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Here in East Africa, we have already married the stranger

Saturday June 25 2016

Sometimes, to borrow a wonderful expression from former South African president Thabo Mbeki, it feels good to be an East African.

Think about it: The African Union will at its July summit launch an “African passport.” It will be an electronic passport (e-passport), which is very much in keeping with the times.

But this being Africa, the inevitable happened. The first beneficiaries will the continent’s presidents, prime ministers, ministers of foreign affairs, and permanent representatives of AU members based at the headquarters in Addis Ababa.

In other words, the people who already have VIP passports and don’t need another.

As the AU fidgets, East Africa is going for a new “smart” travel document, and the goal is that it should not just take us to Nigeria, but by December 2018 be recognised globally.

In other words, while the AU tests the waters, East Africa is going for a second generation passport.

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This has been possible because the East African passport infrastructure, and most importantly the East African tourist visa issued by Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, have allowed these countries to develop the muscle to take the next step toward issuing a globally recognised joint passport.

In having a joint visa and a regional passport that actually works, East Africa is alone on the continent. The AU could learn a few things from the EAC.

The question then is why is it East Africa that is making these kinds of strides, more than the rest of the regions in Africa?

For one, we have had the longest history of refugees moving around, beginning with the Rwanda “revolution” of 1959, the long war of liberation in South Sudan, the Rwanda war and genocide, the Burundi war, Somalia, the long years of madness in Uganda – name it.

While not all former refugees are open-minded about immigration when they return home, there is always a vanguard element among them who are and sometimes they rise to top leadership as Rwanda and Uganda testify.

And in the host countries – Tanzania and Kenya in the early years – having “strangers” among them becomes normalised. They marry them, they employ them, they quarrel with them, cheat them and vice versa, and knowledge of the strangers grows.

I think, however, the two turning points in the region were the 1979 invasion of eastern Tanzania by the forces of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

That produced a retaliation that saw the Tanzanian army and Ugandan exile groups oust Amin in April 1979.

The mindset to reduce such risks began to emerge, but didn’t take root until the 1998 Al Qaeda bomb attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Well before the attack, Kenya had already read the tea leaves, and figured that we had entered a new security era with very different threats, and formed the National Intelligence Service (NIS) in May — three months before the attack.

The 1998 US attacks drove deeper regional security co-operation, and a professionalisation of parts of the intelligence services in East Africa.

This and the resulting rise of more educated and less crudely partisan securocrats in East Africa, has been the secret fuel driving regionalisation.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3

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