By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Last week on this page we peered ahead to the good things that await the East African Community (EAC) in 2024. But life is rarely all roses, and East Africa is notorious for its episodes of madness.

There is, thus, the risk of trouble ahead, but also one uncomfortable fact. Because, for long, East African economies were not sophisticated, and not tightly integrated, crises inside countries hardly had a major impact on their neighbours, especially the coastal ones.

In the nearly two decades of coups and civil war in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania got along with their lives happily.

The tragedy of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda was not felt much in Kenya and Tanzania, except in the influx of refugees in the latter, who were anyway looked after by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other humanitarian agencies.

The war in then-Southern Sudan went on for nearly 30 years without major ripples in the region, except, perhaps, for Uganda. In fact, crises usually create opportunities for neighbours, as the elite, the experts, and capital from there flee nextdoor, and the exiles provide cheap labour.

The big difference happens for the landlocked countries when the troubled country is one through which their exports and imports from seaports pass, as happened to Rwanda, Uganda, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in early 2008, during the post-election violence in Kenya. However, even with that, with the alternative route to Dar es Salaam, in the end, the impact was not life-ending.

That has changed. With new consumption demands created by population explosion, increased regional movement, and close tie-ups of certain sectors there’s more inter-dependence. The region would feel the heat if Ugandan and Tanzanian food supplies were suddenly off the market. The disruption of financing provided by the network of Kenyan banks would be harmful to East African economies.

With Kenya Airways floundering, RwandAir has picked up the slack. Were developments in Rwanda to make it impossible for RwandAir to fly, there are many destinations outside the region that East Africans wouldn’t get to.

For 2024, there are three main risks for the EAC. The first would come from its east coast. After six years, Somali pirates returned to action in the waters of the Horn of Africa, at a time when Yemen’s Houthi rebels, propelled by the dynamics of the Israel-Hamas war, started attacking ships in the Red Sea.

The Israel-Hamas war could spread, and the pirates could return to their early 2000s level of activity, resulting in serious disruption of the supplies coming to East Africa through the Red Sea, and exports leaving through the same route.

Fuel costs, raw materials for industries, the supplies of medicines and other consumer products from Egypt, on which the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) economies are highly dependent, could shoot through the roof. And there would be a lot of pain all around.

To the north, South Sudan President Salva Kiir, the newly installed chair of the EAC, has not been in the best form of his health. He leads a fragile post-conflict national unity government and has to contend with whether or not to hold elections.

A bigger problem is what is happening in Sudan, where Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and de facto head of the country has been battling the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of erstwhile ally Mohamed Hamdan Daglo “Hemedti” in nearly a year of deadly war.

Burhan’s forces have suffered a string of embarrassing setbacks and defeats by the RSF. Many experts think the result will be a break-up of Sudan, and millions of Sudanese could flee into South Sudan, among others — creating an explosive situation that combusts with the country’s myriad political problems and results in a collapse into Kiir’s feeble hands. In turn, that collapse would dramatically fall back on Uganda and Kenya.

Third is what is likely to come from the western flank – especially eastern DRC. President Felix Tshisekedi has been declared the winner of an election that the opposition has rejected as flagrantly stolen. Tshisekedi fanned extreme anti-Rwanda and anti-Tutsi sentiment to build a nationalist platform.

The long, massive, and ineffective United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Monusco), is finally folding its tents. Kinshasa threw out the short-lived East African Community Regional Force (EACRF) that had intervened to secure the areas handed over by the M23 rebels.

There have been accusations that Kinshasa has been on a mercenary-hiring spree to fight in the east. At the same time, the M23 rebels seem to be on a winning streak. What could go wrong? In mineral-rich eastern DRC, doomsayers say mercenaries will come, set up, and won’t leave — becoming a threat even against Kinshasa.

Or, acting on the beck and call of their paymaster to attack Rwanda — as Tshisekedi said he would during the campaigns — do so.

It would be the first return of non-African military forces on a frontline in that area since the French military role in the Rwanda civil war. The region would have its first inter-state war since Rwanda, Uganda, and others, helped Congolese rebels oust the corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.

A lot has changed since, and armies in the region have several times more firepower and troops. What would follow would make 1996-1997, and all the conflict that has been happening in eastern DRC to date, look like a lazy picnic day.

But then, again, this is East Africa. The worst often doesn’t happen.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans". Twitter@cobbo3