Zimbabwe needed to create a good political environment in order to meet regional macro-economic targets of the region, including low inflation, a free trade area and a single currency, said Tito Mboweni, who is the governor of the South African Reserve Bank. Mboweni spoke to journalists after a meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) central banks with the European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet in Cape Town on Monday. All SADC member states are expected to meet certain goals set for the region, including single-digit inflation rates by 2008 and a SADC customs
union by 2010, he said. The region further wants to have a single currency in place by 2016 Mboweni added.

The SARB governor added that countries such as Angola, with a 45 % inflation rate, and Zimbabwe with a 300 % inflation rate, might miss the criteria.
He said regional economic integration was important for the region in the wake of globalisation.

Tender Board exemptions, suspense accounts and S&T money owed by civil servants to their ministries and repeated overspending of budgetary allocations should be drastically reduced, said DTA parliamentarian Johan de Waal in the National Assembly on Tuesday. Tabling the report of the parliamentary standing committee on public accounts for the government expenditure of the 2000/2001 financial year on Monday, de Waal said certain ministries were always late in submitting their books to the auditor general. As a result, that office changed its policy and now publishes reports of individual ministries. Although this was a good move and speeded up audited reports, according to De Waal, it still prevented the AG’s office to submit reports on the government’s total annual expenditure.

Only last Friday, financial expert Chris Mwinga revealed that the budget deficit of the government rose fro 4,4 % to 7,5 % and the debt stock now stood at around N$ 12 billion, which is equal to the total annual government expenditure of 2004/2005. This shocking news came barely half a day after Finance Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amathila told Parliament she needed "only" N$ 65 million to rescue the government medical aid scheme so that it could pay out medical claims. In her motivation, the Minister kept quiet about the increase in government debt of N$ 12 billion.

In mid-February, Old Mutual disclosed during an economic review that the Namibian government had to pay off N$ 5.8 million in foreign debts by the end of this year. This leaves very little room for the new annual budget for 2005/06 expected to be tabled in early April. Some experts fear hefty tax increases for individual taxpayers for the new fiscal year.

The South African power utility Eskom said it was spearheading the largest power project for sub-Saharan Africa to build a U$ 50-billion-dollar hydroelectric plant on the Congo River. The Inga project will provide low-cost power to 13 southern African nations, including Namibia. The power utilities of five countries, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Botswana and the DRC have formed WestCor, a regional company to realise the Inga power project, which has the largest electricity potential in the world.

Eskom Holdings said this week the project, which will take 10 to 12 years to build in the politically unstable DRC and could generate 40 000 megawatts.
According to Eskom’s chairman, Reuel Khoza, the plan was presented to a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) conference in South Africa where
Eskom championed it as a "clean source of energy" for Africa. The Inga project would address the bulk of Africa’s need at relatively low cost," Khoza said. "It will also provide an answer to Africa’s industrialisation problems", according to Khoza. Funding for the project would come from southern African governments and multilateral organisations like the World Bank and International Finance Corporation. It is at this stage not clear how each of the 5 countries is to contribute to the funding of Inga through WestCor.

Other African nations outside SADC would eventually be linked to the plant through a grid, Khoza said and the plant could even possibly export power to southern Europe. UNEP gave the project a cautious go ahead but emphasised that the project had to consider the Congo River’s fragile environment.