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By BRIAN HATYOKA
SOUTHERN Africa Development Community (SADC) member states are working on modalities for the establishment of a single currency unit for the region by 2018, deputy executive secretary, Joao Caholo, has said.
Mr Caholo said that SADC had already created a Macroeconomic Surveillance and Performance Unit at the secretariat in Botswana to facilitate for among other things, the creation of a monetary union.Speaking in an interview in Lusaka over the weekend, Mr Caholo said that SADC member states were also working on reducing the inflation levels for the SADC region to single digit.
He said the committee of central banks was monitoring the region’s direction towards single digit inflation. Meanwhile, SADC director of infrastructure development, Remmy Makumbe, has said that the provision of quality infrastructure is key to sustaining growth in trade and business in the Southern African region. 
Mr Makumbe who is based at the SADC secretariat in Botswana said that improved infrastructure was important to facilitate the handling of imports and exports among member states.
Speaking in Lusaka when he featured on ZNBC TV’s SADC special program earlier in the week, Mr Makumbe said that the challenge that SADC member states faced was to attract additional investments to support infrastructure development.
“Infrastructure development is one of the key challenges that we have in the region and we are putting up measures to attract investment in this area,” he said.Mr Makumbe said that there was need to strengthen the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the provision of infrastructure. “PPP is key to infrastructure development hence we are encouraging a lot of players to participate in the sector,” he said.He noted that Zambia was one such country in the region that had put up measures to boost infrastructure development and cited the development of the Kafue Lower Hydro power plant as one of the facilities aimed at mitigating the impact.
Mr Makumbe said that SADC member states were developing a framework that would support infrastructure development in various sectors of the economies.
At the same meeting, Transport and Communications Permanent Secretary, Peter Tembo, said that Zambia would ensure the implementation of SADC programmes.
Retired Brigadier General Tembo also said that Zambia had many trading partners by the fact that the country was landlocked. “The fact that Zambia is a landlocked country is a blessing to us because some countries have fewer neighbors hence they have fewer trading partners,” he said.
Zambia is hosting the SADC Heads of States and Government Summit in Lusaka this week.
http://www.times.co.zm/news/viewnews.cgi?category=11&id=1186984762
August 13, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Brian,
… This SADC proposal is very welcome. Regionalism can be a strong proponent of economic integration; especially if more barriers are removed … thanks a trillion
August 14, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Preparing for the monetary union for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is a welcome development. The SADC monetary union will likely then be one of the several regional monetary unions around the world which will then come together to form a Global Monetary Union.
The long-term solution to many of the world’s financial problems and risks is to implement a Single Global Currency managed by a Global Central Bank within a Global Monetary Union, where there will be no exchange rate politics, no currency fluctuations, no current account imbalances and no currency crises. See http://www.singleglobalcurrency.org.
The benefits of a single global currency will be substantial:
* Annual foreign exchange transaction costs of $400 billion will be eliminated.
* Worldwide asset values will increase by about $36 trillion.
* Worldwide GDP will increase by about $9 trillion.
* Global currency imbalances will be eliminated.
* All balance of payments problems will be eliminated.
* Currency crises will be prevented.
* Currency speculation will be eliminated.
* Currency fluctuations and the need for hedging will be eliminated.
* Worldwide interest rates will be reduced due to the elimination of currency risk.
* Worldwide inflation will be reduced as currency exchange rates will no longer be a cause.
* The need for foreign exchange reserves, now over $4 trillion, will be eliminated, and these funds can be used for more productive purposes than maintaining an inefficient foreign exchange system.
The people of the 192 U.N. members now need only 146 currencies to transact all their business. By next January the number of currencies will drop to 144. If the SADC monetary union were to be adopted tomorrow, the number would drop to 134. Why not plan and research now for an accelerated movement to a single global currency?
How to get there from here? It can be through a combination of processes: ization (whether euroization or dollarization) and the expansion and creation of monetary unions. Also, the IMF or Bank for International Settlements could establish an international “central” reserve bank for countries that wish to have a stable currency based on an aggregate of current international currencies. At some point in this transition, there should be convened a number of international monetary conferences, as was done in 1944 at Bretton Woods, N.H., to firmly establish the global monetary union. It’s common sense to move toward common cents.
Morrison Bonpasse
Newcastle, Maine, USA
August 15, 2007 at 12:05 am
Morrison,
… common cents really make common sense, thanks a trillion