SADCC AFTER NKOMATI

Abstract

THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) was established in 1980 by the nine black states in the regionthe six Frontline States (Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Angola) plus Malawi, Swaziland and Lesotho-with a view to progressively reducing their inherited economic dependence on and their mounting military vulnerability to their powerful and menacing neighbour, South Africa. In its first four years of existence, SADCC showed encouraging evidence of modest but steady progress in achieving its long-term objectives. Faced with these signs of success, South Africa has countered with a calculated campaign of economic and military destabilization which, combined with the crippling drought, global recession, and some deficiencies in domestic policy, proved devastating. In March 1984, President Samora Machel of Mozambique-in many ways, the key country in SADCC-finally felt compelled to sue for peace. The resulting Nkomati Accord on Non-Aggression and Good Neighbourliness, signed at a border ceremony amid a blaze of publicity, formally bound South Africa as well as Mozambique to a mutual commitment to 'refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of the other.' In practice, however, the pact represented a Pretoria diktat, especially when viewed in the light of the subsequent Pretoria Declaration of October 1984. Similarly unequal treaties have been concluded with Angola the Lusaka agreement of February 1984and, secretly two years earlier, with Swaziland. Predictably, South Africa has, in each case, found some excuse for failing to implement the agreed terms fully. At the same time, Pretoria has pressured Botswana and especially Lesotho, to acknowledge its unchallenged regional hegemony as the 'dominant power' on the subcontinent. Both are resisting fiercely and, so far, with some success, though the odds are unequal. Ironically, South Africa has christened its crude exercise in coercive diplomacy the 'peace process'.