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Lloyd Gumbo   in VICTORIA FALLS
Accreditation for delegates and media personnel who will be attending the 34th Sadc Summit of Heads of State and Government will start today until the last day of the summit on August 18, Foreign Affairs permanent secretary Ambassador Joey Bimha has said.He said this after touring Elephant Hills Hotel, the venue for the Ordinary Summit, that started with a closed-door meeting of the Finance Sub Committee yesterday.

“Accreditation will start tomorrow (today) lunch (time) because most of the delegates for the senior officials meeting are going to arrive tomorrow late afternoon and we are hoping to have equipment for accreditation by lunch (time) tomorrow,” said Ambassador Bimha.

“It’s for as long as the summit is on because we have senior officials arriving, ministers coming in with their aides as well, then after that we will have Heads of State and Government arriving for the summit, so we will have accreditation going on right up to the time of the summit. Probably we will have some of the Heads of State arriving on the day the summit is going to be officially opened, so it will be a continuous process.”

Ambassador Bimha said preparations were going on well with everything in place for the meeting of senior officials which is starting tomorrow up to Monday.

He said the other equipment for the actual summit was expected to arrive before it started.

The summit will be held under the theme: “Sadc Strategy for Economic Transformation: Leveraging the Region’s Diverse Resources for Sustainable Economic and Social Development through Beneficiation and Value Addition”.

Ambassador Bimha said the success of the summit was dependent on the agenda that would be set by the secretariat on implementing the decisions and directives of the previous summit.

“Of course, it will also go around the theme that we produced for the summit and we hope there will be a discussion about the theme in the senior officials meeting and ministers’ meeting. And,  (we also hope) that they will make concrete recommendations to summit in terms of the whole concept of beneficiation and value addition, in terms of the strategy that we could use as a region and how we are going to go about it and follow up measures to see that we have actually implemented what we would have agreed and what will have been directed by the Heads of State and Government at summit level,” said Ambassador Bimha.

Value Addition and Beneficiation is one of the four clusters in the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation economic blueprint spearheaded by the Zanu-PF Government after the July 31 2013 harmonised elections.

The other clusters are food security and nutrition, social services and poverty reduction as well as infrastructure and utilities.

There will be constant updates to the media by Sadc officials throughout the conference, with a preliminary programme released for the media events showing that the officials will be speaking on various subjects.

There will also be updates on Sadc infrastructure and services, administration and human resources, legal affairs, procurement, gender and development and internal audit.

The organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation will also brief journalists, as well as the Sadc arm on food, agriculture and natural resources.

More briefings will be done on trade, finance, industry and investment and on policy, planning and resource.