True friends know each other’s crooked ways

Two Kenyan students at Makerere University were shot dead by a security guard at their hostel in Kampala last Monday.

As was to be expected, on Tuesday the students staged protests at the killings.

The killings happened after rival student camps backing two candidates vying for the presidency of the university guild, clashed at the hostel.

The deaths are tragic, and nothing can be said to the families of the victims that will mollify them, but there are also some “good” things highlighted by the deaths.

For starters, the simple fact that there are Kenyans in the race for the student leadership is a strong indicator of the pace of East African integration.

The killings also demonstrated something more complex.

While East Africans want to enjoy the pleasures of regional integration, they are not willing to suffer its pains.

This is not the first time Kenyan students have been killed in Uganda.

But it always makes big news in the Kenyan media.

During the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya, several Ugandan trucks were seized and burnt by protestors, and some drivers killed.

One was locked in a house, which was then torched.

Reading accounts in the Uganda press, you would have thought all the post-election violence was aimed at killing Ugandan truck drivers and burning their vehicles.

The same thing happens in Tanzania when Tanzanians are arrested and deported from Kenya.

And, of course, there are always those Kenyan fishermen being arrested for “stealing” fish from the Tanzanian side of Lake Victoria.

Yet, it could be argued that if an EAC country gives other East Africans jobs, lets them study in its country, or marry local men and women, it should be allowed to do to them the same things it does to its own citizens — arrest them, shoot them, and cheat them.