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Bold proposals to foster regional integration in Southern Africa have included two free movement protocols. South African opposition ensured that these protocols were not passed. Softer borders for the residents of the region remain as elusive as ever.
This paper examines the formidable obstacles to the development of a regionally harmonized approach to migration management in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Tracing the origins and development of SADC initiatives on regional cooperation on population movement, the paper shows how the far-reaching 1995 SADC Draft Protocol on Free Movement was killed off by South Africa. An examination of South Africa's response and counterproposals reveal the myth and paranoia that characterize thinking on crossborder migration within the country. The SADC initiative to develop a Migration Protocol, akin to those on education and training and regional trade, finally ran aground in Mauritius in September 1998. This paper shows why it has been so difficult to develop a regional protocol on population movement and speculates on the likelihood of such a development in the future.
Rene Dumont's influential False Start in Africa (first published in the 1970s) painted a gloomy picture of the first decade of postindependence African politics (Dumont 1998). In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a second "false start" in different parts of Africa with attempts to form subregional or pan-regional economic groupings of states that transcended inherited colonial boundaries (Asante 1997). These new configurations were designed to further the economic integration of member states. Proposals for the freer movement of people across national borders were often embedded in the texts of founding documents and reflected the underlying economic logic of integration (Oucho 1998).
Every African subregion (and many independent countries) in subSaharan Africa (SSA) has, at one time or another, been part of an actual or proposed broader economic grouping. And each bloc has, in turn, confronted the issue at the outset of whether, and when, to allow free or freer movement of citizens between member states. The fact that there are no examples of a fully planned and operational free movement zone is primarily because these efforts at regional economic integration have run into more general political difficulties (Mistry 2000).
In Southern Africa, the SADC devised a series of regional protocols...