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THIS year marks 30 years of the existence of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) whose agenda among others is the promotion of sustainable and equitable economic growth and socio-economic development that will ensure poverty alleviation with the ultimate objective of its eradication among member states.
The eventual result of the organisation is regional integration where all its members apparently need to have the same standard of living, people moving freely from one country to the other within the region and have policies that will not hinder free movement of capital and labour.
The integration, of the regional-grouping will also create a large market to compete favourably with Balkan markets on the international market. This will also give the regional grouping a strong voice to negotiate at the World Trade Organisational (WTO) meetings.
However, SADC has been facing challenges in achieving its objectives as a result of political instability, corruption poverty and natural calamities among some member States.
This has resulted in the hindering of its vision of economic well-being, improvement of the standards of living and quality of life, freedom and social justice; peace and security for the people of Southern Africa.
For SADC to comprehensively integrate, certain stages are supposed to be achieved such as the attainment of the SADC Free Trade Area (FTA), the Customs Union (CU), the Common Market (CM), Monetary Union (MU) and the single currency.
SADC members all have different challenges that have slowed down the pace ranging from political instability, civil wars, corruption poverty and hunger.
This also frustrates SADC's time frame within which to attain regional development and integration agenda such as the attainment of the Customs Union (CU) by 2010, the Common Market (CM) by 2015, Monetary Union (MU) by 2016 and the single currency by 2018.
The SADC FTA was launched on August 17, 2008 in Sandton, in South- Africa during the 28th Summit of the SADC heads of State and Government according to the stipulated time frame.
The FTA marked the abolishing of custom tariff and Non-Tariff Trade Barriers (NTTBs) between or among countries that have chosen to form FTA.
The launch of the SADC FTA led to increase an of intra-regional trade among the members in the region thereby increasing the volume of goods, services and investment.
However, this is somehow not working well as some countries that have infant industries are not benefiting from the FTA as their goods are being undermined by products from countries whose industries are developed.
When the FTA succeeds, it is supposed to led to the establishment of the Customs Union (CU) which according to the SADC calendar was supposed to have been launched this year at the just ended summit held in Windhoek, Namibia.
But all that was mentioned concerning the CU was the re-affirmed commitment of its establishment and the summit endorsed the decision of the taskforce in charge of the CU to appoint a high level expert group.
The group needs to consolidate and refine technical work done so far to reach agreements and common understanding on the parameters, benchmarks, timelines, a model customs union and its implementation modalities. This group has been mandated to submit a report to the taskforce before December 2011.
CU will entail unified tariffs where the members will have the same external tariff and no internal tariff and investments taking place in a country where the best conditions can be found.
Christian Peters an expert on SADC affairs in his book "Regional integration in Southern Africa-guidebook" which was recently published high-lights some of the achievement that SADC has made so far and some of the impediments that are slowing down the pace of regional integration.
The guide book adopted by the in Went a Garmany organization and Institute of the Advancement of Journalist (IAJ) to train journalist on how to report regional integration high-lights some of the scores achieved by SADC and pointed out areas which still needed to be attended to.
With what Mr Peters highlighted in his book, regional integration is a process that might take years or even decades looking at the prevailing situations in the member countries.
Most of the protocols and policies have either not been signed or ratified by memberstates, thereby slowing down the pace of the SADC agenda.
Though SADC is operating under the FTA, some member states have not completely phased out the NTTBs as some countries depend on the custom duties and other taxes for their revenues.
There are issues of dual membership, which are still out-standing and need to be addressed. Dual membership is contrary to the WTO rules. Zambia is one of the countries in the region that has dual membership with SADC and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA).
 
The region is still facing a challenge over the facilitation of free movement of people as this is being frustrated by some countries who still request visas for people to move from one member State to the other.
These and many other obstacles are hindering SADC from achieving its goals. However, there is potential for the SADC to integrate provided that perceived hidden agendas by various countries are dealt with .
Times of Zambia