Many people are wondering just what is happening in the East African Community, and, specifically, what Tanzania’s game plan could be.

Over the past year or so, we have witnessed the intensification of activities that have tended to point to the further weakening of this regional grouping that had previously shown signs of cohesion and vibrancy.

The centripetal forces currently in play stem from a failure of communication among the five member states, their inability to effect a meaningful conversation around what seem to be contentious issues. This situation seems to be escalating to the point where some of us fear the dream of integration of our countries is in danger of being dashed, once again.

It is no secret that, for three of the partner states, maybe four, the problem member is Tanzania, which is perceived, rightly or wrongly as the laggard, the foot dragger, some kind of deadweight. While others are anxious to move with dispatch to effect greater integration in the shortest time possible, Tanzania is seen as applying the brakes to the regional enterprise.

Even a name has been fashioned: Coalition of the Willing (CoW) connoting a willingness and readiness to forge ahead and implement those programmes already agreed on in principle, connoting also that those who remain behind are in effect reneging on their own earlier commitments.

If Burundi does indeed constitute the fourth leg of the CoW, that will have left Tanzania in splendid isolation. That will also embolden the CoW and encourage moves to expand farther afield. South Sudan will need little coaxing to join and arrangements involving eastern Congo could soon be afoot.

Now we are at the phase where summits are being organised and Tanzania is either not invited or not attending, and where the most undiplomatic statements are made by people who we were told were diplomats.

I recall that when we started embarking on the new East African Community, resurrecting the one we killed in 1977, we committed to a community of the peoples of the region, not a club of heads of state and their bureaucrats; it now seems as if we were incapable of living up to that ideal, as if all we were good at was making high sounding noises signifying nothing.

Now I hear Tanzanian officials offering all sorts of spurious arguments, including things such as “They want our land… if they don’t want us, they should give us our divorce… we shall remain within SADC…” Really sad.

Tanzanian land is being sold on the cheap to all sorts of shadowy characters with whom we have no truck as far as our future development is concerned. Nobody owes us a divorce because no one married us, and SADC is a joke I am not ready to laugh at.

I have had occasion to say this before, East Africa is our home, and whoever thinks they can uproot us from here and implant us in another region is delusionary rather than visionary. We share a colonial past, not only with Kenya and Uganda but also with Rwanda and Burundi.

The Southern Africans don’t give a hoot about Tanzania, which they don’t know from Adam. SADC is the leftover from the days of the frontline states in the struggle for the liberation of Southern Africa, whose chair was Julius Nyerere, though his country shared no frontier with any of the combatant countries. After 1994, SADC is hardly anything more than a market for South African goods as well as an economic hinterland where cheap land is acquired and mines given away for a song.

Our leaders need to stop singing themselves lullabies. If they cannot engage with their natural partners, they will not be able to engage with the artificial ones they cobbled together only the other day. Even these newfangled partners are likely to notice that we cannot be trusted to keep our word.

They may even suspect that some day, if we find something we don’t like in SADC, we may want to quit and join Ecowas.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]