TEA and sympathy? Me? No, a thousand times no

 

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

This is the 1,000th edition of The EastAfrican. I love The EastAfrican. This is also the 1,000th column I have written for it. All together I have written about 1,250 articles for this vaunted weekly, totalling nearly a million words.

I love The EastAfrican (TEA as it is often abbreviated) so much, I wish it were long dead. We don’t wish death on the things we love, so why I would wish for the demise of TEA?

It is because TEA is primarily not a newspaper. It is two things: One, it is an idea. Second, it is an organising principle.

The idea was that the peoples of this region are bound by a common history and shared cultures. That in an increasingly globalised world, those pre-existing factors could be exploited to create an economic advantage for its people and give them a better life.

In practical terms, that better life is to be organised and distributed through an economic geography called the East African Community comprising, initially, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. It has long since grown to include Burundi and Rwanda.

So that we don’t get it wrong like we did with the first EAC that collapsed in 1977, on a weekly basis, TEA’s job has been to fertilise the East African idea — offering points of views that can help make the Community better; telling stories of the various East African people so that we can understand each other better; and raising the red flag where there are developments that could wreck the EAC.

That TEA is alive and kicking, is proof that it’s still needed and the work of building a well-grown regional community is far from over.

Therefore, TEA is also a constant reminder of how much as a region we are behind in achieving the dream of one East Africa.

If we had a well-oiled EAC, TEA would have become irrelevant long ago and closed shop.

Now that it is still in business, the 1,000th edition is a very good time to think of future tasks. I believe that the next stage of East African integration is going to be the most difficult.

For one, we East Africans have to imagine the smart regional institutions of the future. The leadership for that will not come from State Houses, but from the private and non-governmental players. And no one is better suited to do that imagining than TEA.

First, it will have to transform itself into an East African ideas leader in the manner of the US publication Foreign Affairs, and cease to be a newspaper.

Second, it will have to organise world-beating East African successes like M-Pesa, the world’s most successful mobile money transaction service, and even the success of the region’s long-distance runners, into a well-described body of knowledge that can be adapted by other societies.

Other questions would be what Rwanda teaches about genocide and post-genocide societies; what insights Uganda offers about post-war reconstruction; the lessons Kenya teaches about democratic resurrection; and what Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere reveals about how the force of an individual can be the defining architecture of a nation. These are just a few from a list that is more than 50 items long.

Happy 1,000th, TEA.