The British have voted to leave the European Union. After the prime minister formally triggers Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, two years of disentanglement from over 40 years of EU directives and regulations will ensue.

The British parliament, the majority of which was pro-EU, is talking about how to preserve the pillars of the Common Market. Wanting to guarantee existing trade arrangements.

The Leave Campaign, on the other hand, wants immediate action on limiting the remit of European courts and the free movement of workers — almost three million EU citizens currently work in the UK.

Prime Minister David Cameron has decided to resign. The Right is celebrating across Europe — including in old EU stalwarts like France and the Netherlands — and calling for referenda of their own.

Economically, the pound sterling has already taken a serious tumble — intervention is expected from the Bank of England and recession is predicted. But… who knows?

As we watch and wait — somewhat nervously in ex-colonies like ours, for whom Britain remains a key trading partner and whose trade relations have, more recently, been mediated through the EU — all we can do is try to make sense of the reasons for the vote.

The reasons. The Leave Campaign calling the Brexit a vote for Britain’s “independence.” I was in the UK last week and made use of that supposedly reliable gauge of popular public opinion — the taxi driver (yes, it’s not only in Africa that expatriates, tourists and other motley foreigners have a single conversation with a single taxi driver to capture and distil alleged local knowledge into “analysis” of whole countries).

My single source sample asked me if I was following the Brexit. Yes, I confirmed. How, I asked, was he going to vote? He assured me he, his family, the taxi drivers he knew, would all be voting to leave. He saw the shock on my face.

No, he assured me, it wasn’t about immigration. After all, his wife was Thai and some of his relatives were Irish (!) I chose not to interrogate the implication that the Irish are deemed immigrants and moved swiftly along. Why then, I asked? So we can make our own decisions, he said. So we can be free.

Coming from ex-British colonies on both sides of my family, I found this ironic. But chose again to move swiftly on. How are you not making your own decisions, I asked. How are you not free?

He couldn’t give me any specifics. He repeatedly stated that Brussels is far away and it’s not right that his own government has no control over anything. He pays his taxes for his own government to make decisions. Not Brussels.

Hmmm.

The implications of the Brexit will only become clear in the mid-to long-term. But the Brexit does immediately call for our own reflection about how we’re also increasingly delegating executive authority downwards, horizontally and upwards — in the latter case, to the still nascent East African Community, its parliament and court or to the African Union, its parliament and court.

The EAC and AU are still, of course, far from being as all-reaching as the EU has become. But many of us want them to be. Reflection on those questions is needed now.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes