President Cyril Ramaphosa has called on SADC countries to build a more integrated economic region, but also issued an unusually pointed warning to South Africans at a time when tensions over migration are straining relations with some of the country’s neighbours.
“We cannot preach integration at summits and practice exclusion in our streets,” Ramaphosa said on Friday.
Addressing a SADC public lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, he said South Africans should be “concerned and ashamed” that nationals of other countries had recently faced discrimination and ill-treatment.
“The criminal actions of a few within our communities are a repudiation of the solidarity upon which this Community was founded,” he said.
The remarks carry particular weight as South Africa hosts leaders and diplomats from across the region at the 46th ordinary SADC summit from Sunday.
The summit is one of the highest diplomatic and decision-making platforms in the region, with leaders, diplomats, government officials and delegates from the 16 Member States, poised to be in attendance.
It comes as South Africa still deals with the effects of a wave of anti-immigration protests and vigilantism this year. At least 178,000 migrants from Africa were reported to have left or been deported from South Africa in recent months. The issue has also contributed to diplomatic tensions with countries including Ghana and Nigeria.
Ramaphosa's message was that the economic ambitions of SADC and the treatment of its people cannot be separated.
"Together, we possess the energy, we possess the minerals, the agricultural resources, the skills, the markets, the financial institutions that are needed to build a prosperous industrialized region."
The region, he argued, has the resources to become far more self-sufficient but remains structured around trade with the outside world. SADC countries have energy, minerals, agricultural resources, skills and markets, yet continue to export raw materials and import finished products.
“Our railways were built to run to the sea rather than to each other,” he said.
He pointed particularly to critical minerals needed for the global energy transition.
“But these minerals continue to cross our borders in raw form. We export the ore and we import the battery,” he said.
“We need to use our own resources to drive our own industrial revolution.”
That means investing in regional refining and manufacturing, electricity networks, transport corridors, water infrastructure and digital capacity, while removing the barriers that make it difficult for businesses and goods to move across borders.
Ramaphosa said SADC's regional market should become an asset the region controls itself.
“A regional market is an advantage that we ourselves own. Others cannot take it away from us,” he said.
But that integration cannot stop at trade.
Ramaphosa said Southern Africa needed to address the conditions that drive migration; including conflict, poverty, weak economic opportunity and social instability — so that people can move “out of choice, not out of desperation.”
That puts the country's current migration debate directly alongside the President's vision for SADC.
South Africa wants a region in which goods, capital, skills and people move more freely. But the President's own warning was that regional integration cannot be built while exclusion takes hold at home.
The stakes are economic as well as political. SADC leaders meeting in Durban are expected to focus on industrialisation, infrastructure, food security, critical minerals, trade and regional security.
For Ramaphosa, the ultimate test of that agenda is whether it produces jobs and opportunity for the region's young population.
“Vision 2050 is not our document. It is yours,” he told students at UKZN.
And then, in a line that perhaps best captured the challenge facing the region:
“Let us go to work.”