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GABORONE, BOTSWANA —The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is building a military logistics hub in Botswana to ensure rapid deployment of troops. The construction follows the regional bloc's 2021 failure to quickly send forces to quell an insurgence in northern Mozambique.
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, in his capacity as SADC chairperson, performed the groundbreaking ceremony Friday to mark the start of construction.
The 19 hectare-SADC Standby Force Regional Logistics Depot will be built in Rasesa, 40 kilometers north of Gaborone.
"This groundbreaking ceremony is timely and marks a significant stride in our journey towards promoting and consolidating peace, stability and security in our region," said Mnangagwa. "Regrettably, the last four years have seen our region witnessing complex and multifaceted threats to peace and security. These require urgent and collective regional responses."
Having faced previous deployment challenges, Mnangagwa says the establishment of the center will ensure the region will be able to deploy troops quickly.
"The regional logistics depot will serve as a critical hub for the storage of and the rapid deployment of resources, personnel and equipment," said Mnangagwa. "This ensures that the SADC Standby Force has tactical capability to swiftly respond to the threats to peace and security."
However, Mnangagwa says only $15 million of the $45 million required to complete the facility has been raised. He appealed to international partners to come to the SADC's aid.
Botswana President Duma Boko said the military hub will give the SADC the capacity to intervene in strife-torn regions.
"They (people) are mostly unsafe in some of their countries. They face strife, they face belligerent hostilities," said Boko. "They are in distress and they are looking for help and we in SADC have taken it upon ourselves when these calls of distress are raised to step in, to step up and come to the rescue we set up therefore, a force through which we intervene in some of these situations."
Boko said the depot will be crucial to the distribution of military equipment when needed.
"We have taken it upon ourselves to respond, to take to these trouble spots and deploy forces to assist and to bring an end to the conflicts," said Boko. "Such missions require facilities where the equipment they will need in the execution of their missions will be kept and from which such equipment can then be moved and distributed with speed and dispatched to the front lines where it is needed."
Zimbabwe-based political analyst Effie Dlela Ncube said while it is critical to have the armory, regional leaders must first address the root cause of conflict.
"We need to go beyond that (deploying troops) and deal with the political, socio-economic, legal and other structural root causes of conflict in the region," said Ncube. "We need to ensure that there are free and fair elections so that people do not have to rely on war in order to change governments. We need to eradicate discrimination on the basis of where people come from, on the basis of the language they speak, because that is a key driver of conflict. We need to deal with poverty, corruption (and) economic inequalities."
The SADC has seen the emergence of trouble spots, notably in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and in northern Mozambique.