The Sunday Mail
In August 2015, President Mugabe will handover the Sadc Chairmanship to Botswana after a successful year at the helm of the regional bloc. During his tenure, President Mugabe saw southern Africa adopt an Industrialisation Strategy, an historic landmark that will lead to value-addition of primary products.
Dr Tax
Our Chief Reporter Kuda Bwititi caught up with Sadc Executive Secretary Dr Stergomena Lawrence Tax on the progress Sadc has made under President Mugabe’s leadership. We publish Dr Tax in her own words.
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We are coming to the conclusion of Zimbabwe’s tenure as Sadc Chair. During that tenure, a lot of achievements have been made; tremendous achievements.
Though a lot of successes have been recorded, I will focus on a few things.
When Zimbabwe took over, we started with the theme “Value-Addition and Beneficiation”, and from this theme, Heads of State agreed that Sadc should prepare an Industrialisation Strategy.
We were given a very short period as the Secretariat as the decision was taken in August 2014, with the strategy scheduled for presentation in April 2015.
And under the able leadership of Zimbabwe – not only the leadership, but the commitment as well – we achieved our mandate as seen by the Extraordinary Sadc Summit in April 2015.
To me, that is really a big achievement during President Mugabe’s tenure.
One could tell that it was on the heart of His Excellency himself and the entire machinery in the Republic of Zimbabwe who prepared the Industrialisation Strategy and Road Map.
The strategy aims to transform Sadc – economically, technologically and socio-economically – and the strategy has a long-term perspective.
That is why we call it an Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap 2015-2063.
It has three phases and its major elements are enhancing value-addition; value chains; development; innovation; technology research and developments and also recognising that the implementation of the strategy requires both public and private sectors.
We need the private sector because they are the implementers. They are the ones who will provide financing in terms of implementing the interventions.
The strategy recognises that we must have financing mechanisms.
So it is a gradual process, starting with enhancing competitiveness, increasing the productivity of our economies and enabling us to move from being low-income countries to middle-income countries along that time-frame.
This is one of the major achievements.
Industrialisation alone cannot take the region where we want to go.
Therefore, the second major achievement has been finalising the revised Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan. This is a process, which started some time ago, but during the tenure of Zimbabwe as the Chair, we made sure that process was finalised.
RISDP has four priority areas. You need infrastructure that will support industrialisation.
So, that is one of our priorities in the revised RISDP.
One has to recognise that there are other special programmes with a regional dimension, which will enable the socio-economic transformation, which we are aiming at through the Industrialisation Strategy.
Another important factor is peace and political stability. There cannot be economic development without regional peace and political stability.
What we have done through RISDP is prioritise and agree on critical priority areas to enable us to transform our economies. Industrialisation and sustained peace, security and political stability; though there are a number of other areas.
We have a number of milestones in terms of infrastructure, agriculture, education and health.
Another milestone of note during the course of the year was the launch of the Tripartite Free-Trade Area.
The TFTA negotiations were finalised.
Since 2012, we expected the launch to take place in 2014, but trade negotiation complexities meant that did not happen.
The launch eventually took place in June 2015, and that is during the Chairmanship of His Excellency, President Mugabe. The TFTA enhances our markets in the region. You are bringing together 26 countries from Sadc, Comesa and the East African Community.
It means you now have more integrated markets with a GDP of about US$1,3 trillion. It’s a big market. But what we need to do now is for our citizens to understand that these are big opportunities, which have been created for them.
They need to be aware of these opportunities and utilise them because our role is to make sure we create those opportunities. But it is also the duty of the private sector and our citizens to understand that these are our opportunities.
So, you need competitiveness and to compete; trade is about competition.
People should understand that there is market and they need to compete and benefit.
Otherwise, you will sit down and complain that other people are taking our development opportunities; other people are taking our markets.
There are a lot of other milestones, but these are the three major ones during President Mugabe’s tenure that I can mention here.
Further, the value-addition being advocated in Sadc is a building block to the African Union’s Agenda 2063.
We have aligned our Industrialisation Strategy with Agenda 2063.
When it comes to value-addition, our strategy recognises that there are competitive advantages in our member states we should capitalise on.
From the value-addition perspective, we should also now enable and develop value chains.
A certain process can be done in Mozambique, for instance, and that other stage in Tanzania, or that stage in Zimbabwe.
Or certain raw materials can be obtained from any another country and another thing can be done better in a certain country. We then bring our efforts together so that we come up with such value chains, capitalising on value-addition. Let us process what we have as much as possible; trade in value-added goods.
In doing so, you attract investment to your country, create employment and get more value from what you are trading in.
The Industrialisation Strategy was approved in April.
So, it has been four months now.
Immediately afterwards, we agreed to start preparing an Implementation Plan.
Phase 1 of the strategy entails consolidating what we are doing and the first priority of the RISDP, which is Industrialisation and Market Integration.
A number of interventions are ongoing.
For example, trade is one of the areas. Harmonisation of payment systems has been in progress; the same applies to cross-border facilitation.
The Implementation Plan will enable us to bring everything together and then we will monitor from there.
This is what we agreed and this is where we are. Implementation is in progress and the Implementation Plan is just to sensitise and make everything coherent to enable monitoring.
An inspiration
I have been following President Mugabe since I was a little girl. He is an inspiration to everyone. One has to look at it from history; where he started from during the liberation struggle, where he started leading this country, the way he is recognised and how he has been accepted nationally, regionally, and internationally.
He is an icon.
What I can say is that over the years, I have been inspired. I have very high respect for him because he has done a lot, not only for Zimbabwe, but for Sadc and Africa as whole.
I got to meet him in early 2014 when I had just been appointed.
We had a meeting of about 30 minutes and he articulated issues and enabled me to understand where Sadc started from and how we can take Sadc further.
I requested him to support Sadc in accelerating economic integration.
The discussion centred on our history, including political liberation, and we have done a lot to that end as the region is stable and peaceful.
So, our discussion was: How can we capitalise on this political stability and peace and turn around our region economically?
What he said was, “That is what everybody wants. We want to see our economies grow and our economies utilise the diverse resources that we have for the benefit of our people. That is what we want. In that regard, what I can tell you is that I will support you.”
That is what he said.
And, indeed, he has supported me as Executive Secretary and he has supported the Executive Secretariat and Sadc as a region during his tenure.
His main message has been, “You are here as the Executive Secretary of the Sadc Secretariat and what we want to see is our economies prosper through regional integration. Member States shall go to do what is required to be done. As Executive Secretary, you are also expected to provide strategic direction.”
About his leadership: I would say he is vigilant, committed, passionate about his country and the region.
He has his country and the region at heart. He is a true nationalist.
In short, I can say he has true love for his nation, the Sadc region and Africa.
For a country, which experienced the difficulties that it has, Zimbabwe has been able to transform very quickly.
That does not just happen like that.
It happens because you have a truly committed leader.
Other nations can learn from him: dedication, wisdom, eloquence, and also ensuring people continue to learn. As a leader, one should ensure he or she has direction of where they want to go.
A leader is a person who enables his followers to reach a certain destination. You set the destination and enable the people you are leading to reach that destination.
When the (August 2014) Sadc Summit concluded under his leadership, President Mugabe directed that we prepare an Industrialisation Strategy.
He said, “I am giving you eight months for that strategy to be ready.”
I then had mixed feelings.
I was very happy because I was seeing my dream come true. I wanted regional economic integration to be accelerated since that is my duty.
On the other hand, I said to myself, “Oh my God, how am I going to do that. How can you prepare an Industrialisation Strategy in eight months?”
You have to mobilise the resources. You must have the resources. You must put together the terms of reference for them to be able to work. You must arrange the logistics and what have you.
That will take about two months.
You have to make sure you bring on board all stakeholders and that, in itself, is another big assignment.
But I was very, very happy when the strategy was approved and all the Heads of State commended us for the good job.
That was very touching.
On another occasion, President Mugabe spoke about (Tanzania’s Brigadier-General) Hashim Mbita.
He said make sure the project on the liberation of southern Africa as led by Mbita is finalised and launched.
We did that and that is another milestone reached during the President’s tenure as Sadc Chair. We managed to launch the Hashim Mbita Project.
As the Sadc region, we are very proud of the Industrialisation Strategy because it is a strategy of its own kind, not only in this region, but even on the continent as a whole. It is historic because it is a strategy, which comprises all aspects and enable the region to transform economically and technologically.
As we speak, all the other regions are now trying to emulate what we have done. We believe we are taking the region in that aspect, in a manner which even the African Union are trying to understand and learn from.
The other regions are also trying to learn from our strategy and we will be in a position to inform Agenda 2063.
Obviously, obviously, President Mugabe and his Government need to do bask in the glory of this achievement.
Yes, member states contributed, but a leader is a leader.
If a leader is not committed and does not lead his people, you won’t succeed.
Not only that, there are a number of meetings, which Zimbabwe hosted. There are a number of meetings that require resources and time.
For the Government of Zimbabwe to commit the enormous resources, to commit the enormous time they committed and to ensure it happened, really President Mugabe and his Government deserve to be commended.
We call upon the citizens of the region to understand the direction, which is being forged.
They should be part of that process and utilise the opportunities; be part of poverty-eradication in the region.
Leaders set the way, but it is for each and every one to be part of that process so as to benefit.
