A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
Three regional economic communities, twenty-nine member and partner states, and a single treaty that took nine years to gather the ratifications it needed: the COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite Free Trade Area entered into force on 25 July 2024, once Angola's...
Botswana’s 2024 transition is real history; the framing of a youth-driven power shift here is an illustrative scenario, not a sourced claim – and is treated as such.
The Extraordinary Virtual Summit that SADC Heads of State and Government convened on 20 May 2024, chaired by Angolan President João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço as SADC Chairperson, was formally justified under Article 10 of the SADC Treaty, which establishes the Summit...
After delays, the High Court scheduled a 15 May 2024 hearing on whether Botswana needs a standalone constitutional court.
SADC is not short of operational frameworks. A Protocol on Finance and Investment has stood since 2006. A Protocol on Trade in Services has governed liberalisation since 2012. A Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan and an Industrialisation Strategy running...
A regional protocol is only as strong as the sixteen legislatures that must each choose to enact it. That is the structural contradiction sitting inside every SADC summit communiqué, and it sat inside the one issued from Luanda on 17 August 2023: a bloc of sovereign...
A regional development plan is only as credible as its own accounting of where it has failed to deliver, and the Report of the Executive Secretary 2022/23, signed on 7 November 2023, is unusually explicit on this point for an institutional document. It claims...
Regional strategies are easy to sign and hard to operationalise, and the gap between the two is where most of the interesting analysis lives. On 10 October 2023, the Southern African Development Community formalised its Digital Transformation Strategy, a framework...
SADC likes to present its integration record as a coherent sequence: a Free Trade Area in 2008, a Simplified Trade Regime in 2019, a Regional Infrastructure Development Master Plan approved in 2012, and a Real Time Gross Settlement system live since October 2018. Read...