A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
Regional blueprints have a familiar failure mode: the vision statement survives, the implementation plan lapses quietly, and by the time a successor document arrives, nobody outside the secretariat can say with confidence which targets from the previous cycle were...
A thirty-year vision and a ten-year plan to operationalise it were approved on the same day by the same body — and so was the decision to scrap an existing labour protocol before its replacement had been written. On 17 August 2020, the 40th Ordinary Summit of SADC...
A regional bloc of sixteen sovereign states has just adopted a single ten-year strategic document meant to guide them all toward one long-range vision. The intellectual puzzle in that sentence is not whether the document is well designed — it plainly reflects years of...
Regional trade blocs are judged, in ordinary times, by the treaties they sign. They are judged, in a crisis, by whether the machinery beneath those treaties keeps working when no one is watching a summit stage. The Southern African Development Community now finds...
SADC now operates under thirty-three signed protocols, a Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan, an Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap running to 2063, and an Investment Policy Framework layered on top. The volume of strategy is not in question. What...
Southern Africa's regional integration project has always had two layers that do not automatically move together: the trade and infrastructure architecture that gets most of the analytical attention, and the social and human development architecture that is meant...
Twelve of SADC's sixteen member states sent representatives to Dar es Salaam this week for the ministerial meeting on ICT, information, transport and meteorology. That attendance gap is not incidental detail; it is the structural fact that should temper any...
Regional integration in Southern Africa has never lacked for legal instruments. It has lacked for instruments that operate at the same speed as the trade they are meant to enable. On 20 August 2019, SADC and the European Union signed a Contribution Agreement...
Regional blocs are usually judged by how few instruments they produce, on the theory that a lean rulebook is easier to enforce than a thick one. The Southern African Development Community's 39th Summit, held on 17 and 18 August 2019 in Dar es Salaam, tested that...