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Below is a full briefing to the media by Sadc Executive Secretary Dr Stergomena Lawrance Tax and Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi after their meeting with President Mugabe at State House yesterday to update him on preparations for the 34th Sadc Summit set for August 17-18 in Victoria Falls.

Dr Tax: I would like to first of all thank the Government of Zimbabwe and in particular his Excellency the President for giving me this opportunity, and the purpose of my being here was to brief him or I should say is to brief him on the preparations of the forthcoming summit, the 34th summit which is going to take place here in Zimbabwe, in Victoria Falls, as you are aware, I believe so.

You know that Zimbabwe is our incoming chairperson, so His Excellency is going to be our chairperson for the next year, starting from August to next year August.

So, that being the case, I had to come here and brief him where are we in terms of preparation, what is expected from summit, and that is what we have done.

For the preparations, we are set for the meeting, everything is ready, but maybe you had asked me what did we discuss.
The theme of this year, the summit theme of this year, is: “Leveraging on natural resources for sustainable socio-economic transformation through beneficiation and value addition”.

So, that has been our focus of discussion that for the region to prosper we have a lot of resources, so what we need to do is now to make sure that this value addition and beneficiation is for our economies and our people’s prosperity.

So, that was the centre stage of our discussion. But also we touched upon a number of issues because basically during the summit they are going to receive reports on the political situation in the region, socio-economic situation in the region, but also as you are aware this year we have been busy working on the revised Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan because that is the blueprint for whatever we do as a region.

What we expect is to present the revised Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan to the Heads of States for them to look at it and see if the key identified priorities are appropriate to enable us for deepening economic integration, but integration as a whole, given that resources are scarce.

But also we have a number of things which are taking place continentally, regionally, internationally, so we need to be focused.
The theme itself is part of the new priorities under the revised Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan.

We have a number of achievements so far because, first of all the most notable achievement, not only within the region, but throughout the world, is the stability we have.

We are very stable, politically stable in the region. We have peace in our region, that is a major achievement and that is also partially as a result of being united, that is one of the achievements.

Economically you can also see that we have managed to have a Free Trade Area and also we have the intra-trade which is also coming up.
There are challenges here and there, we are trying to address those challenges, but again you cannot have trade in isolation without having infrastructure which can facilitate trade and economic development as a whole, so we have a number of regional infrastructural projects, that is also another achievement, and we have a number of achievements which I cannot exhaust.

In short that is what we have done so far.
The future is first of all to sustain the peace and stability we have, the peace and political stability we have, but also now to accelerate the economic integration because there is no peace and security without development and there is no development without peace and political stability, so the two should go together and that should be our focus.

Minister Mumbengegwi: The executive secretary has covered very much relating to the content of the summit and the issues coming up on the summit.