The strains on EAC integration suggest growing political pushback by member states.
By Wachira Maina
In Summary
The 18th East African Community Heads of State Summit
finally took place in Dar es Salaam last week, after being put off three
times.
At one point, Burundi requested postponement to remember the
assassination of president Cyprien Ntaryamira, when the plane of
Rwanda’s Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down near Kigali in 1994. Another
was put off to allow Kenya to complete its party primaries ahead of the
General Election in August.
The reasons sound plausible, but Burundi’s “Assassination Day”
and the dates for party primaries in Kenya were known well before the
Summit dates were set. So, were these the real reasons for rescheduling?
Sceptics suspect deeper problems. Interpersonal relations between the
EAC heads of state seem uneasy, if not sour.
Rwanda feels that Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza is stoking a
regional crisis. A majority of the nearly 400,000 people said to have
fled Burundi are Tutsis, and many have gone to Rwanda. President
Nkurunziza’s practices echo — rather uncomfortably and personally for
President Paul Kagame — the Hutu-led anti-Tutsi pogroms in the late
1950s and early 1960s in Rwanda that forced him and his family into
exile.
President Uhuru Kenyatta was miffed that the EAC was lukewarm—
even hostile — to Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed’s candidacy for the
chair of the African Union Commission. Kenya suspects that Burundi and
Tanzania abandoned Amina while Uganda says it stuck with her. Nairobi is
sceptical.
Blowing hot and cold
Tanzania and Kenya have been in a zero-sum race for the infrastructure corridor of the EAC. But Nairobi recently lost that race,
when Kigali and Kampala abandoned the previously agreed rail and
pipeline routing through Kenya for the Tanzanian alternative.
In foreign policy, the Community is sharply divided:
Rwanda and Kenya have signed the Economic Partnership Agreement with
the European Union while Tanzania and Uganda are holding out, citing
national interest. Burundi is under EU sanctions, and is presumably
EPA-ineligible as a result. When the talks with the EU began, South
Sudan was not a member of the bloc.
For reasons personal to Presidents Kenyatta and Nkurunziza,
Kenya and Burundi do not like the International Criminal Court (ICC):
Burundi has pulled out; Kenya threatens to pull out; Tanzania says it
won’t pull out; Uganda attacks the Court but President Museveni has
referred Joseph Kony and the high command of the Lord’s Resistance Army
to the court — suggesting he is hot for one purpose and cold for
another, as it suits him. Rwanda is not party to the Rome Statute.
In this web of sometimes over-lapping and conflicting interests,
common ground is hard to find. It will not get any easier when Somalia
joins the bloc. Ethiopia, which needs larger markets for its growing
economy, is waiting backstage and regularly observes EAC meetings. If it
does join, its complicated relationship with Somalia would add stress
to an already strained Community.
Ebullient versus brusque
To put the EAC’s strains into perspective, consider how the
Summit’s communiqués have changed in a decade. In the early days, they
were ebullient and exultant; now they are brusque, even despondent.
Start, randomly, with the communiqué from the 8th summit in
2006. It is a 10-page document ringing with positive and vigorous words
like “historic,” “commendable” and “successful.” “Highly commended”
appears eight times; “applauded” four times and “noted with
satisfaction” 10 times. This was a summit on a roll, happy with its
achievements and so self-assured that it admitted two new members at a
go — Rwanda and Burundi.
Their one “serious concern” was a then live lawsuit in the Dar
High Court between the East African Development Bank and Blueline
Enterprises. Blueline had sued the EADB, and two months to the summit it
had got a court order to attach $68,546,653 of EABD’s money in a
Standard Chartered account in Dar es Salaam.
The High Court rejected EABD’s plea that it had immunity under
its founding instruments and it is this that was causing the “serious
concern.” EADB won the case on appeal in 2011
Imploring language
Contrast the optimism of 2006 with the communiqué that came out
of the 17th Summit 10 years later. It was a muted, even despondent
document. Where the summit once jubilated, it now merely recorded “the
steady progress made.” In dispirited tone, it noted that “Council
decisions” and “directives” had “remained outstanding for many years”;
that there had been “delays in ratification of protocols” and that there
were “Bills enacted by the East African Legislative Assembly” that had
not been assented to. The vigour was gone.
Unequivocal language had been replaced by imploring. Partner
states were directed “to implement all the outstanding decisions” and to
“report the status to the next summit of the heads of state.”
Elsewhere, partner states were asked to “consider” taking action on a
range of issues: Raw hides and fast-tracking the vertical integration of
the textile and leather industries, and many other matters that should
have been done earlier.
The good news was the admission of South Sudan, the launch of
the e-passport and the EAC Vision 2050, and the approval of senior
appointments, including Secretary-General Liberat Mfumukeko. A report on
the political federation was tabled but deferred.
Further action was urged — but no agreement was reached — on the
automotive industry and on used clothes, among other things. The change
in tone is not merely a change in writing fashion. It is symptomatic of
a deeper malaise. There are two reasons for thinking so.
Undermining the “realistic”
First, the strains on EAC integration suggest growing political
pushback by member states. That means that any closer union could
unleash an anti-EAC backlash similar to the anti-EU sentiments in
Britain and France. Much remains to be done on the Common Market and yet
the EAC has expanded, with the entry of South Sudan. Somalia is in the
pipeline and Ethiopia seems just a matter of time.
If the latter two join, there will additional strains. Consider,
first, the difficulties of nearly doubling the EAC’s population and,
second, integrating countries that do not share current “understandings”
about the Community.
Second, the EAC has undermined the “realistic” by pursuing the
“unattainable.” By keeping the maximal community goal of political
federation permanently on the agenda, the EAC also, unwittingly, keeps
alive the historically divisive “fears of dominance” that destroyed the
old EAC in 1977. Always lurking in the background, those fears — though
unspoken — make it harder to achieve more modest integration goals.
The Summit must take responsibility for these barriers. The
presidents seem to have become slightly inebriated with their success
from 1999 to 2010. The EAC Treaty was signed on November 30, 1999 and
came into force in 2000. Rwanda and Burundi joined on July 1, 2007. The
Customs Union was established in 2005, followed by the Common Market in
2010. Success this rapid can induce vertigo. No wonder, then, that by
the mid-2000s, a federation seemed inevitable.
Free movement held hostage
And yet the fact that it has been so hard to make the Common
Market work over the past six years should have forced the Summit to
rethink the EAC and especially political federation.
Member states fear that the freedoms of the Common Market cannot
embrace the civil and political freedoms of a federation. Right now,
the EAC seems either deadlocked or deeply reluctant to implement fully
the free movement of goods, people, services and capital that underpins
the Common Market.
True, in law, goods are free to move across borders but non-tariff barriers
— failing to apply Community laws, arbitrary application of quality and
safety standards, corruption in transit and other in-country
regulations — remain serious impediments. Cross-border services are
constrained, and the right of establishment, on which the free movement
of services depends, is blocked everywhere, in some places by law and in
others by practice.
The EAC Treaty was signed on November 30, 1999 and came into force in 2000.
People can move reasonably freely, but free movement is hostage
to unwritten rules and police and immigration attitudes. Capital can
move but a new wave of nationalism, especially in Tanzania where a
history of domination by Kenyan companies still rankles, is putting the
brakes on this. None of the countries fully honours the principles of
non-discrimination and equal treatment of member-state nationals, which
the Treaty commands.
To that incomplete agenda, more has now been added. South Sudan must begin to harmonise its laws
with those of the Common Market. The verification exercise to admit
Somalia needs to be completed and then Mogadishu must begin the long
process of joining and harmonising with existing laws and practices. All
this will make the Common Market harder to achieve, what with new
partners with such asymmetric state capacities and preparedness.
Regional security
The bad news then is that the step-wise process prescribed by
the Treaty in which the Community integrates toward a political
federation is a fairytale. The building blocks are not in place. The
explicit preconditions set out in the Treaty have not been met and will
not be met soon.
The political union would follow the earlier stages of
integration. It would be buttressed by good governance and common
foreign and security policies. On security and foreign policies, member
states could not be further apart and the few policy issues on which
they agree cannot form a platform for a federation.
So far, on security, the Community has agreed on four main
areas: Implementation of the protocol on drug trafficking; interdiction
of small arms and light weapons; co-operation on police matters; and
bringing the East African Brigade into operation. These are important.
But East Africa’s biggest security risk right now is the danger of state
breakdown — in Burundi and, perhaps, in South Sudan.
On Burundi, the Summit has been complacent. It thinks that the
worst of the crisis is over and that the country is stabilising, as the
talks facilitator Benjamin Mkapa said in his latest report to the
Summit. That view will please President Nkurunziza, but it will alienate
an opposition that has been suspicious of Mkapa from the very start.
In coddling Mr Nkurunziza, the Summit forgets the history of the
Great Lakes region. Every time a large number of people flee into
neighbouring countries, they seed rebel movements within a decade or so.
Remember Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan?
More bad news
So, on security, the EAC is far from ready for a federation.
On foreign policy, it is even further away, as the disagreements on the
ICC, Amina Mohamed candidacy’s for the AUC chair and the EPA clearly
show. But, even without these alignment and co-ordination problems,
there are sharp disagreements on tactics.
How fast, for example, should the EAC move towards federation?
President Museveni, once thought to fancy the EAC presidency, wants to
fast-track federation.
Everyone else wants to move more cautiously. And more bad news:
Even if the EAC federation were plausible, history condemns such unions
in Africa. In 1958, Egypt forged one with Syria and Yemen. This was
phenomenally popular — supported and ratified by overwhelming majorities
in Egypt and Syria.
When Yemen joined later in the year, the United Arab States was
formed. It lasted only three years, collapsing in September 1961
following a military coup in Syria. Later, in 1981, Senegal and Gambia
united to form Senegambia. The union collapsed in 1989, with Senegal
frustrated that Gambia was stalling.
There were many problems at play: Conflicting legal and
bureaucratic traditions — continental French versus Commonwealth British
— and backstage games by the respective former colonial powers, France
and Britain.
Tanganyika’s Union with Zanzibar may be thought an inspiration.
But even here, the strains are deep. The ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi
fears secessionist sentiment on the Isles and perpetually frustrates
free and fair elections there, stoking the very thing it fears. This
same fear was part of the reason why constitutional reforms in Tanzania
stalled just before the 2015 polls.
There is no happy ending to this story. However you look at it, a
political federation presents insuperable obstacles. It also provokes
emotions that undermine integration on less ambitious matters. It is
time the EAC lowered its sights, threw out the dream of federation and
toiled to make the Common Market succeed.
Wachira Maina is a constitutional lawyer.
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