South Africa Floats Cross-Border SEZs From a New York Roundtable

FTZ News: Parks Tau used a government-and-business sitting in New York to talk about special economic zones that would cross more than one African border.

SAnews published the account Tuesday, Sept. 22, from New York, under Dikeledi Molobela’s byline. Tau, the minister of trade, industry and competition, had come out of a South African Business Impact Initiative roundtable on the edge of the U.N. high-level week. He said the discussion ran through the African Continental Free Trade Area, rules of origin, which goods might go into Chinese markets, and a recently adopted automotive pact. The department’s industrial paper, the same dispatch said, is built around decarbonisation, digitalisation and diversification, and lists autos, mining, agro-processing, digital work and green industry.

“We shared the work that we’re doing to ensure that we expand our views of special economic zones from being South Africa centric to being Africa centric special economic zones,” Tau said.

Nkomazi is the project with a deadline: South Africa, Eswatini and Mozambique want an agreement by the end of 2026. The SEZ sits on the South African side toward those two neighbours. Tau said DP World, which runs Maputo port and is an anchor investor there, is also in Nkomazi, and that the three governments are working on a zone covering all three.

He mentioned Beitbridge in the same briefing, as a corridor into Zimbabwe and farther into the continent. SAnews printed no treaty, acreage or opening date for that file.

Funding was on the table without a signed facility. Tau said officials and companies talked about private money, public money, international lenders that might take some of the risk, and what South African banks could do on projects elsewhere in Africa. He said Mauritius had asked South African firms to put factories there, not only finished goods on the quay.

He also sat with a group of South Africans on the Youth Employment Service. First-time workers, he said, need time on a shop floor.

His prepared line for the SABII roundtable, quoted in the government story, was that the question had moved from what South Africa should do to what the state and firms can build together.