THE call for the abolition of entry visas between countries in the Southern African region by visiting Angolan External Relations Minister George Chikoti could not have come at a better time when countries in the sub-region have been talking about the irrelevance of the seamless borders separating countries.
Dr Chikoti’s argument that abolishing visa requirements will ease the bureaucracy of doing business between countries is right. This, however, is not to imply that borders should be left unmanned, which unscrupulous people can take advantage of.
It is a well-known fact that some unscrupulous individuals have already been taking advantage of some porous borders to involve themselves in human trafficking, and Zambia has not been spared as a transit country.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe once said during the United Nations World Tourism Organisation conference in Victoria Falls town that the borders separating countries just represented the geographical location of countries and were not meant to alienate one country from another.
True to Dr Mugabe’s word, Zambia and Zimbabwe have since struck cooperation to have One-Stop borders in Chirundu and in Livingstone, which has reduced on the red tape for people doing business between the two countries.
The suggestion by Dr Chikoti of abolishing the visa requirement altogether is one route that could be pursued but the other way to go about it would be to ease the red tape that is currently there when one is trying to obtain a visa.
We are also of the view that even if the visa requirement when travelling from one country to another within SADC is retained, the process of doing so must be shortened with some restrictions eased so that business people are not inconvenienced.
Some of long winding queues found in border towns can be attributed to the bureaucracy when travellers are going through the immigration formalities and, in the business world, any time lost attending to avoidable red tape is costly.
Countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Great Lakes regions should start using their endowments based on each country’s comparative advantage so that all the involved countries end up with a win-win situation.
For example, Angola has got oil that Zambia badly needs to help stabilise prices of petroleum products but the neighbouring country may not have climatic conditions that support production of some crops that are abundant in Zambia.
As a landlocked country, Zambia needs the trade exchanges that come through the regional hubs, and Angola is one such partner the Government must be exploiting in so many sectors, not least the establishment of a railway line from North-Western Province to the port of Lobito.
The Great Lakes Region must also heed Dr Chikoti’s call for member countries to do more to end conflicts in the region, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where civil war has been raging for years on end.
The region should be as concerned about the war in the DRC as the natives of the vast country given that some of Congo’s mineral endowments are only exclusive to it. The precious metal that is used for a delicate component in a cell phone is found in Congo, among other precious metals.
The rest of the region must consider the mineral wealth of the DRC to be for the whole SADC and the Great Lakes Region. Only if the member countries inculcate that sense of belonging will each one make efforts to end the war.