What a year of wins and losses 2016 has been

 

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

In Summary

• An EAC with part of it in the 21st century, and the other in early 20th at best, can only fail. Fixing Burundi and South Sudan should probably be the EAC’s only priority for 2017. If they can’t do it on their own, presidents Pierre Nkurunziza and Salva Kiir must forcefully be fed sanity pills.

It has been a trying year for East Africa.

Drought hammered parts of Uganda and Kenya; the bloodletting continued in Burundi and South Sudan, with warnings of a “genocide” in both countries; and there were savage clashes in the far western Rwenzururu kingdom between Uganda government troops and its royal guards.

Uganda also had, well, a Ugandan election (i.e. with hammers, tongs and fiddling) in February.

It remained a hard time for the media in the region, probably the worst period in recent times.

Yet the year was not lost. To begin with, though Tanzania President John Magufuli’s needs to outgrow his thin-skinned approach to media and social media critics, his anti-corruption handiwork has done something important for the region.

With Rwanda still holding up as the most honest country in Africa, despite small reversals, with Magufuli’s Tanzania there are now two nations back to back, anchoring the bottom of the EAC like some kind of chastity mat.

It might not be a world of difference, but where once there was one, and now there is two, you have to recognise progress.

After six years, the African Union meeting returned to East Africa, with a summit in Kigali. A lot of things have been happening in Rwanda, with the biggest climate change meeting in the region also taking place in Kigali in October.

The meeting was significant because nearly 170 countries agreed to get rid of 90 per cent of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) beginning from 2019 for some of the leading industrialised economies, and between 2024 and 2028 for many of the less developed ones.

But perhaps more significant from an Africa point of view, and as a pointer to possibilities, Rwanda’s Green Fund (FONERWA), which finances climate resilience initiatives in the country, took root. More than $100 million has been mobilised, and the fund says it has already created 60,000 green jobs.

Rwanda President Paul Kagame’s top UN environmental prize, the Champions of the Earth award, was well deserved.

As the year closed, Uganda — which has been obsessed with oil and dams in recent years — threw in a pleasant green surprise, with the launch of a $19 million solar power plant in the eastern district of Soroti.

The project is the largest announced in East Africa so far.

On the back of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) 10th Ministerial Conference in Nairobi in December 2015, residents endured many painful traffic days again in July with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting.

Good things don’t come cheap. Depending, these are either small twitches or significant steps in globalisation, even though it has become a dirty word to some these days

Therefore it has to worry the region that nothing forward-looking, except massacres, rape and repression, is happening in Burundi and South Sudan.

Indeed parts of South Sudan are all sliding back into the Medieval Age.

An EAC with part of it in the 21st century, and the other in early 20th at best, can only fail. Fixing Burundi and South Sudan should probably be the EAC’s only priority for 2017. If they can’t do it on their own, presidents Pierre Nkurunziza and Salva Kiir must forcefully be fed sanity pills.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3