Food, security and political stability were on Wednesday identified as some of the urgent matters that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) needs to address.
”For us as a region we cannot continue in the medium and long term … to beg for food,” said SADC executive secretary Tomaz Augusto Salomao.
He was speaking after a meeting of SADC’s council of ministers, ahead of the SADC heads of state and government summit in Maseru, Lesotho, on Thursday.
Salomao said the ministers had decided, due to human and financial constraints, that the regional body will focus on five broad areas of development.
”We have come to a conclusion that we cannot do everything at the same time.”
The first priority for the SADC region is peace, political stability and security.
”[This is] the prerequisite for us to address our main challenges: underdevelopment and poverty,” Salomao said.
The second priority the body set for itself is liberalising trade between member countries. The SADC wants to be a free-trade area by 2008, a customs union by 2010, a common market by 2015, a monetary union by 2016 and have a single currency by 2018.
Infrastructure development is identified as the third priority. This includes transport networks like roads, rail, ports and airports in the region.
The fourth priority is food security, seen as one of the issues affecting the daily lives of the region’s people. Skills development is the fifth priority.
”This includes skills to build capacity on national and regional level to take forward our regional agenda,” Salomao said.
”We have land, we have water and, most important, we have people,” he said, adding that SADC members have to decide how and what they can do to free themselves.
The heads of state for most of SADC’s 14 member countries started arriving in Maseru on Wednesday afternoon for the official opening ceremony before the summits starts on Thursday. — Sapa