MOZAMBIQUE ELECTED TO HEAD SADC SECURITY BODY

The heads of state summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), meeting in Gaberone on Monday, elected Mozambique to chair the SADC defence and security body, generally referred to as the troika.The outcoming chairperson, South Africa, remains a member of the troika, while the new, incoming member is Tanzania.Botswanan president Ian Khama takes over the rotating presidency of SADC from his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe. Swaziland becomes the organization’s deputy chair – which means that Africa’s last absolute monarch, King Mswati III, will head SADC in 2016-17. Handing over the chairmanship of the troika to Mozambique, South African President Jacob Zuma said 'I am pleased to report that we have developed a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy, to ensure our preparedness in confronting these threats facing the continent and the world today. Similarly we are addressing other threats to our regional stability such as the risks of natural disasters, poverty and underdevelopment”.

'As a region we have committed ourselves to ensuring that our regional early warning system is improved to ensure that it provides effective and efficient alerts to potential areas of insecurity and instability', Zuma said.A key theme of the summit had been the industrialization of southern Africa. Speaking to the reporters who had accompanied him to Gaberone, Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi said “it became clear at this meeting that implementing the SADC industrialization programme implies raising more funds and recruiting human resources who can carry out the task. The money can only come from production and from contributions”. The report to the summit noted that while average world growth last year was 3.4 per cent, the SADC region grew by five per cent.

Inflation in the region fell from 6.6 per cent in 2013 to 5.7 per cent in 2014, said Nyusi, while the region’s indebtedness fell from 41.2 to 39.8 per cent of GDP.

The summit also looked at food security in the region, concluding that 24 million people in southern Africa are a risk of hunger, including 150,000 in Mozambique

Margaret Nyirenda, head of SADC’s Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Division, told the summit that SADC is facing a deficit of about six million tonnes of grain, due largely to the drought which hit parts of the region in the 2014-15 agricultural year.  Drought struck at Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and southern Angola. Mozambique, Malawi and Madagascar were also affected by floods.   Nyusi said the summit also dicussed the region’s growing shortage of electricity. “Southern Africa is facing a deficit of about 8,000 megawatts of power”, he said, “which is required to make various projects viable”.  In Mozambique’s case, the President said, the priorities were the coal fired power stations which are on the drawing boards of several of the coal mining companies in Tete province, and two new hydro-electric power stations on the Zambezi river. One of these is a north bank power station at Cahora Bassa, complementing the existing power station on the south bank. The second is the new dam and power station proposed at Mpanda Nkua, some 60 kilometres downstream from Cahora Bassa.  “Only with electricity can we make the SADC industrialization programme viable in order to solve the problems of poverty”, said Nyusi. “But money is needed for this, which can only come from work, from taxes and from contributions”.