Last week, Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete calmed
fears about the future of the East African Community that have been in
the air since the start of July.
It all became public when Uganda’s President
Yoweri Museveni, Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta, and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame began
schmoozing and summiteering about grand plans and regional
infrastructure — a single tourist visa, railways, power, ports — without
Kikwete and Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza.
The Ugandan, Kenyan and Rwanda chiefs soon became
known as the “Coalition of the Willing” or CoW. A lawyer friend in
Kampala called them the “CoW Boys” (as distinct from cowboys, which we
shall use below to refer to all five presidents).
Angry words were exchanged, particularly after
Kikwete suggested that Kagame’s government should talk to the FDLR
rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the remnants of the
forces that committed the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which nearly one
million people were killed.
The EastAfricanistas fretted, fearing that the EAC was going up in smoke as the first one did in 1977.
However, the most revealing moment in all this
came last week. Former Kenya prime minister Raila Odinga offered to
mediate among the leaders and save the EAC.
What Raila was unwittingly acknowledging was that
all the tension over the EAC was between the cowboys (the leaders,
including Kikwete and Nkurunzinza), not among the cows (the people).
Watering holes
It all told us something that didn’t exist when
EAC I collapsed. At that time, as far as formal institutions go, we had
only the common structures of state parties. Today, the EAC is different
— the cowboys hold their big summits, but the cows too assemble at
their shared watering holes.
The one area in which there was the most
reactionary nationalism in Africa in general in the past, was in the
media. Today, a media house like Nation Media Group operates in all the
EAC partner states, except Burundi.
But it is what the public doesn’t see that is
striking. NMG operates on one Internet structure, runs on one
“switchboard,” and one financial software across the region. It is not
alone, that is the way several of the companies that operate across
borders in the EAC roll.
Then the real takeoff of private tertiary school
education in Uganda came from an influx of Kenya enrolment. All of 70
per cent of the high-paying patients at a smart but little-known
specialist eye hospital in the eastern Uganda town of Tororo, are
Kenyan.
An international school like St Andrews Turi near
Nakuru has become the veritable school of the children of the East
African elite.
There are more expensive Ugandan, Rwandan, and
Tanzanian cars parked there on visitation day than at any EAC summit or
meeting of the East African Legislative Assembly.
My lawyer friend made a profound point: East
Africa’s cowboys need the cows. East Africa’s cows, however, don’t need
the cowboys. They will do just fine with regular herdsmen.
Paradoxically, one reason all these East African
cows are able to share kraals is because the cowboys opened up the
pastures and set them free — especially former Kenya president Mwai
Kibaki, and President Kagame.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s
executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail:
cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter: @cobbo3
sourcer: africa review
sourcer: africa review
