South-Africa – Comoros
Mbulelo Bungane, Ambassador of the Republic of South Africa to the Union of the Comoros, met with the businesspeople of the island of Anjouan last Wednesday at the Al Amal Hotel in Mutsamudu. This is prior to the forthcoming visit to the Comoros by a delegation from the South African Ministry of Industry and Commerce from 4 to 8 December. The Ambassador has come to sensitize the island authorities and business people about the arrival of this delegation in order to prepare to benefit from this visit. It is coming to identify feasible projects between South Africa and the Comoros. Therefore, the Ambassador requests us to prepare projects, to formulate them well to present them to this delegation in order to create partnerships or (get) funding from them>>, Mohamed Soyad, President of the Chamber of Commerce of Anjouan, was keen to explain. He added; we know that now the Comoros has become a member of SADC (Southern African Development Community). It is currently chaired by South Africa and we know that one of the policies of this organization is the industrialization of its member countries in order to fight against them being deprived of their resources.
At the beginning of this decade, Madiba's country featured amongst the ten main importing countries for the Comoros. However, it was ninth ahead of India and behind Tanzania with two billion six hundred million francs in terms of total value of purchases according to a report on external trade between 2009 and 2010 from the Customs Directorate General. In 2013, it came up in the table by two places. By contrast, this important trading partner was still not on the other list, that of the ten customers of the Union of the Comoros opened by France and closed by the United States. Let us therefore say that with a commercial deficit evaluated at less than two hundred and twenty million euros (it has gone down again by 27% compared to the two previous years) in 2015, our country must at last think above all about the balance of its trading partners. |
