Kenya’s new President Uhuru Kenyatta’s response to the sharp cuts the 2010 Constitution made to the country’s Cabinet could radically affect the future of the East African Community.

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The Constitution provided that there could be no more than 22 Cabinet Secretaries. Former president Mwai Kibaki had 42 ministries to play with, but the March 4 election in which Kenyatta emerged winner, was the first under the new Constitution. Kenyatta’s government collapsed the 42 ministries into 18.

It folded the Ministry of East African Community into a new one of “East African Affairs, Commerce and Tourism.” Kenya thus became the only EAC partner state without an exclusive ministry for EAC affairs.

Interestingly, when Uhuru unveiled the new government structure two weeks ago, there was no EAC function at all. The current ministry where regional affairs sits was then only “Commerce and Industry.”

It fell to Deputy President William Ruto to clarify that the EAC was under Commerce and Industry on the evening of April 23, when the duo appeared to announce the first set of their Cabinet nominations.

Technocrats

On April 25, 48-year-old investment banker Phyllis Chepkosgei Kandie was named to the docket. Because the Constitution provides that the Kenya Cabinet shall be largely technocratic, and its members don’t sit in the National Assembly or Senate, much like the US model, the new crop of ministers shall have few political and personal electoral calculations to deal with on the job. Secondly, they won’t have the army of deputy ministers that Uganda, for example, can muster.

The Permanent Secretaries, renamed Principal Secretaries, shall now call even more shots than their predecessors. In a departure from other EAC countries again, the next line-up of Principal Secretaries have had to apply for the jobs, and shall be appointed by the president from a shortlist provided by the Public Service Commission after interviews.

Their appointments will, therefore, be far less an act of patronage, and they will have greater job security than those who came before them.

The combination of a more technocratic ministry handling East African affairs, and a new non-political Principal Secretary, means Kenya will from now on have a much drier, more technical voice at the EAC ministerial table.

As it happened, the day before President Kenyatta nominated Kandie, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, who is the current Chair of the EAC Summit, addressed the East African Legislative Assembly in the Rwanda capital, Kigali.

He raised the kind of issues that Kenya’s new EAC minister will be comfortable handling, “There are a number of strategic bottlenecks that are hampering development in the region. However, two main issues are small markets and inadequate infrastructure, especially the energy issue,” President Museveni said. He outlined a series of challenges still facing the EAC, including non-tariff barriers.

President Museveni also spoke on his pet theme: The need for the EAC to move towards a political federation. Museveni said that it was time for the region to look to political unity as a stabilising factor in development and called on the regional parliament to use its legislative agenda and mandate to support the political unity project.

That, however, is the kind of territory the new minister will have less wiggle room to play in under the new Kenya government structure.

That does not mean East African political federation will be relegated to the back burner. Rather, that even more than Kibaki and Daniel arap Moi, Kenyatta, or his deputy William Ruto, Kenyatta will have to do the heavy political lifting on the EAC.

Past demons

Furthermore, unlike any other leader in the region, Kenyatta will also have to wrestle the past demons of the EAC. One reason for this is when the first EAC collapsed in 1977, Kenyatta was living in State House, as he is today. The difference, of course, is that then he was there as the teenage son of Kenya’s founding president Jomo Kenyatta.

Kenyatta, who was 16 then, will only have been vaguely aware that something called the EAC had collapsed.

Today, though, he will be more than fully alive to the fact that his father was, with Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Uganda’s military dictator Idi Amin, one of three regional leaders in whose hands the EAC cookie crumbled. He will therefore want the story to end differently on his watch.

It is likely therefore that from a personal point of view, Kenyatta is deeply vested in leaving a positive legacy on the EAC. It is still morning, so one cannot easily read from his actions which will be his pet regional projects.

One signal though, is his naming Amina Mohamed as Foreign minister. Ms Mohamed was assistant secretary-general at the UN, and deputy executive director at the UN Environmental Programme (Unep).

As it happens, Ms Mohamed is a Kenyan Somali. Ordinarily, this would not have mattered, except that Somalia — where Kenya like Uganda and Burundi, has troops serving in the African Union peacekeeping force Amisom — has become one of Nairobi’s top strategic priorities.

Somalia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign minister Fauzia Yusuf Adam is also a woman. It is easier to get something out of present-day Somalia if you are Somali too. In Ms Mohamed, Kenya will have the kind of ear-time advantage in Somalia few other nations have.

With that move, President Kenyatta could have taken one of the most important steps yet in bringing Somalia into the EAC fold, at least as an observer, by the time his first term ends in 2018.

On another important front, when Kibaki was president, we had seen the quiet emergence of a two-lane EAC, with late entrant Rwanda and Kenya ahead of the rest in opening up to the region.

Rwanda, for example, got rid of work permit requirements for East Africans first. Kenya followed next by, first, reciprocating for Rwanda nationals, before opening the doors for all East Africans. Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda are yet to match that, although Museveni continues to champion political unity.

Also, Kenya and Rwanda have signed an agreement to allow their nationals to travel to each other’s countries, using their biometric national IDs, possibly as early as late this year.

Diplomatic sisters

On the softer side, Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo will no longer be the only lonely woman in the higher echelons of East African diplomacy as she will now have Ms Mohamed for company.

Like Mohamed, Ms Mushikiwabo was also a political outsider, having worked in academia before she was appointed Information minister, then moved to Foreign Affairs in 2009. If Mushikiwabo remains Foreign minister for long — there is speculation in UN circles that she is one of the women being considered to replace former president of Chile Michelle Bachelet who resigned recently as head of United Nations Women (UN Women) — and they can get along, we could see the rise of an “East African Diplomatic Sisters” club that will entrench the Kenya-Rwanda EAC axis.

The waiting will not be long. The next EAC Summit was scheduled for April 28. A few days ago, EAC Secretary-General Richard Sezibera called on Kenyatta at State House, and they emerged from a meeting all smiles. All eyes will be on Ms Kandie and President Kenyatta for signs of their East African intentions.