Elias Magosi calls on SADC members to ramp up trade, drive industrial growth

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]plenty of discussions here in Brazzaville. It's all about really integrating Africa to make sure that Africa is well powered and a very central theme is around mobilization of resources for Africa's development in a very fragmented world. So now let's get some perspective from Southern Africa.

[00:00:18]Representing the region is the executive secretary, Mr. Makhosi so we've we've seen a very important session around integration in Africa. A very key forum about scaling up the finances for making sure that Africa is able to meet these targets. Let's hear now from Southern Africa some of the priorities. I mean if we talk about energy, if we talk about roads and just broadly the infrastructure.

[00:00:44]>> Thank you very much. Yes, indeed uh uh the African Development Bank uh uh meetings they had uh provided a platform for engaging on uh resource mobilization. This is an African bank. I think first to start with the drive of the president himself, the new president uh Sid Alda Taub.

[00:01:07]He focused on uh process called uh NAFAD.

[00:01:12]He was looking for African financing African development and he's really refocusing the bank to Africa and for African uh development specifically, particularly funding and coming up with alternative ways of funding, where to look for these funds. I think generally we've looked for funds elsewhere, outside of the continent. Little realizing that we actually are sitting with huge amounts of funds and huge amounts of uh resources in the continent and particularly for the SADC region. If you talk pension funds, if you talk insurance funds, private equity funders and so on, we've got majority of them sitting in our continent and guess where they even uh invest these monies? They invest these money outside of the continent because they don't have enough assets that can be able to mop up and absorb this. Now it comes to the priorities of what Africa wants to do.

[00:02:08]For Africa to integrate, we need infrastructure. We need roads, we need rail, we need ports, we need airports and the one stop border post and so forth. So that is capital intensive. But who can fund it? It's ourselves. We can fund it. We can truly work with the private sector to be able to do that. So these were the main conversations around here. For SADC, it started off with our retreat in South Africa in Skukuza where he said we need to focus on our own resources and therefore domestic resource mobilization is a core and a key driver which the new president is looking at and he actually sits well with all member states. And for the SADC region, certain we've started the conversation. We now need to look within and it's easier and it's quicker and the the the the the what is it? The risk the the way of accessing those funds is much much easier.