There has been remarkably little news about the progress on East African integration in the past three months.

Some noise, yes. Substance? Zero.

Not surprisingly, a few pessimists are saying the East African Community is half-dead.

But then last Friday Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was at a ground-breaking ceremony for the $240 million Lamu-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor.

This phase will be mostly the construction of a railway network between the countries.

In early February, South Sudan signed a contract with Kenya to build a pipeline also through Lamu.

Industry analysts estimated the pipeline might take up to three years to build and cost up to $4 billion.

However, sources say the Chinese contractors aim to deliver it in less than two years!

Over the next 10 to 15 years, a highway and a fibre optic line linking the three countries will also be built.

All this follows agreements that Kenya signed with Ethiopia to buy bucket loads of electricity, 600MW of it, from its northern neighbour.

It was the first agreement to emerge under the planned East African Power Pool, a wholesale market for trading electricity across borders.

At the end of last year, Presidents Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame also launched the rehabilitation and expansion Mbarara-Katuna-Kigali that runs from western Uganda to Rwanda.

These big deals might explain why there is little news about East African integration; it seems aimless to yak about how free movement of labour in the EAC will benefit the region, when Juba is putting $4 billion, money that can be touched, counted, and banked, on the table.

As the wonderful Uganda writer Okot p’Bitek might have said, a man who is carrying an elephant carcass on his head would be foolish to stop and try to trap a little cricket with his toes.

But there is something with far-reaching implications for the East African project in all this.

These projects could become the glue that make true integration happen, and might be slowly shifting the centre of gravity of the EAC.

The centre of the Old Community, made up of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, is becoming tentative.

The events that could eventually shape the region are happening on its periphery — Somalia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia.

Soon, there could be more of these agreements locking countries into a common fate than there are EAC protocols on integration.

The EAC borders that we are choosing collectively as a region, are being shaped at the same time with those individual nations are making through trade and infrastructure pacts.

There is simply no way the 600MW will begin to flow from Ethiopia to Kenya, and South Sudan will have a $4 billion pipeline to Lamu, without seeking to secure it with a framework that is bigger than the particular agreements.

Being part of the EAC gives them that. South Sudan has already applied, and will probably be in latest 2014.

Ethiopia has not applied to join to the EAC Secretariat in Arusha. It has done so through a chequebook exchange with Kenya.

To all intents and purposes, Ethiopia has already become a member of the EAC.

South Sudan is member six. Welcome Ethiopia, member seven.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]. Twitter: @cobbo3