It was another big week of contrasts in East Africa.

In Uganda, the government was chasing down and beating up the opposition, arresting its leaders for fear they would disrupt President Yoweri Museveni’s swearing-in for his seventh term. It also shut down social media.

Museveni’s election in February was rejected by the opposition as fraudulent, and the opposition secretly swore in his long-time rival and runner-up in the vote, Kizza Besigye, as the “people’s president.”

In Kampala, in the past few days, the government has packed the streets with heavily armed soldiers, and buzzed the city with air force jets on a regular basis.

Next door in Rwanda, the World Economic Forum Africa convened, with the glitzy men and women of Africa and the world in attendance in their hundreds, and fellows peering into virtual reality headsets.

A Bloomberg article proclaimed, “…Rwanda is taking another step toward looking like the closest thing Africa has to Switzerland… [its] economy has outperformed most of its continental peers, with annual growth averaging 7.8 per cent since 2000.” 

It’s barely 20 years since similar – and indeed more colourful – accolades were showered on Uganda.

Also a few moons ago, every page you turned of an international news magazine, there was Kenya being touted as the “Silicon Savannah,” the place where those Africans who couldn’t go to San Francisco, could come and get a sense of what the famed Silicon Valley smells like.

Lately, we have all been putting on our leotards and dancing to fete Tanzania’s newish President John Magufuli, the man who has not seen a shilling he does want to save or hide from the hands of the corrupt.

These are the age-old rhythms of East African progress.

Historically, there have always been countries that are in the doghouse at a time when their neighbours are flourishing.

A huge chunk of Rwanda’s educated class was killed off in the genocide of 1994, or fled. And even among the highly educated refugee corps who formed the backbone of the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front, hundreds were killed in the war.

If Rwanda had waited to train enough doctors and professionals on its own, it would be 10 years behind where it is now. It grew beyond its native skills by throwing open its doors for, especially, Ugandan and Kenyan professionals.

And for that, it needed dysfunction and a little madness, to take hold in Uganda.

But a more complex case happened in the Kenya of Daniel arap Moi, when a flourishing economy was bled dry and a promising nation had its back broken by repression and corruption.

That happened at a time when the cruel military dictator Idi Amin was overlord in Uganda. Thousands of professionals fled to Kenya. Exiled Ugandan university professors became high school teachers. High school teachers became primary school teachers.

Basically, Kenyan secondary school kids got a university education at the time of the country’s worst misrule. The result was that the country immunised itself against total failure, and the energies that were unlocked after Mwai Kibaki came to power at the end of 2002, cannot be understood without taking into account the work of Ugandan professors who were teaching secondary school in Kenya.

The ruins of one East African country have always been the manure that fertilises the rise of its neighbours.

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