Top left: Launch of the Lapsset project in Lamu; Construction site for a
new railway in northeastern Ethiopia that will connect Addis Ababa to
Djibouti’s Red Sea port (bottom left); and Djibouti harbour. Photos/FILE
By Christine Mungai and Charles Onyango-Obbo The EastAfrican
In Summary
- In our continuing series on the future of Greater East Africa, we look at how security, energy and water have combined to create a northern magnetic pull on the region.
- Two years ago, several new impetuses emerged. First, South Sudan became Africa’s newest independent state on July 9, 2011. Then last year, Kenya announced it had found oil in Turkana.
- Production is to start in six or seven years, but profitability will largely hinge on Kenya’s ability to realise the $25 billion Lamu Port and Lamu-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport corridor (Lapsset) mega-infrastructure project linking Juba and Addis Ababa to the Lamu port.
At one point in the mid-1990s, it seemed that
the Democratic Republic of Congo would settle down, and with its vast
mineral wealth — estimated to be $24 trillion, more than the GDP of
Europe and the US combined — would determine the shape of the wider East
African regional economy (See: The future shape of East Africa: What happens when the sleeping giant of Congo awakes, The EastAfrican, June 22-28).
That, however, was not to be and the investment in a more traditional East African Community of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda gathered steam.
But the late 1990s were very different from the 1970s, when the first EAC folded. By the mid-1990s, Kenya was home to more than 500,000 Ethiopian, Somali and Sudanese refugees, and there were more than 150,000 Sudanese refugees in Uganda.
Moreover, the war between the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the Khartoum government was raging furiously. The SPLA leadership had set up regional political headquarters in Nairobi.
Uganda had been drawn into providing the SPLA with active military support. In retaliation, Khartoum adopted and armed the anti-Kampala rebel group, the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
The rebellion in northern Uganda, and the war that
brought President Yoweri Museveni to power at the head of a victorious
army in 1986, had produced several thousand refugees, some of whom had
been relocated to camps in Ethiopia.
Kenya’s president then, Daniel arap Moi, was going to retire in 2002 after a new political deal with the opposition limited his continued stay in office. To his credit, Mr Moi understood as well as some of the best geopolitical strategists in the region, that the security of East Africa and its economic future lay in a regional solution to the war in Sudan, and a negotiated settlement of the Somalia crisis.
It took a while to come together, but the Somalia and Sudan peace talks eventually began in Nairobi in 2001.
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Indeed, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad) was created in 1996 to supersede the Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and Development (Igadd) which was founded in 1986. The membership of Igad — Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda — drew in two of the countries that were working on reviving the EAC. Only Tanzania was out of it.
Indeed, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad) was created in 1996 to supersede the Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and Development (Igadd) which was founded in 1986. The membership of Igad — Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda — drew in two of the countries that were working on reviving the EAC. Only Tanzania was out of it.
Geopolitical forces
In many ways, there was an understanding that the
EAC of three would only be shortlived, given the regional realities. In
addition to these geopolitical forces, with East African countries,
especially Kenya, plagued by food crises, Tanzania rushing to expand
agriculture as its population became the largest in East Africa, and
Uganda’s economy that had seen double-digit growth beginning to be
hobbled by power shortages, the Nile and what lay north of it were
becoming even more important than before.
Kenya’s case in particular was, and remains, particularly striking. While it was being battered by food shortages, the underlying problem that it was contending with was water stress.
The Lake Victoria basin in Kenya covers only 8.5 per cent of the total area of the country, but it contains over 50 per cent of its national freshwater resources. Thus, while Lake Victoria, and therefore the River Nile, do not figure as big in Kenya’s political and security conversations as in Uganda’s and Ethiopia’s, the lake’s continued productivity is a greater existential issue for Nairobi.
Security, energy and water combined to create a
northern magnetic pull on the region and, two years ago, it started
getting several new impetuses.
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