SADC MUST DISMANTLE TRADE BARRIERS AND DRIVE SHARED INDUSTRIAL FUTURE, RAMAPHOSA TELLS REGION
Nine independent Southern African states gathered in Lusaka in April 1980 to reduce their economic dependence on apartheid South Africa. More than four decades later, President Cyril Ramaphosa stood at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Westville campus and argued that the structural work those founders began remains unfinished, and that the 16-country Southern African Development Community must now close the gap between what it promises at summits and what it actually delivers on the ground.
Ramaphosa was direct about the implementation deficit. “We can’t preach integration at summits and practice exclusion in the streets of our countries,” he said, speaking ahead of the 46th SADC Ordinary Summit in Durban. The remark addressed tensions around undocumented immigration that have strained regional cohesion in recent months, framing the problem as one requiring coordinated regional machinery rather than isolated national responses. Southern Africa, he noted, has been shaped by the movement of people across borders for centuries. Managing that reality demands a shared operational framework, not competing national policies.
The core of his argument was economic. SADC member states hold critical minerals and agricultural products that are currently exported as raw materials to external markets. Ramaphosa called for that to change, urging the region to build localized industrial capacity around its own resources. Doing so, he argued, requires dismantling the trade barriers that continue to fragment what should function as a unified market. A formidable regional market is not possible while goods move more freely across the bloc’s external borders than between its member states.
Meanwhile, KwaZulu-Natal Premier Thami Ntuli pushed the integration argument into institutional territory. He called on member countries to establish student exchange programmes and to reform school curricula so that regional history sits alongside national narratives. Media outlets, he suggested, should cover regional developments with the same prominence given to local stories. Universities should facilitate student mobility in practical terms: a young person from Durban studying in Harare, a student from Windhoek pursuing a degree in Pietermaritzburg. Ntuli’s point was that understanding is built through sustained institutional practice, not political declarations.
International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola, chairing the SADC Council of Ministers, brought the discussion back to measurable outcomes. The SADC Vision 2050 agenda, he indicated, must yield concrete benefits for citizens, a highly industrialized, peaceful, and prosperous region where integration produces improvements in ordinary lives rather than remaining confined to policy documents and summit communiques.
Ramaphosa also credited SADC member states with a foundational role in ending apartheid, framing current integration efforts as a continuation of that historical solidarity. “We cannot forget the freedom we enjoy today was in great measure from the people of SADC and we say thank you,” he said. The founding logic of 1980, reducing dependence and building collective capacity, he argued, is as operationally relevant now as it was then.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal itself drew recognition for its institutional agility during the COVID-19 pandemic, held up as an example of the kind of regional capacity that coordinated action across the bloc could leverage more broadly. The lecture venue, in that sense, embodied the principle being argued: a regional institution hosting the region’s leadership to chart a path built on shared resources and the removal of barriers that currently prevent SADC from functioning as the unified economic and social space its founding documents envisioned.
Whether the 46th Summit in Durban produces implementation commitments that match the ambition of the rhetoric is the question that will define whether this moment is remembered as a turning point or another communique.