Polygamy can keep the EAC going

Regional leaders put on some serious moves when they signed the Protocol for a Common Market for the East African Community on November 20.

From July next year, East Africa’s people will begin to move, work, and live freely in the partner state they choose.

For now, they can only do so in Rwanda, which took a unilateral decision to throw its doors open to East Africans two years ago.

It was a bold move because Rwanda (and Burundi) were then just days old as new members of the EAC.

What kind of Common Market, though, will East Africa be?

There is no shortage of romantics about East Africa.

A lot of them have visions of an EAC like the first one that died and was buried in 1977.

EAC 1 was about jobs. Outside the EAC governments, the EAC was by far the largest single employer in the region.

The brightest people in the region at that time worked in their thousands for the EAA, the East African Railways, East African Posts, East African Harbours, the East African Trypanosomiasis Research Organisation, the East African Development Bank, or at the headquarters in Arusha.

The story of a friend’s father who passed away not too long ago, demonstrates the East Africa of the time aptly.

He started working with the East African Railways in Uganda.

He married a fine Ugandan girl.

He came to Kenya to work for the EAR, and left his wife back home.

Within about two years, he had married a Kenyan woman, and they had children.

Then he was transferred to Dar es Salaam.