East Africa community remains a pipedream

By PETER WANYONYI

Kenyans love demonising Tanzania’s well-documented aversion to closer integration within the East African Community. In playing this spoiler role, Tanzania might not know that it, in fact, is doing exactly what the rest of the EAC — especially Kenya — wants. The rhetoric aside, we are just as bad at regional integration as the Tanzanians!

The latest spat involves an apparently illegal fee that Kenyan truckers are being charged to drive their Kenya-registered trucks into Tanzania. It is not much, just Sh1,075. This is peanuts for someone carrying goods worth hundreds of thousands of shillings, or millions. But Kenya is making so much noise about it. One would think the Tanzanians were confiscating half the payload of every Kenyan truck.

Perhaps even more hypocritically, Kenya then proceeds to slap double that charge on trucks from Tanzania bringing goods into Kenya! Even as we look one way and complain that Tanzania is charging us Sh1,075 per truck, we then turn around and charge those same trucks — both Kenyan and Tanzanian — Sh2,000 each to transit into Kenya.

That this is pointless and nonsensical needs no gainsaying. The East African Community has slowed down lately, but all member countries should be doing everything they can to ease the movement of goods and peoples across our artificial borders. For Kenya to be preaching EAC water and drinking nationalistic wine in this way is shameful and retrogressive.