Durban, South Africa — Southern African People’s Solidarity Network chairperson on Friday opened the 2026 SADC People’s Summit by declaring that the region’s peoples must organise for economic justice, debt justice, climate justice and democratic control of natural resources, rejecting an extractive order that leaves communities poor amid vast mineral wealth, writes Winston Mwale.
Mike Banda said the gathering carried the wounds of xenophobia and Afrophobia, the blood of Marikana workers, the lives lost in the Kariba disaster in Zimbabwe, and solidarity with those suffering in Sudan, Palestine, Iran and wherever ordinary people pay the price of war, imperialism and geopolitical domination.
He described a dangerous moment in which the region exports gold, platinum, lithium, diamonds, copper, cobalt, oil and gas yet imports poverty, debt and dependency, leaving young people educated but jobless, workers unable to afford dignified lives, women excluded from ownership and power, and future generations burdened by debt while Africa risks becoming merely the mine and raw-material warehouse of the industrialised world in the race for critical minerals.
Banda rejected a Southern Africa where wealth is privatised and poverty socialised, where corporations cross borders freely but Africans are called foreigners, where extractivism leaves polluted rivers, displaced families and empty promises, and where a global financial architecture forces African people to tighten their belts while creditors and elites loosen theirs.
He declared that another Southern Africa is possible only through organised struggle for economic justice, debt justice, climate justice, gender justice, workers’ rights, public ownership and democratic control of natural resources, and a regional economy organised around human need rather than private accumulation.
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