Minister Thembi Simelane: Third SADC Community Law Seminar

Programme Director,
Our host, Vice Chancellor and Principal, Professor Sakhela Buhlungu,
Members of the Executive Management of the University of Fort Hare,
Esteemed academics and representatives of the National University of Lesotho,
Esteemed academics and scholars present from the continent and elsewhere around the globe,
Representatives from different local universities,
Esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the academic community

Good Morning,

Thank you very much for your generous invitation to this important 3rd edition of the SADC Law Seminar.

Perhaps I should start by commending this collaboration between the National University of Lesotho and the University of Fort Hare for organising this important seminar.

Just a few days ago, South Africa laid to rest one of its distinguished sons, a freedom fighter, the former Governor of the South African Reserve Bank and a former Minister of Finance in the Republic of South Africa, the late Tito Mboweni.

Tito Mboweni was a proud alumnus of the National University of Lesotho. He would be proud to see us partnering and collaborating in this fashion, as we try to find solutions to our common challenges as Africans.

Your seminar is also taking place at a great and iconic University of Fort Hare. The University of Fort Hare will always be revered as a national treasure for its exceptional contribution to our freedom struggle.

Fort Hare defied the odds by producing distinctive and well-known towering political stalwarts like O. R. Tambo, Govan Mbeki, Robert Sobukwe and Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Herbert Chitepo, Eliud Mathu and Charles Njonjo.

Duma Nokwe, South Africa’s first Black Advocate, is an alumna of Fort Hare. Fort Hare is the only Southern African university well known to have produced various Heads of State such as Nelson Mandela, Yusuf Lule of Uganda, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Ntsu Mokhele of the Kingdom of Lesotho and Sir Seretse Khama of Botswana.

Other notable honorary alumni include President Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia.

Your seminar is taking place at a great institution – and I have no doubt that this seminar is itself a meeting of great minds.

This meeting of great minds has a mandate to interrogate challenges and tailor solutions to the great challenges that afflict our continent.

Programme Director;

Your Seminar is organized under a guiding theme that says ‘SADC and the AU: Assessing the Symbiotic Relationship Between Sub-regional and Continental Process’.

I think it is safe to move from a premise that, through this theme, organizers have accepted the need to make their important contribution to the vision encapsulated in the Africa Agenda 2063.

As you would know, this is a vision of an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens, representing a dynamic force in the international arena.

This is not a slogan, it is a vision that call all of us to action.

Programme Director;

ASPIRATION 3 of Africa Agenda 2063 specifically talks to yourself as legal minds that are converged in this room and your colleagues throughout the continent and the diaspora.  

It speaks to the urgency of building an Africa of good governance, democracy, respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law. This should be an Africa with capable institutions and transformative leadership at all levels.  

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA or CFTA), which is the latest attempt to reboot the integration drive and achieve sustainable development. The CFTA seeks to create a geographic zone where goods and services will move freely among member states by removing trade distortions and boosting factor mobility, competition, and investment.

This is an important flagship programme of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 in pursuit of the Africa We Want. We have already entered and witnessed the implementation phase of the AfCFTA Agreement with the start of preferential trade by some countries under the AfCFTA.

We are proud to have launched out first shipment of manufactured products to Ghana and Kenya at the Port of Durban on 31 January 2024 and will continue to support the objectives of the AfCFTA through enhanced intra-Africa trade and investment.

South Africa is committed to advancing the continent’s economic development and integration. This was affirmed in the President State of The Nation Address to the Country 2024, when he said that “…we will use the opportunities provided by the African Continental Free Trade Agreement increase our trade and expand our industries.

The African Peer Review Mechanism and its emphasis on the normative aspects of socio-economic issues needs more work to reconcile and anchor the trade from a rights perspective.

The SADC Committee of Ministers of Justice/Attorneys-General that mirrors the African Union Specialised Technical Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs (STC-JLA), play this role. Article 14 of the AU Constitutive Act provides for the establishment of the Specialised Technical Committees across a range of thematic issues. The STCs work in close collaboration with the African Union Commission departments to ensure the harmonisation of AU projects and programmes as well as coordination with the Regional Economic Communities.  Each STC develops its own Rules of Procedure to define its detailed activities and functions.

The SADC Protocol on Legal Affairs is the legal framework enabling the Ministers of Justice/ Attorneys-General to provide guidance and co-ordination of policies, programmes and projects for the Legal Sector; advise Council on legal matters arising from the activities of SADC; and liaise with SADC Secretariat on matters pertaining to Legal Sector.

Like the STC-JLA, the mandate of the SADC Committee of Ministers of Justice/Attorneys-General is to amongst others, provide legal guidance, review and clearance to all SADC legal instruments that emanate from matters that promote the objectives of SADC set out in Article 5 of the SADC Treaty and as mandated by the SADC Protocol on Legal Affairs.

This is to ensure the legal consistency of all instruments emanating from other STCs or Ministerial Committee, before their adoption by the Executive Council and the Assembly of Heads of State and Government. For your information, much of the instruments that are processed through this committee is trade related.

Programme Director,
In 2014, SADC Ministers of Justice/Attorneys-General observed that besides clearing legal documents, it should also play a significant role in promoting cooperation on legal matters under the United Nations and other regional organizations, in order to: assist Member States in developing legal capacities (e.g. establishing a legal training centre for SADC Member States) and expertise in specific legal areas of concern; facilitate the adoption of appropriate schemes of cooperation in criminal and civil matters; and facilitate the harmonious implementation of decisions taken by multilateral organizations of which SADC Member States are parties to.

This meeting is therefore timely as we are on the eve of the G20 convening in South Africa when SA assumes the role of Chairing in 2025. Similarly, I would also urge this meeting to reflect on the other regional and group clusters such as BRICS and the Commonwealth.

We can never think of a developmental continent without justice and fairness. As we speak of the integration of the African continent, we should also speak to the need to find legal and institutional mechanisms to settle dispute among ourselves as Africans.

This should be a predictable, fair and robust legal and institutional mechanism that enjoys legitimacy across all nations of the continent.

Part of it should be to strengthen the Pan African Parliament to ensure that it lives up to the mandate of ensuring the full participation of African peoples in the economic development and integration of the continent.

Colleagues,
There is clearly no doubt that sub-regional and regional bodies such as SADC have an important role to play in this regard.

The law itself has a much greater role to play regarding the task of integrating the continent and making our continent a prosperous home for us and the future generations of Africa.

The law has a role to play in breathing life to the task of ensuring peaceful Africa, a continent at peace with itself and indeed, a continent that can export peace to the rest of the global village.

Academic institutions as centres of excellence and knowledge production have a significant role to play in this regard.

As scholars of law and researchers, you have a unique, yet exceptionally important role to play in this task of rebuilding of our continent.

The place of the law with regard to the attainment of the goals of a united, peaceful and prosperous Africa cannot be over-emphasized.

The concept of universal justice is a necessary condition for the much-desired goal to silence guns on our continent, and for the attainment of universal world peace and order.

Programme Director;
Lawyers have always provided leadership to communities and societies throughout history. You cannot be a generation of lawyers that abdicate this hallowed responsibility.

The dismantling and disintegration of the African continent was facilitated largely though colonial and draconian laws.

Laws were created to keep Africans away from each other, thus enabling the plundering of African resources. Unfortunately, these laws that were aimed at keeping each other away from each other remain in statute books of many countries across our continent.

We have laws that make it easier to trade with Asian and European countries, yet almost impossible to trade among ourselves as Africans.

Laws remain in our domestic statute books that makes it difficult to travel from one African country to the next yet make it very easy for people from outside the continent to visit any part of our country, almost without restrictions.

These are the laws that make it difficult for us to realize the ideal of an integrated Africa, an Africa able to take its rightful position on the global arena.

The voice of Africa has been muffled for far too long on the international stage and it behoves all of us to use our collective abilities and efforts to imagine and build a better Africa.

Do not use your knowledge of the law to aid and abet criminals, as lawyers, we must not allow our skills and knowledge to be used to help legitimize the illegitimate.

Those who wish to circumvent the law, must not find refuge in us, we must refuse to use jurisprudence as a tool to undermine the rule of law in favor of wrongdoers.

Do not fall to the temptation of being at the disposal of corrupt and despotic whose only mission is to veer our continent off from the rails of justice, peace and prosperity.  

Programme Director;
It is time that as Africans, particularly as leaders, we need to begin a deliberate and visible movement away from sweet sounding slogans and rhetoric to action. The type of action that would breathe life to the idea of an integrated Africa.

The vision of an integrated Africa is about harnessing the collective strength of the people of the African continent.

This vision cannot be achieved under conditions of lawlessness and injustice.
I wish this seminar a fruitful and constructive deliberations that will not only benefit SADC but the entire continent of Africa.

I thank you.