What SADC is and how it works

The conference and the state outside it

Nine states declared the Southern African Development Coordination Conference at Lusaka on 1 April 1980, under a document titled "Southern Africa: Toward Economic Liberation". It had no treaty behind it and no power to bind anyone. What it had was a programme, and the first item on the programme was to move transport, power and trade off the routes that ran south. South Africa, then under apartheid, was not in it. Zimbabwe reached independence on 18 April 1980, seventeen days after the declaration.

South Africa acceded on 30 August 1994, and the membership list has carried since then the country the coordination was organised against.

From a conference to a community

Heads of state and government signed the Declaration and Treaty at Windhoek on 17 August 1992, and the conference became a community with legal personality, organs of its own and a secretariat, which has sat at Gaborone ever since. An agreement amending that treaty was signed at Blantyre on 14 August 2001, and further amendments followed in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2015 and 2025.

Tariff phase-down began in 2001, and the free trade area was reached in August 2008, at which point 85% of trade inside the group carried no duty. Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo stayed outside the arrangement. A customs union stood next in the plan after it, and none has been declared.

Where the name stops

Southern Africa is what the community is called, not where it ends. This catalogue files Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo under Central Africa and nine further members under East Africa, which leaves five filed under Southern Africa itself. The northern member borders the Central African Republic and South Sudan. Four members are Indian Ocean island states, and Comoros sits in the Mozambique Channel between two more members, Mozambique on the mainland and Madagascar.

Rosters that overlap

Belonging here does not stop a member belonging elsewhere, and some of the other rosters do not fit together on paper. Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa are the whole of the Southern African Customs Union, established in July 1910 and run under an agreement of 2002 from a secretariat at Windhoek. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania are also partner states of the East African Community. Nine of the members belong to COMESA as well. A customs union sets a single external tariff, so full membership of two of them at once is not available, and the arithmetic of that is what any deeper integration here has to solve first.

The catalogue's records for Lesotho and Namibia list the South African rand beside the loti and the Namibia dollar.

The court that heard individuals

The 1992 treaty provided for a Tribunal, and the Tribunal was inaugurated at Windhoek on 18 November 2005. Individuals could bring cases to it, and in 2007 and 2008 it decided against Zimbabwe in proceedings brought by farmers over land acquisition. The summit of August 2010 ordered a review of the Tribunal's functions and its terms of reference, and the Tribunal did not sit again. In 2012 the summit resolved that any new tribunal would hear disputes between member states only. A protocol drawn on that basis was signed at the summit of August 2014 by nine heads of state and government.

Coming and going

Namibia joined on 21 March 1990, the day it became independent, and Mauritius on 28 August 1995. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Seychelles both acceded on 8 September 1997, and Madagascar on 18 August 2005. Seychelles withdrew with effect from 1 July 2004 and rejoined in 2008. Madagascar was suspended in 2009 and readmitted on 30 January 2014. Comoros was admitted at the summit held in Pretoria in 2017.

Swahili was adopted as a working language in August 2019, beside English, French and Portuguese. The four of them track the roster: Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, French across the islands and the Congo, English through the former British possessions, and Swahili in the north-east.