Pay up, devolve the secretariat or move it to Beijing! Take a pick
Each country has a ministry for East African Affairs — let each be a centre of operations. In other words, disperse the EAC secretariat to the eight capitals.
So the routine financial crisis of the East African Community is on again, yawn! The cause? The same; members not meeting their obligatory contributions. Only four of the eight — Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda — are on schedule.
What do you do with a sick organ that is debilitating the entire body but does not respond to treatment? You can amputate – and we know amputees who have lived productive lives to a ripe old age.
If the organism cannot live without it, then you replace it by transplanting — we know many people living with donated kidneys or livers for decades.
Artificial organs are increasingly saving lives, while some systems’ functionality including sight can now be restored without a miracle being performed.
Do we need the community? Yes, we do. Can the EAC operate without a physical secretariat or a physical parliament chamber in one of the countries? Of course, it can.
Unless we didn’t learn anything from the Covid-19 lockdown. In which case there are two simple solutions.
The first simple solution is to let each country pay and maintain its people in Arusha – from East African Legislative Assembly members to staff working at EAC.
Host Tanzania can maintain the physical premises but if it is not willing, any of the other countries can bid to host the EAC and earn the prestige plus the business accruing from having so many highly paid expats from seven other countries.
Second simple solution is having the eight presidents go to Beijing on bended knee and ask the Chinese government to host and maintain the EAC secretariat from there.
There is no honour left where states that cannot honour their obligatory dues to an organisation they lobbied hard to join. And I am ready to bet my writing hand that Beijing would accept the request.
It can be dressed as a China-EAC summit which would resolve to shift community organs from Arusha to Beijing to cement the solidarity and speed up development projects.
To save face, they can even call it a temporary arrangement and say its duration is 60 months, well knowing that at the end there will be no reminder that the East Africans’ welcome has expired.
But since we learnt something from the lockdown, we don’t have to open a new EAC secretariat in one of the countries (though I’d have loved for Uganda to host it on one of its beautiful islands in Lake Victoria claiming it is at the centre of the of the EAC, but truthfully to boost our marine tourism).
Nor would we have to accept China’s graciously willing patronage. We just need to get the EAC operating from all the member states, thanks to the era of online interactive tools.
Each country has a ministry for East African Affairs — let each be a centre of operations. In other words, disperse the EAC secretariat to the eight capitals from Dodoma, Juba, Bujumbura, Kinshasa, Kampala, Kigali, Nairobi and Mogadishu.
This arrangement could even serve the real community of about 350 million people as the legislators and experts would be right inside their governments.
Since the problem arose from lack of money, the dispersal of the EAC would go a long way to alleviate it. There will be no need to have so many MPs as each country’s parliament committee responsible for EAC affairs would just second one or two members to EALA, which would be holding all its sessions online. Let the management be done online as the individual government implements and enforce what they have to.
As others have said before, the US cutting aid could be the biggest blessing for awakening African countries. East African countries are already debt-ridden and anyway, even Somalia whose debt was forgiven is not paying its dues.
The leaders will have to re-think the way they spend the meagre tax collections. For a start, let those who have been paying their EAC dues divert the money to buying medicines that the United States was giving them.
