A President for the East African Community?

Published in the New Vision newspaper, Uganda’s leading daily on September 24 2007
Author: Peter Bill Kisitu

EDITOR—On September 19, The New Vision published a story entitled “Tanzania will be part of federation - Kategaya”. A single president should not be an aim in itself. take for example the President of the European council. his job is to chair the meetings of heads of state and government and perhaps help draw up the agenda for such meetings.

So President Museveni should not be very excited about this job as there will be only a few meeting per year. Furthermore, if there are five countries, there will be five side shows as all five will continue to pursue national interests alongside community interests. This is what happened in Brussels during the Iraq war. a common stand was agreed to oppose the war but Britain, Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain and Denmark sided with the US to the frustration of the presidency. This leaves the presidency

looking inept and disenfranchised. Leaving Tanzania out of the federation for now is a good idea but we need to amend the treaties to insert a clause that allows for multi-speeding. Multi-speeding has two main advantages: it allows those who are ready to take an initiative to go ahead while allowing others like Tanzania to get ready and join later.

It puts pressure on the indecisive as they risk becoming irrelevant, and worse they will be bound by most of the rules which they don’t participate in making. that is the case for Norway and Switzerland. even though they are not EU members and have no legislators in Brussels, they are bound by 70% of the acquis communautaire or the body of Community law. Multi-speeding will ensure that we do not grind to a halt as unanimity may be difficult to attain all the time. So those that agree should not be held back by Tanzania which only seems to be afraid of the chequered history of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi as well as the intentions of the proposed first President of the federation.

As the leaders continue to provide guidance, they should also be creating East African citizens. this will not be achieved by a single passport for East Africa, nay, but a student exchange programme where Ugandan university students can do their final year in Tanzania and Vice versa can be started. You can also exchange civil servants in a kind of secondment so that they can share best practices and also compare corruption levels. If you build only from the top, you are likely to engender more incredulity in Tanzania.