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President Bakili Muluzi said on Wednesday the Southern Africa Development Community (Sadc) has developed a five-year strategic economic development plan which will guide national and regional projects.
Briefing journalists at Chileka International Airport in Blantyre on return from a Sadc leaders’ summit in Tanzania, Muluzi said the plan, to be launched in the course of the 2003-2004 period, emphasises improvement of road infrastructure and telecommunications if Sadc is to compete in the global economy.
But Muluzi said Sadc governments will only draw the policy and it is up to the private sector to take interest in regional markets to get their share.
“I’m impressed with the plan, it paints a very good future but the private sector is the main player in all this because it’s them who do trade, not government,” he said.
Answering a question on what his government is doing to achieve Sadc’s set-target of “at least 30 percent women representation” in leadership positions by 2005, Muluzi said while his administration was trying hard the law is the limiting him in the case of Parliament, for example.
He claimed that during the constitutional conference in 1993 he suggested that, like in Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, the Republican Constitution should empower the President to nominate 20 MPs from special interest groups including women but delegates dismissed this as amounting to going back to the one-party state.
“You have denied me that right and what I am saying is that let’s revisit that provision to have nominated MPs, then we will have more women,” he said.
Reacting to accusations by a civil society lobby network on the Zimbabwe political and economic crisis that Sadc is not doing much to resolve the problems, Muluzi said it is wrong for any one to say that because Sadc leaders including himself have been engaged in quiet diplomacy which is bearing fruits.
For example, Muluzi said Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) MPs including its leaders Morgan Tsvangirai, have started attending Parliament which they had been boycotting for almost two years.
“What you should know is that the problem in Zimbabwe can only be resolved by Zimbabweans themselves and, as Sadc, we can only help,” he said.
Muluzi said the continued sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe are affecting ordinary citizens such that the country now faces a 1.3 million metric tonnes grain shortfall, an inflation rate of 230 percent and an exchange rate of US$1 to 2,300 Zimbabwean dollars.
“You can’t sustain such an economy. Something has to be done and the good news is that President Robert Mugabe understands that the economy is in bad shape,” he said.
Muluzi also said the meeting noted that member states like Zambia, Malawi and South Africa have recorded food surpluses and that the number of people facing food shortage has dropped from 15 to seven million of the estimated 200 million Sadc citizens.
On reports that the Indian Ocean island of Seychelles has withdrawn from Sadc, Muluzi said Seychelles has not pulled-pout as such but that it was striped-off voting rights after accumulating US$2.6 million in unpaid contributions to Sadc.
“We expressed regret and we are saying it is unfair to ask Seychelles, with only 70,000 people and a very small GDP, to contribute the same amount as a big economy like South Africa,” Muluzi said, adding that countries beyond Sadc would also be incorporated as members as long as they share its ideals of regional economic integration.
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