Seychelles has once again been admitted in the folds of SADC, the Southern African Development Community. Our President was very proud to announce that fact explaining in great details the benefit our country will have.
Seychelles was a member of SADC before back in the mid 1990’s when there was divided opinion as to whether it was best for us to join SADC or COMESA, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.
Back then our local economists expressed their concern about joining SADC since the membership fee was very high and as a small island developing nation Seychelles did not have much to offer in that organization compared to Mauritius who was then hosting the Tourism Sector.
Our government disregarded the experts’ opinions and went ahead with joining the SADC but after a few years, they found out that Seychelles was unable to participate actively due to enormous arrears in membership fees. So the decision was taken to remove our country from that organization and joined COMESA which was deemed better suited to our needs.
Many great projects were outlined as to how businesses from Seychelles can use COMESA but after a few years not much was said about that organization much less about whether businesses have been able to benefit.
Now we are right back where we started as a member of SADC and according to President Michel, the membership fee has been renegotiated and will be far less that what we had to pay before.
Seychellois will be watching closely what will follow because from past experience Government makes one decision then changed it, to go back to the same decision after a while. It has been clear for a long time that what our country needs are great thinkers to come up with feasible programmes not the harebrain schemes we keep making.
So far we have yet to reap the benefit of the heavy investment we have made in various projects. Meanwhile our country becomes poorer and Seychellois more miserable.