How SADC and AU Can Protect Economic Growth From Future Shocks

By Tonderai Godknows Mapfumo

HARARE – THE COVID-19 pandemic, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and Russia’s war in Ukraine are not merely sequential crises that happened to afflict the global economy in the same decade. They represent a permanent shift in the risk landscape—one in which the assumptions that underpinned African development strategies for the past half-century no longer hold. Each crisis exposed a different vulnerability: COVID-19 revealed the lethal consequences of pharmaceutical import dependence and the fragility of just-in-time global supply chains; the Hormuz chokepoint demonstrated how a single maritime corridor concentrated with energy shipments can hold entire regions hostage; and the Ukraine war laid bare the catastrophic costs of relying on distant producers for staple grains and fertilisers. For the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU), the question is not whether another shock will come. It is whether the continent will have built the institutional, productive, and financial buffers to absorb it before it arrives.

This article critiques the efforts made thus far and outlines the measures the continent must take—measures that are structural rather than rhetorical, regional rather than fragmented, and unapologetically focused on economic growth and development protection rather than the perpetuation of dependency dressed as partnership.

The Vulnerability Landscape: Three Shocks, Three Exposures

The COVID-19 pandemic did not create Africa’s pharmaceutical dependency; it exposed it with brutal clarity. When vaccine nationalism took hold and wealthy nations hoarded doses while export restrictions prevented active pharmaceutical ingredients from reaching manufacturers in the Global South, African nations were forced to queue for charity at the back of a supply chain they had no capacity to influence, let alone control . The lesson was not primarily about public health. It was about productive capacity. A continent of 1.4 billion people that cannot manufacture its own essential medicines, vaccines, or diagnostics is a continent whose health security—and therefore its economic stability—is permanently outsourced to political decisions made in Brussels, Washington, and Beijing .

The Ukraine war compounded this exposure by shifting the crisis from the pharmacy to the bakery. Russia and Ukraine together account for roughly 28 percent of global wheat exports and 18 percent of maize, while Russia alone produces approximately 14 percent of the world’s fertilisers . When Black Sea shipping routes were disrupted and sanctions blocked Russian exports, the consequences cascaded through African food systems with devastating speed. Wheat prices surged by 27 percent within weeks of the invasion; shipping delays turned a 23-day journey from Cape Town to St Petersburg into a 93-day ordeal . Countries that had grown accustomed to sourcing staple grains from Eastern Europe discovered that their food security rested on maritime corridors and diplomatic relationships over which they exercised zero control.

The Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly 20 percent of global oil passes—represents a third, more chronic vulnerability. Unlike a pandemic or a war, a Hormuz closure is not a hypothetical scenario but a recurring feature of Middle Eastern geopolitical tension. For a continent heavily dependent on imported refined petroleum products and lacking strategic reserves in all but a handful of countries, any disruption to Gulf shipping lanes translates directly into fuel price shocks that ripple through every sector: transport costs rise, food prices follow, inflation accelerates, and central banks are forced into interest rate increases that choke growth precisely when stimulus is needed.

What unites these three exposures is their common root: productive and logistical dependency. The continent did not suffer these shocks because of bad luck. It suffered them because decades of development policy—much of it encouraged by the very international financial institutions that now urge resilience—systematically deindustrialised African economies, oriented their productive structures toward raw commodity exports rather than value addition, and dismantled the state-owned enterprises that had once provided a measure of strategic autonomy in sectors like pharmaceuticals and food processing. The vulnerability is not natural. It was built, and it can be unbuilt.

Beyond Rhetoric: Critiquing the Current Regional Response

The SADC Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan 2020–2030 and the AU’s Agenda 2063 articulate many of the correct aspirations: industrialisation, regional value chains, pharmaceutical sovereignty, food security, and intra-African trade. At the level of policy language, the documents are difficult to fault . The problem lies in the chasm between aspiration and implementation—a chasm that persists despite the demonstrated urgency of the past five years.

Intra-SADC trade has crept up to approximately 23 percent, an improvement from the 19 percent recorded in 2021 . But this figure, while moving in the right direction, remains embarrassingly low by global standards. Intra-European trade exceeds 60 percent. Intra-Asian trade exceeds 50 percent. A region that trades only a quarter of its goods with its own neighbours is a region whose economic integration exists on paper far more than in practice. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) promises to change this, but its implementation has been slow, its rules of origin remain contested, and the infrastructure—roads, rail, customs digitisation, and payment systems—that would enable a genuine single market remains largely aspirational .

The manufacturing deficit tells an equally sobering story. The share of manufacturing value added in SADC GDP languishes below 12 percent, against a target of 30 percent by 2030 . Most member states still depend overwhelmingly on agro-based and mining commodities for export earnings. This is not an accident of geography. It reflects policy choices—or the absence of them—that have failed to build the energy infrastructure, the logistics networks, and the skills base that industrialisation requires. The SADC Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap 2015–2063 identifies agro-processing, minerals beneficiation, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, capital goods, and services as priority value chains . Yet progress in developing regional strategies for these sectors has been incremental at best, with detailed mapping exercises still underway for basic commodities like cotton, rice, soya, and wheat .

The AU’s high-level side events and communiqués speak of South-South cooperation, technology transfer, and accelerated industrialisation . South Africa’s Minister of International Relations, Ronald Lamola, warned in March 2026 that ongoing global conflicts are driving up oil and fertiliser costs, threatening food security across the region, and potentially deterring Gulf state investments in African infrastructure and mining . He noted that more than 750 million Africans live in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on health or education . These are accurate and sobering observations. But they are observations, not actions. The test of regional leadership is not the precision of its diagnoses but the speed and scale of its implementation.

The Debt Trap and the Fiscal Space Crisis

Any serious discussion of economic resilience must confront the fiscal reality that constrains African governments. The continent is experiencing its worst debt crisis in eight decades . Many SADC member states consistently exceed the agreed macroeconomic convergence targets for inflation, fiscal deficits, and public debt . When a government spends more on interest payments than on schools and hospitals, its capacity to invest in resilience—to build pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities, to upgrade port infrastructure, to establish strategic grain reserves—is not merely limited; it is structurally absent.

The COVID-19 response demonstrated the consequences of this fiscal constraint. While wealthy nations deployed trillions in stimulus spending, African governments were forced to choose between suppressing the virus and preventing starvation—a choice shaped not by the severity of the pandemic but by the emptiness of the public purse. The Ukraine war then delivered the second blow before the first had healed, driving up import bills for food and fuel at precisely the moment when fiscal space was most exhausted .

Breaking this cycle requires more than debt relief—though the African Leaders’ Debt Relief Initiative is an essential component . It requires rethinking the structure of African economies so that governments derive revenue from value-added production rather than commodity exports subject to global price volatility over which they have no influence. A country that exports raw cobalt will always be vulnerable to the next commodity price crash. A country that manufactures battery precursors from its own cobalt, using its own energy, and exports finished components into regional value chains, has begun to build the fiscal resilience that debt relief alone cannot provide.

The Strategic Measures the Continent Must Take

The first and most urgent priority is pharmaceutical and medical product sovereignty. The experience of COVID-19, during which Africa was relegated to the end of the vaccine supply chain, must not be repeated. Rwanda’s Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness Plan offers a replicable model: a $500 million, 15-year programme targeting 70 percent self-reliance in finished medical products, the production of over 50 million vaccine doses and 25 million diagnostic tests annually, and the creation of AI-powered surveillance systems capable of detecting health threats within 48 hours . The plan explicitly frames pandemic preparedness not as a health ministry expense but as an economic development strategy, projecting over $650 million in annual revenue and $400 million in foreign exchange savings through exports and import substitution by 2040 . The AU should champion the replication of this approach across at least five regional manufacturing hubs, linked to the AfCFTA to ensure continental market access for their outputs.

The second priority is food systems resilience through regional value chains. SADC and the AU must move beyond the current piecemeal approach to agricultural development and commit to a coordinated investment programme in fertiliser production, irrigation infrastructure, and strategic grain reserves. The continent possesses the raw materials—phosphate, natural gas, potash—to produce its own fertilisers. That it imports them from Russia and Ukraine is a policy failure, not a geographic inevitability. The SADC Regional Detailed Mapping of cotton, rice, soya, and wheat value chains is a necessary analytical foundation, but analysis without investment is merely documentation of decline . Member states and development finance institutions must direct concessional capital toward the industrial processing capacity that transforms harvested crops into shelf-stable food products traded within the region rather than exported as raw commodities.

The third priority is energy security through diversification and strategic storage. The Strait of Hormuz dependency is a choice, not a fate. Southern Africa possesses abundant solar, wind, hydro, and natural gas resources that, if developed through regional power pools and cross-border transmission infrastructure, could dramatically reduce the region’s exposure to global oil price shocks. SADC has added more than 14,000 megawatts of new generation capacity in recent years . But generation capacity without transmission infrastructure is stranded power. The regional priority must be the completion of interconnected grids that allow surplus hydropower from the Congo River basin, solar power from Namibia and Botswana, and gas-fired power from Mozambique and Tanzania to flow to where it is needed.

The fourth priority is logistics and trade facilitation. A free trade area without functional transport corridors is a legal fiction. The experience of the Ukraine war, which congested European ports and added months to shipping times from Southern Africa, demonstrates that over-reliance on distant logistics chains is a competitive disadvantage . SADC must accelerate investment in the North-South Corridor, the Maputo Development Corridor, and the Lobito Corridor, with particular attention to the customs harmonisation and border management digitisation that currently cause goods to spend more time at frontiers than in transit. The target should not be incremental improvement in intra-regional trade percentages. It should be the elimination of every non-tariff barrier that makes it cheaper for a Zambian business to import from China than from its neighbour across the Zambezi.

The fifth priority is institutional reform of the regional bodies themselves. The SADC Secretariat continues to monitor industrialisation and intra-trade progress, but the implementation deficit between what member states agree at summits and what they execute domestically remains the binding constraint on regional resilience . The AU’s reliance on side events, communiqués, and voluntary commitments has produced a wealth of frameworks and a poverty of results . What is required is a mechanism with teeth: a binding peer-review process with published scorecards, consequences for non-compliance, and the elevation of regional commitments to the same legal and political status as sovereign debt obligations. A government that defaults on a Eurobond faces capital market exclusion. A government that defaults on its regional industrialisation commitments faces no equivalent sanction. That asymmetry must end.

Finally, the continent must leverage its critical minerals not as raw materials to be exported but as strategic assets to be processed, beneficiated, and deployed as bargaining chips in global supply chain negotiations. SADC holds approximately 90 percent of the world’s platinum group metal reserves, more than half of cobalt reserves, and significant graphite and copper deposits—all essential to the global energy transition . The choice, as Minister Lamola articulated, is “clear: we can either engage the world from a position of unity and strength or approach it from a position of division and dependency” . Unity means coordinated export policies, joint negotiating positions with global buyers, and regional investment in the processing and manufacturing capacity that keeps value on the continent. Dependency means continuing to export raw ore while importing the finished products made from it.

The Price of Inaction

The three shocks—COVID-19, Ukraine, and Hormuz—were not anomalies. They were previews. Climate change will deliver more frequent and more intense extreme weather events, straining food systems and infrastructure . Geopolitical fragmentation will continue to weaponise trade, finance, and technology. The global order that enabled African development strategies based on commodity exports and manufactured imports is being dismantled in real time.

The price of inaction is not theoretical. It is measured in the millions thrown back into poverty by the pandemic, in the food price riots that follow grain shortages, in the businesses destroyed by fuel price spikes, and in the generational opportunity cost of children who missed school because their governments could not afford to cushion the blow. SADC and the AU have the frameworks, the rhetorical commitments, and the institutional architecture to build resilience. What they have lacked—and what the post-COVID, post-Ukraine, post-Hormuz world demands—is the political will to implement what they have already agreed, the honesty to acknowledge where implementation has failed, and the courage to subordinate national political expediency to regional economic survival. The next shock is not a matter of if but when. Whether African nations meet it stronger and more sovereign, or as vulnerable as they were in 2020, will be determined by decisions made between now and its arrival.

Tonderai Godknows Mapfumo is the Research and Advocacy Officer for COMALISO (Coalition for Market and Liberal Solutions) in Zimbabwe and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.