Plans for Southern Africa’s economic integration are unlikely to be realised by 2012 at the current tempo of implementation, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad said on Monday.
”I do not believe if we continue at the pace we are doing now, the SADC [Southern African Development Community] programme of economic integration can become a reality,” he said at the opening of a Pretoria meeting of the South Africa-Mozambique Joint Permanent Commission for Cooperation.
Pahad is also doubtful about the SADC’s ability, at its current pace of putting programmes in place, to become an engine of growth for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad).
Ways have to be found for SADC to function better, Pahad said.
”For Africa to meet its challenges, we need to strengthen our institutions.”
He referred to SADC programmes that are ”taking too long to operationalise”, especially in light of a recent United Nations report painting a bleak picture of the continent.
”Our continent as a whole begins to get poorer than any other continent, and the conditions of our people today is worse than 10 years ago.”
It is critical that the SADC, Nepad and the African Union be successful given current food shortages and growing refugee numbers in Africa, Pahad said.
The African Peer-Review Mechanism, which he described as the continent’s response to ”those who think they can force-feed democracy on the Third World”, will help Africa identify and tackle blockages to development.
The minister lamented what he called a lack of political will among rich nations to boost development in the Third World.
The recent special millennium summit of the UN in New York was a ”vast failure” and did not meet any of Africa’s expectations, he said.
These included the reform of the UN Security Council, as well as issues surrounding Third World development, the definition of terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
”It was clear again that there is no political commitment among developed nations who have the resources to help developing countries get out of the cycle of underdevelopment,” Pahad said.
Africa is at risk of becoming the only continent unable to meet the so-called Millennium Development Goals — which include halving poverty by 2015, Pahad said.
He was co-chairing the commission with his Mozambican counterpart, Eduardo Koloma.
The Mozambican said the two-day meeting is an opportunity to examine events in the region and on the continent, and to identify contributions the two countries can make to eradicating conflict, achieving stability, fighting poverty and promoting economic and social development.
”We will seek to identify bottlenecks and constraints … that prevent us from fully implementing all that we have committed ourselves to,” Koloma said. ”It is important to ensure that in the two days the people of Mozambique and the people of South Africa should be the main focus of our deliberations.
”They trust us to make decisions that will impact positively and visibly on their lives.”
Pahad agreed that one of the commission’s critical aims is to find ways of mitigating poverty and underdevelopment.
”Our high-level delegations will constructively but critically review where we’ve been making progress and where not, with a view to identifying blockages and unblocking those.”
One issue up for review was the avoidance of duplication in the work of the commission and that of a South Africa-Mozambique economic forum presided over by the two countries’ heads of state.
Ways should also be found to narrow the gap in the trade balance between the two countries, which is in South Africa’s favour, Pahad said. — Sapa