Sadc Summit gives Zimbabwe a fresh start President Mugabe confers the Royal Order of Munhumutapa on Ms Shella Hashim Mbita, daughter of Retired Brigadier-General Hashim Mbita of Tanzania, for his sterling contribution to Zimbabwe’s liberation during the 34th Sadc Summit held in Victoria Falls earlier this week
President Mugabe confers the Royal Order of Munhumutapa on Ms Shella Hashim Mbita, daughter of Retired Brigadier-General Hashim Mbita of Tanzania, for his sterling contribution to Zimbabwe’s liberation during the 34th Sadc Summit held in Victoria Falls earlier this week

President Mugabe confers the Royal Order of Munhumutapa on Ms Shella Hashim Mbita, daughter of Retired Brigadier-General Hashim Mbita of Tanzania, for his sterling contribution to Zimbabwe’s liberation during the 34th Sadc Summit held in Victoria Falls earlier this week

Hildegarde The Arena
THE 34th Sadc Ordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government has come and gone. The real work is just beginning not only for incumbent chair President Mugabe and his deputy, President Ian Khama of Botswana, but also for the more than 400 million people of the 15-member

regional bloc.

The 2014 theme, “Sadc Strategy for Economic Transformation: Leveraging the Region’s Diverse Resources for Sustainable Economic and Social Development through Beneficiation and Value Addition”, demands that Sadc citizens do not take it as a business as usual affair, but should rather be part of the implementation process.

The current socio-economic climate calls for participation at all levels. This means that the theme must be people-oriented and people-centred.
This requires new models, new approaches, new thinking in order for the region to contribute towards the fast growth rate that the continent is experiencing.

Thus on the theme, the Summit “directed that industrialisation should take centre stage in Sadc’s regional integration agenda. To this end, Summit mandated the Ministerial Task Force on Regional Economic Integration to develop a strategy and roadmap for industrialisation in the region”.
This is how crucial the theme is to the region’s socio-economic development and transformation.

To this end, the Summit deliberations and the communiqué should not only be readily accessible and available, but they should also be translated into vernacular languages of all the 15 countries so that citizens from diverse social structures are not left out due to language barriers. That way, Sadc citizens will have ownership of the process and help drive its agenda.

The Summit publications should not be allowed to gather dust in offices, awaiting analysis just before the 2015 Summit in Botswana.
The region’s Fourth Estate should continually take the region’s leadership to task on the issues they all shared common consensus on in Victoria Falls. A spirit of accountability and responsibility should be part and parcel of the process.

The communiqué also states that “Summit underscored the need to appropriately honour founding leaders who played an outstanding role in the liberation of Africa, at both regional and continental levels”.

President Mugabe spoke emotively about Mwalimu Julius Nyerere whose country shouldered the burden of Southern Africa’s liberation movements at the expense of his own people and the East African region.

He lamented that Sadc had not done enough to honour “this icon of continental liberation”: “We have not done much by way of paying tribute to our founding fathers. Yes, something has been done for (Kwame) Nkrumah at the AU, and recently a hall was named after (Nelson) Mandela.

“But we forget, perhaps as a new generation of leaders, that the greatest burden of freeing Africa was borne by one country — Tanzania. That one! Not that he was the greatest, but Mwalimu — no mention has been made, no symbol to remember his part. We cannot be that ungrateful, no. I would want to say, help us, help me, respect Mwalimu at the AU somehow,” President Mugabe said.
Solly Tamari says: “Learn from the past, enjoy the present, influence the future.” The value of this unlimited generation of founding fathers should thus be unlocked.

Although Zambia’s founding president Kenneth Kaunda (KK) has been honoured as a founding member of the Frontline States, the just-ended Sadc Summit brought to mind another meeting held between KK and South Africa’s apartheid leader John Vorster to find a roadmap for the independence of the region as a whole.

According to media and historical sources, the meeting was held on August 25, 1975 at the Victoria Falls Bridge. However, it would take five years before Zimbabwe attained its independence and close to two decades before South Africa became a democratic state. These are the sacrifices that the region should think about when it honours these founding leaders, when it comes up with policies to transform the region.

But 2014 has been Zimbabwe’s year, especially President Mugabe’s moment to bask in glory. After the resounding poll victory in the July 31 2013 harmonised elections, Zimbabwe crossed over into 2014 to have a fresh start and the Victoria Falls Summit was one such event that gave it that fresh impetus.

This new beginning was echoed by the United Methodist Church’s August 15 to 17 Ebenezer Convention. It was not just the UMC saying, “Thus far the LORD has helped us,” but the nation of Zimbabwe was making similar echoes. Against odds, it managed to host the Summit, and successfully too.

Exactly seven years ago, Zimbabwe became an agenda item of the regional bloc’s ordinary summits, and in some cases extraordinary summits were convened to tackle the Zimbabwe issue.

The first such meeting was held in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, on March 31, 2007 where then South African president Thabo Mbeki was tasked with mediating in the Zimbabwe situation.

From then on, near obsession gripped opposition politics with each Sadc ordinary or extraordinary summit being closely monitored to see whether Zimbabwe was on the agenda.

Although it helped Zimbabwe to mature and appreciate the importance of regional integration especially from social and political perspectives, these were also wasted years because this one item became the definitive element about Zimbabwe and it’s role in the Sadc region.

It also threatened to derail the decades of trust, and in the process regional peace and integration among comrades-in-arms who had fought and defeated imperialism.

Having Zimbabwe on Sadc’s agenda year-in, year-out was not only counterproductive to the letter and spirit of the bloc’s founding principles, but it also stalled the region from following up on a majority of issues agreed on at previous summits.

When the Sadc Tribunal as it was constituted then looked like it would reverse Zimbabwe’s land reform programme, there was cause for concern as Zimbabwe wondered whether the bloc understood the grave consequences emanating from such a retrogressive act.

But July 31 2013 ushered in a new era. The drubbing of the MDC-T put paid to having Zimbabwe as an agenda item to a Zimbabwe chairing the regional bloc until August 2015.

What a difference seven years made. As the region reflects on the Zimbabwe issue then and what it has turned out to be, there are many lessons to be drawn, one of which is: was it really neces- sary?

Those were the lost years not only for Zimbabwe, but the whole Sadc bloc. But at the Victoria Falls summit, it was time to pick up the pieces and concentrate on rebuilding and reconstruction of people’s lives for the better.

It was time to ensure that the region lives off from its rich mineral and natural resources. It was also another opportunity for the bloc’s human resource base to refocus its energies toward raising the standards of living of every citizen not from donor funding, but from the region’s rich resources.

It was also time to realise that with the critical mass of professional disciplines already in place, the 2014 Summit theme can be realised in practical terms. Above all, it was time for the region to realise that it has the capacity and potential to create jobs for millions of unemployed people. Thus it was time to give the region a hope and a future.

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