The Seychelles’ president, Danny Faure, called upon the African leaders to adopt a more proactive and coordinated strategy for addressing maritime security challenges of the Ocean nations in southern Africa, while speaking at the recently concluded summit for southern African heads of state under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community held at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Seychelles President said that economic activities carried out in country’s exclusive economic zone such as transportation, fisheries, tourism etc contribute almost 45% of the country’s GDP.
Rampant piracy in the region has threatened the livelihood of the inhabitants and to abate such activities, which strike at the root of the development of the island nations should not be left with one country or a group of countries. There should be increased international and regional focus to address such activities. He also referred to the growing number of illicit activities taking place in the territorial waters of island nations, such as drug and human trafficking, unregulated fishing and other sea products, poaching of marine resources etc. Despite the global efforts, which have seen investment of several million dollars just for surveillance, there are even now higher incidence of such invidious activities in the economic zones of Seychelles and other oceanic countries.
While thanking the neighboring Mauritius, which is lying close to the archipelago of Seychelles and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) secretariat for beefing up the security surveillance, President called on the member states to have an urgent meeting to discuss these issues threadbare to find amicable solutions.
The SADC region has its own development challenges. The unemployment rate is as high as 31% and 5.4 million people are undernourished. There increased HIV infections. Also, more than 40% of the population in 12 countries do not have access to basic sanitation services. As a result of trade mis-invoicing, the region loses at least US$8.8 billion a year from trade-related illicit outflows. South Africa alone is drained of at least US$5.9 billion a year due to trade-related illicit outflows, including over and under invoicing of trade volumes.
