Ferial Haffajee
The chiefs in fatigues from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) jetted into Luanda this week to talk war.
They could send soldiers to provide military assistance in Angola as the SADC did in the Democratic Republic of Congo last month and in Lesotho last week.
The SADC’s new role is a triumph for the military men over the community’s trade technocrats involved for years in intricate trade and development negotiations.
Southern Africa is home to some of the world’s poorest states, and the SADC has plans to promote a regional trade bloc to serve as a bridgehead into the international economy. But budgets are tight across the region with a squeeze induced by low gross domestic product, largely stagnant economies and structural adjustment programmes.
Yet armed interventions by SADC countries raise the spectre of increased military budgets, with already minimal resources redirected into fighting across borders. Zimbabwe, for example, has spent $200-million on its operations in the Congo while its basic food prices were scheduled to increase by 40% this week.
The prevailing establishment view is that a successful foreign investment drive demands security and that the region therefore needs to be stabilised. Trade and trade negotiations continue even during conflicts.
Professor Peter Vale of the Centre for Southern African Studies says that the SADC is a two-headed animal where the aims of peacekeeping and economic integration have always competed for dominance. “It has to share sovereignty [through economic integration] but it has to protect sovereignty. This organisation has been mandated with an impossible task,” Vale said.
He believes the “discourse of security and difference” has won the day where instead Southern Africa should be exploring whether it should be redefining its borders fixed by colonial powers.
The SADC has its genesis in the Frontline States, formed as a buffer against apartheid South Africa. The original organisation established in the 1980s as the Southern African Co- ordination Conference was financed mostly by foreign donors. That organisation had a mandate to reduce economic dependence on apartheid South Africa.
In 1992, the SADC was born in Namibia. Its treaty has a clear economic focus, but the community also envisaged a political role for itself.
“The focus is on economics, development and trade. Security won’t become the main preoccupation of the SADC,” says Kenneth Kotelo of the Institute for Strategic Studies. He adds: “Where painstaking, diplomatic solutions have failed, military intervention can be seen as an act only of last resort.”
The SADC’s military deviations have overshadowed a key moment in economic development, including South Africa’s offer to lower tariffs for SADC countries. The region has been waiting for years for improvements in the trade imbalance. South Africa’s export-to- import ratio with the region is six to one and the new order could stabilise the regional economy.
But this key SADC concern went almost unnoticed in the midst of the military ventures.
“The only way to industrialise is to have a regional market. Everybody is bringing tariffs down, so we have a limited time horizon to do something to develop our [regional] industries,” says Marina Mayer of the Department of Trade and Industry.
Angola and the Congo are out of the trade talks for the moment, and work on regional infrastructure projects like the extension of the Tanzanian/Zambian Railway line to South Africa could be stalled because of the SADC’s preoccupation with military affairs.
In addition to setting up a free trade area, the leaders of Southern Africa are also negotiating water, banking, investment and finance agreements. Negotiations are sensitive, and South Africa is regarded as a double-edged sword.
“It is acknowledged that South Africa must step into the breach. Yet South Africa’s domination is resented,” says analyst Dot Keet. In this context, she argues, South Africa’s military intervention in Lesotho last week assumes particular significance.
It could risk current negotiations and scupper long-term plans for common macro-economic planning and a common investment policy. The only way the region will prosper is by a new regionalism where economic linkages are put in place.
Says Keet: “There is a deep and profound interlinkage and interdependence of the countries in the region.”