William Saunderson Meyer notes that, despite its rich endowments, the economic performance of the region has been dire
The empty words of a failing presidency. That is the reality linking Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent G20 leadership with his this week assuming the chairmanship of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
Ramaphosa’s limping two terms in office, which have been marked by severe economic and social decline at home and diminishing respect abroad, has been defined by a gulf between vision and execution. His leadership spells at the G20 and SADC show this starkly.
His tenure at the head of the G20 was awash with flowery oratory about ‘sustainability’, even as intensifying military rivalry among the great powers pushed the costly net-zero ambitions that have so damaged Western economies further from practical reach.
It ended, predictably, with Donald Trump snubbing both the Johannesburg summit and its handover ceremony. Since then, South Africa has been excluded from the G20’s work under the US presidency and barred from its summit in Miami, while France uninvited it from the subsequent G7 gathering in Paris.
It is also entirely feasible that Ramaphosa will not be in Lusaka to hand over the SADC chairmanship in August 2027. Unlike his immediate predecessor, Madagascar’s Andry Rajoelin — whose overthrow in a military coup led to Ramaphosa acting as SADC’s interim chair for the past nine months — Ramaphosa is highly unlikely to be removed from office by men in uniform.
But hanging over him is the revived Phala Phala impeachment process, against which he has mounted a desperate rearguard action in the courts, even as a succession struggle gathers momentum within the ANC. If the party performs as disastrously as expected in the municipal elections on 4 November, the pressure for his early departure may become irresistible.
A measure of the shallow intellectual waters in which the ANC is drowning is the cut-and-paste nature of Ramaphosa’s keynote speeches. South Africa’s G20 presidency struggled along under the banner of Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability. For his SADC chairmanship, Ramaphosa announced the theme Solidarity, Equality and Shared Prosperity. The G20 would leave ‘no person, no community and no country behind’ and SADC would be a region in which ‘no country and no person is left behind’.
The pledge to ‘leave no one behind’ is, of course, Ramaphosa’s signature refrain, rivalled only by the ‘green shoots’ of recovery that — like a mystic detecting spectres at a séance — he can discern in even the most dismal economic data. Variations on both phrases have been recycled in his every State of the Nation address since 2019.
Unfortunately, Ramaphosa’s perfumed prose cannot mask the festering condition of SADC. Despite being among the most richly endowed regions in the world, its economic performance has been dire. SADC’s GDP per capita was barely $2,000 in 2024, less than one-twentieth of the European Union’s and not much more than one-sixth of that generated by South America’s more comparable Mercosur bloc.
Much of this failure stems from South Africa’s inability to fulfil the economic promise of its early democratic years. SADC’s roots lie in the Frontline States alliance that supported South Africa’s liberation struggle at great cost. Its economic offshoot and SADC forerunner was established in 1980 with the explicit purpose of reducing the region’s dependence on the apartheid state. With democracy came the hope that South Africa would become the engine of closer integration and growth within SADC, which now has 16 members.
Instead, South Africa’s regional economic performance has been deeply disappointing. Once responsible for roughly two-thirds of the regional economy, it now accounts for around half. The regional centre of economic gravity has shifted not simply because South Africa’s neighbours have prospered. Several, in fact, have performed dismally. But since 2009, the country has stumbled along at little more than 1% annual growth, while economies such as Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo have repeatedly expanded at rates of between 5% and 7%.
Regional economic integration has proceeded slowly, partly because of South Africa’s understandable anxiety about appearing hegemonic within an organisation created to resist its domination. SADC governments also invariably favour short-term national advantage over long-term regional growth. But much of the responsibility lies with the ANC, which controls the region’s economic engine yet remains wedded to dirigiste policies — state-led industrialisation, protected national industries and politically directed development — that sit uneasily with the creation of a genuinely open and thriving regional market.
Six years into its ten-year development plan, SADC awards itself an overall score of just five out of ten. Intra-regional trade remains stuck at 20%, below its pre-pandemic level and far short of the 30% target for 2030. Indeed, an earlier SADC plan had set a 2008 target of 35%. Manufacturing contributes only 11% of regional GDP against a target of 30%; trade barriers remain intractable; and youth unemployment has worsened, rising from 12% to 17% in a single year against a target of 9%. The Regional Development Fund, adopted a decade ago to finance SADC’s ambitions, remains a fund in name only. Just four of its 16 members have ratified its agreement, seven short of the number required for it even to come into existence.
SADC’s moral failure is even more damning than its economic ineptitude.
Established under the 1992 SADC Treaty and operationalised through a protocol adopted in 2000, the SADC Tribunal gave citizens and businesses a regional court of last resort, a forum in which to challenge state-sponsored human-rights violations and lawlessness when their own judiciaries failed them, as they too often did. That avenue survived only until the Tribunal dared to rule against Robert Mugabe’s government over its illegal and uncompensated seizure of agricultural land.
Faced with an independent court willing to hold one of their own accountable, SADC’s leaders — with President Jacob Zuma among the principal protagonists — shamefully chose to neutralise the bench rather than uphold their own treaty. Upon discovering that regional law might apply not only to their citizens but also to themselves, they responded with self-serving solidarity. They systematically neutered the institution by withholding judicial appointments, suspending its operations, and adopting a replacement protocol that denied individuals access to it.
Even after Zuma’s departure, the response of Ramaphosa’s supposedly reformist administration was one of passive compliance rather than principled leadership. A landmark 2018 Constitutional Court judgment declared Zuma’s conduct unconstitutional, unlawful and irrational, forcing Ramaphosa formally to withdraw South Africa’s signature from the restrictive protocol. Yet he has done nothing to champion the Tribunal’s restoration.
Nor should anyone have expected otherwise. Why would Ramaphosa champion accountability when, as recently as August 2025, he stood beside Emmerson Mnangagwa and praised Zimbabwe’s uncompensated expropriation of land as a ‘necessary’ correction of historical injustice?
South Africa’s ANC government, which wields immense influence behind the scenes at SADC, has been complicit in a betrayal of human rights that extends far beyond the destruction of the Tribunal. No fewer than half of SADC’s 16 members are authoritarian states or democracies largely in name. While the rhetoric invokes solidarity with the peoples of southern Africa — ‘nobody left behind’, in Ramaphosa’s parlance — that solidarity is largely with the liberation-era parties and the despotic presidents who rule the roost.
The regional roll-call is bleak. Angola’s MPLA has ruled uninterrupted for more than half a century, ever since independence in 1975. So, too, has Frelimo in Mozambique, which settled the bitter dispute over its dubious 2024 election results with a lethal crackdown in which a reported 315 people died. Over the same period, Comoros has endured more than 20 coups or attempted coups. Elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo take place amid repression, intimidation and chronic irregularities, while Eswatini remains an absolute monarchy.
Tanzania’s CCM has smothered meaningful opposition, and Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF — with which the ANC maintains such warm fraternal ties — presides over a militarised kleptocracy where elections are little more than a stage-managed farce. Madagascar completes this dismal list of the damned: SADC expressed alarm when Rajoelina was overthrown, but the country remained in the club.
What SADC needs from Ramaphosa is not yet another ‘vision’. It needs practical, readily implementable steps, reforms for which there will be deadlines, and governmental accountability for it all. Yet, having failed to achieve this during nearly four years as South Africa’s Deputy President and more than eight as President, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that he will pull it off across the SADC region in just a year. Assuming, as noted, that he lasts a year. Follow WSM on X @TheJaundicedEye