UN General Assembly
1986

Recognizing that no country on its own can tackle the multifaceted problems of development, we in southern Africa created a little more than six years ago, in the spirit of the Lagos Plan of Action, the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (SADCC), of which many representatives already know. We wanted to develop our economies collectively and reduce our dependence on external sources generally and South Africa in particular. Within a short time, SADCC, which is composed of the nine independent countries of southern Africa - Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe - has proved to be a serious tool of regional economic development, in spite of South Africa's evil machinations against it.