The Summit on Saturday bringing together SADC and the East African Community (EAC) was immensely practical in agreeing to effective action to fix the problems in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo without getting bogged down in a blame game while people suffer.
The immediate need in that unhappy area is an effective and practical ceasefire, ending the violence and ending it fully, while re-opening the transport corridors that are needed to ensure aid and normal supplies can get through to the people.
The Heads of State and Government commissioned the military professionals, the chiefs of their defence forces, to move swiftly into the eastern DRC and within five days meet all combatants and settle the ceasefire and the opening of the transport routes.
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By using highly experienced military officers for this tricky mission, the Summit has made sure that those on the ground cannot bluff or pretend; military experts can quickly work out who is where and who is doing what and give the necessary instructions to implement the Summit resolutions.
At the same time everyone in the region has agreed to prevent arms and military supplies reaching any of the movements within the DRC and has promised not to intervene themselves.
This will help maintain the ceasefire arrangements, at least for a time while a determined effort is made for a long lasting and permanent solution to the underlying reasons for the violence in the first place.
Here the leaders of Southern and East Africa have decided to work together, combining the two regional peace processes and charging their foreign ministers to work together to have all issues addressed and to report what everyone hopes will be substantial progress within 30 days.
The point of combining efforts is not only to make the resulting single effort more effective, but also to make it plain to everyone involved in the eastern DRC that it is no longer possible to weave between possible gaps in a double effort, no matter how closely the two regional efforts were aligned.
As SADC chairperson and co-chair of the Summit President Mnangagwa noted, none of those attending came forward to say they had military commitments in the eastern DRC or were backing any of the rebel participants in the violence, although it was clear that there was such backing, but the Summit decided that blame games at this stage of the process would be unhelpful.
So what was then pushed through was an agreement that no state should support rebel movements in the eastern DRC or commit troops to the conflict, regardless of what may or may not have happened in the past.
This universal decision means that attention can be promptly paid to what is needed, ending the violence and then untangling the underlying causes and mess causing that violence.
This decision avoided the summit getting bogged down in the dispute between the DRC and Rwanda, with Rwanda complaining about insufficient control of what it sees as active rebel movement of Rwandese in the area and the DRC complaining about Rwandan intervention to back DRC rebels. Both countries deny the other's allegations. But the Summit moved forward to solve the immediate problems of violence and then the underlying problems.
There are a number of rebel groups and militias operating in the eastern DRC, and they have been able in the past, at least at times, to weave around peace agreements and enter and leave violent situations and even use their mere existence as a threat that others in the area need to recognise and deal with.
Some of these groups are home-grown.
The DRC has been able, in most of the rest of the country, to deal with similar rebel and militia movements, hammer out the necessary peace deals to convert them into political movements, end the threat of violence and incorporate suitable fighting personnel into the national army.
It helps in these sort of negotiations if the rebel movement does not have a sponsor or backer and so has to be willing to talk and to work out a route out of violent conflict.
The eastern DRC does have a non-home grown movement, mentioned in the communique of the Summit, the FDLR, a Rwandan rebel movement made up largely of those who were partly responsible for the 1994 genocide there and who fled the country.
It is an amalgamation of previous smaller movements and Rwanda sees this movement as a serious threat.
The main internal DRC movement is M23, which seems remarkably well equipped and is the rebel movement that has twice occupied the major eastern DRC city of Goma.
The M23 has twice made deals with the DRC Government, and these have broken down when it appears to be able to gain access to other resources.
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Cleaning up the mess permanently will involve the joint peace process to deal with both those movements and to ensure that DRC and Rwanda have their security concerns addressed, which as we have mentioned before will mean a secure border and effective civil control by the DRC of its own territory and that control being able to end the years of anyone grabbing a gun to settle a dispute.
President Mnangagwa stressed to the Summit that the whole peace process needs to reflect and use the unit generated in Africa in the long struggle against colonialism and then in sorting out internal African complications.
Africa has avoided most of the sort of wars between states that have bedevilled other continents, with the founders of the OAU, now the African Union, setting out how to make sure this would not happen.
This determination plus the practical route map the SADC-EAC Summit laid down needs to be applied to whole conflict in all its forms in the eastern DRC, to give the people who live in the two Kivu provinces what they have missed for many years, peace and the opening to use their increasable resources to have a prosperous, peaceful and secure future.
