Thursday, March 28, 2024

COMESA to construct a new $47 million Secretariat on Great East Road

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File:Delegates at the COMESA Council of Ministers conference in Lusaka
File:Delegates at the COMESA Council of Ministers conference in Lusaka

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) will construct a new secretariat at a cost of US$47 million on Great East Road in Lusaka.

The new state-of-the-art COMESA secretariat will be built on a four-hectare piece of land about two kilometres from the Kenneth Kaunda International Airport round-about and works are expected to start as soon as funds are available.

Speaking during the site visit yesterday, COMESA Secretary- General Sindiso Ngwenya said surveyors have already started works on the land.Mr Ngwenya said COMESA was growing and it was important for the regional body to move to a bigger location because the secretariat in the central business district was becoming small.

“We will have a state-of-art secretariat, which will be near the airport and will be a magnet for other investment,” he said.And COMESA Council of Ministers chairperson Ahmed Shide thanked Government for allocating a huge piece of land to the secretariat.

Mr Shide also thanked Government for hosting the COMESA secretariat.

“This project will ignite more investment opportunities as it will be bigger and will house other structures which will create other benefits,” he said. Mr Shide, who is Ethiopia’s state Minister of Finance and Economic Development, said the new secretariat would also strengthen the operations of COMESA.

Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry Margaret Mwanakatwe said Government was excited by the new site for COMESA.

Mrs Mwanakatwe said Government hoped to see more developmental activities at the site.

“We are grateful that our country has been given an opportunity to be the headquarters of COMESA,” she said.

Mrs Mwanakatwe said Zambia has accrued many benefits for hosting the COMESA secretariat and is hopeful that it will continue doing so in future.

6 COMMENTS

  1. They are sweet talking the government into signing the Regional Customs Transit Guarantee (RCTG). This will kill the Customs Clearing Industry in Zambia. Customs Agents in Zambia will be required to not handle transits passing through the Country and will be needed to setup shop in all Port of Entry such as Durban, Walvis Bay, Dar es Salaam. While you are busy posting comments Agents in Zambia are protesting against this but no one is paying attention. Uganda and Rwanda signed up to this and their Agents are suffering in Mombasa, Kenya Port all businesses are being handled by Kenyan Agents before them. COMESA is a sham organization if you ask me as it even promised our government that they will compensate for any loss

  2. Sindiso Ngwenya refered to Customs Agents in Zambia as Tuntemba Businesses. Now will they compensate the many Zambian Agents for loss of business I don’t think so this $46 million goes into a building only and most materials won’t be sourced locally from architectures designer, surveyors to main contractors only laborer’s and bricklayers. Margret Mwanakatwe should follow suit as Felix Mutati and Bob Sichinga did in not signing this. Zambians stop being docile and wake up. This economy will not fix itself and our politicians can’t understand the dynamics of everything when it comes to economics. We can’t even account for the copper that is produced by the mines for export, how I ask will this government calculate the loss of business in Transit revenue loss for COMESA to compensate it’s a…

  3. the previous new headquarters was done as an international competition, so unless a Zambian architect produced something to compete on a global scale i doubt they would be award it…..as for customs agents and comesa no commitment

  4. Guys don’t yap your mouths if you don’t know what you are talking about.

    You think customs agents are crying about loss of employment ? My foot !!

    This is how it works :

    Trader walks into supermarket in South Africa and buys goods. When she exits South Africa, she uses the original invoice to clear South African customs at exit and to claim her South African VAT as she is exporting the goods. When she reaches Zambia the benevolent agent makes out a dummy low value invoice for her and clears on this basis thereby underpaying Zambian import duties.

    Now with the RCTG, the true invoice is entered into the system as soon as the lady exits South Africa. When she reaches Zambia, that full value invoice is already on the Zambian ZRA system as their is regional integration. So…

  5. Cont

    So their is no chance for the agent to do foka-foka jobs to fill his belly and cheat on ZRA duties cause the full value invoice is already on the ZRA system which is integrated to South Africa.

    If ZRA ever took the declared “invoices” and went to match them with the corresponding exit documents from South Africa we could probably be able to pay off Zambias external debt.

    This is how cross border traders work.

  6. Should have been built in cleaner,more organized and more cosmopolitan city like Dar ,Harare or Nairobi.

    Lusaka is an embarrassing chaotic eyesore of a city.

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