Dear EAC Chair, is there reason we can’t connect the bloc by rail?
Sunday January 21 2024
In East Africa, we are in a much better position to develop transport infrastructure than the US was 160 years ago, when they started on the east–west rail connection. ILLUSTRATION | JOSEPH NYAGAH | NMG
If the East African Community Chairperson gives a State of the Union address, some of us haven’t followed it. The Arusha comms team should alert the 300 million citizens to tune into their local radio station and listen.
Remember, each of our small phones is a radio receiver, and simultaneous translation isn’t so hard!
For us to take the regional integration process seriously, we need to be updated at least once a year, through a summarised report of the outgoing chair and also get a forecast of what is to be achieved in the following year. For example, what time is left to attain the Monetary Union and the Political Federation?
A widely circulated report by the chair would help us know how the EAC is handling key developments in the region, like the just “ended” electoral process in the DR of Congo. This would help people know the EAC’s realistic viability of the federation.
Read: OBBO: With love from Hobyo, through Ethiopia, to DRC
For if a huge part of DRC could not vote for their president, what will it take to ensure voters in Zanzibar, Mogadishu and Kinshasa can, at the same time, make informed choices from three leading presidential candidates originating from, say, Juba, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam?
We shouldn’t be sceptical, but hopeful. Let’s dare to dream, but we need to know how a union that cannot deliver a very defined service like managing a single airspace can be trusted to manage an election where no single voter from South Sudan, DRC, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia is disenfranchised just because of managerial and systemic inadequacies.
To remain hopeful, developments taking place in individual member states that offer a lot of hope need to be expanded and re-designed at a regional level to work miracles. A quick comparison of EAC today and the United States of America 160 years ago, or China last year, can help put East Africa’s prospects in context.
At the start of the 1860s, life in US was basic and hard. It would take months and months to travel from the east to the west coast. The Americans, then numbering 30 million, set out to build a railway crossing the states, which they completed in 1869, after five years’ work.
Their life was revolutionalised, especially in terms of trade and human interaction, which are basic goals of our EAC. Crossing from East to West now took a couple of weeks. The cost of the journey fell from today’s equivalent of $20,000 to $100. That was the start of equalising life across the federation.
Read: OBBO: Who will sing a truly EA song or write the new EA book?
In East Africa, we are in a much better position to develop transport infrastructure than the US was 160 years ago, when they started on the east–west rail connection. They had to make a 5,000km connection, while the EAC only needs 3,500km to connect Mogadishu to Kinshasa, for example.
The EAC population is ten times larger than what the US population was in 1864. East Africa’s economic planners and engineers now have far more computing power on the phones in (each of) their palms than the whole US government had at the start of the railway project. EAC has a million times more value in times of raw materials that it needs to connect the entire region by railway.
What is more, EAC has, in Tanzania, already the start of an electric railway system, which can connect the entire region being powered by a tiny fraction of electricity that can be generated at Inga near Kinshasa.
This is just one of the projects the EAC Chairman should talk about. He may even have better plans to connect the region in a shorter time than poor Americans of the 1860s did. There is no shortage of examples to emulate.
The EAC Chair can look at what China achieved last year. They released electric road trains, which might even make building railways unnecessary. The road train uses sensors to identify and create an uninterruptable route through the roads thereby sticking to its time schedule without delaying in traffic jam.
An EAC emulation of China could be a cross of what is happening in Uganda with electric buses and Tanzania’s electric trains. Let us dare to dream, for whatever damage colonialists may have done to our confidence should have healed by now, several generations later.
May the thinkers we pay in Arusha come up with these, sorry, with better ideas!
Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail:[email protected]