Polygamy can keep the EAC going

Regional leaders put on some serious moves when they signed the Protocol for a Common Market for the East African Community on November 20.

From July next year, East Africa’s people will begin to move, work, and live freely in the partner state they choose.

For now, they can only do so in Rwanda, which took a unilateral decision to throw its doors open to East Africans two years ago.

It was a bold move because Rwanda (and Burundi) were then just days old as new members of the EAC.

What kind of Common Market, though, will East Africa be?

There is no shortage of romantics about East Africa.

A lot of them have visions of an EAC like the first one that died and was buried in 1977.

EAC 1 was about jobs. Outside the EAC governments, the EAC was by far the largest single employer in the region.

The brightest people in the region at that time worked in their thousands for the EAA, the East African Railways, East African Posts, East African Harbours, the East African Trypanosomiasis Research Organisation, the East African Development Bank, or at the headquarters in Arusha.

The story of a friend’s father who passed away not too long ago, demonstrates the East Africa of the time aptly.

He started working with the East African Railways in Uganda.

He married a fine Ugandan girl.

He came to Kenya to work for the EAR, and left his wife back home.

Within about two years, he had married a Kenyan woman, and they had children.

Then he was transferred to Dar es Salaam.

He left his Kenyan wife behind, and before long, he married a Tanzanian woman.

He was prolific, and had about five children there.

EAC 1 collapsed while he was in Tanzania.

He never came home, except in his coffin.

It was his wish to be buried in Uganda.

His wives and children all came for the funeral.

They were splendid — the most East African family.

There were many reasons why EAC 1 fell part. There were the ideological tensions between Tanzania and Kenya; the political hostilities between Uganda’s military ruler Idi Amin and everyone else, especially Tanzania.

Looking back now, it seems we missed a great opportunity to save the EAC in 1977.

Amin, in his seeming insanity, once proposed that he and then Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere should step into a boxing ring and sort out their differences there.

A former boxer, Amin was hoping for an easy victory.

Nyerere treated the challenge with deserved contempt.

Then Amin said if Nyerere were a woman, he would have married her and there would be peace.

Now if Nyerere had looked around for a woman who looked like she was his twin sister, he would have appeased Amin.

And if he had stepped into a ring and strategically fallen to the canvas at the first Amin blow, Idi would have been satisfied.

Perhaps the EAC would have been saved.

More seriously, these episodes offer us a clue into what it takes to keep a Community going.

It requires big dreams to come together.

But it is the small things — like cross-border polygamy — that keep it together.

And it is also the small things, like a regional chieftain’s unquenched desire to humiliate his peer (Amin vs Nyerere in a boxing ring) that tear it apart.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media Division. E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke