Industrialisation a key stepThe SADC region has to improve on its overall competitiveness if it wants to become industrialised as a region while each country must do its part by improving the business environment and reducing the transaction costs of opening up and running business enterprises.
This is the view of President Hage Geingob at 36th SADC Summit of Heads of State and Government in Swaziland.
Geingob said that without industrialisation all the lofty ideals including eradication of poverty and the creation of descent sustainable jobs are not possible.
According to him SADC has made enormous progress in standardising procedures and systems in the region, but it must do more to facilitate and streamline border procedures, where there are still some bottlenecks that make us uncompetitive as individual countries and as a region.
He continued by referring to the Ministerial Task Force on Regional Economic Integration report saying that it highlighted pertinent issues to be focused on regional economic integration.
According to Geingob said there is no single country or region that has developed and reached a higher standard of living, without having industrialised.
“As long as we, as a region, continue to export raw, unprocessed goods and continue to import final consumer goods that we do not produce, it will be difficult to create jobs for our citizens and reduce poverty levels.”
Geingob also stressed to succeed in industrialising the region will need partnerships and specifically said those facilitating cross-border movement of goods and services, and most importantly, of people.
He said that the region needs to move faster in enabling citizens to move freely in SADC and eventually on the continent.
He said that is why he recently announced plans to abolish visa requirements for all Africans.
“When I announced that - flood gates. That is the tendency of African countries. Most Europeans travel visa-free, but we are harassed when we go to even our closest friends. We should not hate ourselves, when Europeans do not need visas.”
Geingob also said that he strongly supports the promotion of value addition in the mineral sector and pharmaceuticals as was suggested by the ministerial task force.
He added that the promotion of value addition in the agricultural sector and blue economy should equally be prioritised, as these are the two sectors from where most of the people in our region derive their livelihood.
“These are also two sectors, with huge potential for job creation and poverty eradication.”
According to Geingob, one approach to overcoming the financing constraint of rapid industrialisation will be to focus on projects that can generate their own revenue streams.
He said given the challenges that the region experiences with HIV/Aids, TB and other communicable diseases, the development of a regional pharmaceutical industry should be able to finance itself.
“However, we will have to attune our procurement policies to deliberately purchase locally produced pharmaceutical products to give this industry a head start.”
Geingob also spoke about the opening of air- and seaways that are increasing and said that the development of certain logistics infrastructure should also be able to generate its own cash returns and therefore be bankable with little or no government support.
“I do not see a reason, why airport and port development should be financed by scare government resources while, if properly structured, there is private capital in search for these types of projects.”
With regards to electricity generation and distribution, Geingob said that this is another sector opened up to private sector participation and it will therefore ease the burden on governments to having solely develop and finance this critically enabling sector.
Furthermore Geingob said that while most countries in SADC are now graduating to middle income status, they must question the gross domestic product per capita notion that informs such classification, as it has some inherent weaknesses in capturing overall development.
He also added that countries in the region need to improve our statistical capacity to better capture economic activities in our countries as underestimation of economic activities have negative implications for debt sustainability.
He also said that countries must improve domestic resource mobilisation, by broadening tax bases and strengthening tax collection systems.
ELLANIE SMIT