JOHANNESBURG, March 6 (Xinhuanet) -- A plan to better integrate markets of southern African countries may lead to a single currency managed by a single central bank by 2016, it was revealed on Sunday.

    Tito Mboweni, central bank governor of South Africa, the region's economic powerhouse, said preparations for introducing a free trade area in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have been underway.

    Protocols have already been signed and others in the works would bind future governments of 13 SADC states and their central banks to follow through on the program, he said in an interview with the national newspaper Sunday Times.

    The plan calls for the abolition of tariffs and non-tariff barriers by 2008; a SADC-wide customs union by 2010; a common market, including free movement of labor and capital, by 2015; anda single currency and central bank by 2016.

    Mboweni has established a four-member, full-time secretariat inhis office to drive South Africa's preparations for integration.

    Mboweni declined to identify the specific challenges for particular countries, but said the available figures showed where the most work needed to be done.

    Five countries, including Zimbabwe at 381 percent and Angola at 45 percent had double-digit inflation in 2004. Growth over the three years to 2003 averaged between 7.9 percent of gross domestic product in Mozambique and a negative 6.2 percent in Zimbabwe, according to the Sunday Times.

    Mboweni said in Cape Town on Tuesday that countries such as Angola and Zimbabwe could find it difficult to meet the criteria.

    Mboweni told the newspaper that teams in the SADC secretariat and in other countries of the region were working daily on strategies to achieve monetary union, ranging from payment and settlement systems to information technology and physical currency movements.

    But he said targets could only be assessed formally once the SADC secretariat had systems to monitor performance against the agreed targets.

    Mboweni said members could continue to print their own notes and coins under a monetary union even if there was only one central bank, but it would be far better to have a single unit of currency for the region. Enditem