Further reflections on East African integration and federation project

Following publication of my article titled “It’s time to rethink the East African integration and federation project” some commentators have advised privately that there is need to look more closely at the ‘real’ motive(s) behind the federation or closer union project in East Africa. The instruction by the Burundi East African Summit for fresh guidelines has rekindled interest in the need to reexamine the entire project going as far back in history as available information allows. Questions of nationalism, immigration and citizenship, land ownership and jobs, nation-state and a supranational authority etc have been raised.

The idea was first made public by Harry Johnston when in 1899 he called for closer union between Kenya and Uganda. With Tanganyika falling under British influence after WWI, the idea gathered momentum. Many aspirations were expressed by individuals and officials for creation of a ‘New Dominion’ to include Kenya, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, Tanganyika, Uganda and Zanzibar. The geographic area would run from the Limpopo to the Nile. The hidden agenda was to create a (white) settler-dominated, self-governing federation. Lord Delamare and Cecil Rhodes among others expressed this interest. To present it openly would have created a problem in Africa and possibly in Britain and elsewhere. So the economic and administrative justification for a closer union was substituted.

Ugandans have a right to be angry at their government

Ugandans have a right to be angry and to show it when a mother produces an underweight child because she is undernourished in a country that exports food to earn foreign currency to meet the needs of the few rich families; an infant dies of jiggers because of poor housing conditions and lack of shoes; a child dies of hunger because the mother is forced to produce food for cash rather than for the stomach; a child drops out of school for lack of school lunch because the government has sold food to feed children in neighboring countries; jobs go to foreign workers when Uganda graduates are unemployed because of a liberal labor and immigration policy; domestic industries are closed and workers dismissed because of a trade liberalization policy that allows in cheap used or subsidized imports; droughts and floods cause hunger and famine because of reckless and unsustainable de-vegetation policy that has adversely changed thermal and hydrological regimes; people who lose elections or are censured by parliament for corruption are appointed ministers; family members, relatives and friends of key officials are appointed, promoted or reassigned to positions they do not qualify for while qualified people are sidelined; children of rich people attend private schools at home or abroad while those from poor households languish in neglected public schools and graduate without learning anything; members and relatives of senior officials go abroad to deliver or get treatment while those from poor families die in child birth or from preventable and curable diseases because the health system has been plundered; well connected citizens steal huge sums of public funds and are not touched while junior officers who steal ‘peanuts’ to make ends meet are arrested and jailed; weak and voiceless citizens are ‘politically’ robbed and dispossessed of their land and property as in Rukungiri through municipal legislation; twenty percent of Ugandans get poorer and many more hungrier in a country that has been boasting of eradicating poverty and all its offshoots of hunger, disease and illiteracy; government divides up the country into many economically unviable districts making them dependent on central government for budget support with stiff conditionality; and government hosts expensive international conferences when money is needed to meet basic human needs of Uganda citizens etc, etc. Anger has also been accumulating for the following illustrative deceptions.