Ending East Africa’s tribalism

Kenya is not a failed state. Not yet, anyway. The reason the country is often portrayed as on its way to becoming a basket case is partly because it has the highest concentration of foreign correspondents in Africa, who therefore have a front row seat to report the numerous negative stories that emerge in the country.

Nairobi is also host to hundreds of mzungu consultants of various shades and descriptions.

They are here, obviously, because Kenya is not some dysfunctional backwater.

It has various world class amenities and, apart from certain well documented shortcomings, is a fairly nice place to live.

The lesson from last year’s violence, however, is that Kenya has the capacity to turn into a failed state with alarming rapidity.

There are many reasons for this, including the vast economic inequalities and years of poor governance that have produced an underclass with seething grievances. But the key dynamic that contributes to lingering instability is inter-ethnic discord.

The tragedy is that few good solutions to this problem appear on the horizon. The constitution drafters failed to address the question of ethnicity directly and failed to spell out clear solutions the way the South Africans, for example, tackled the insecurities of minorities in their constitution.

We might have to look abroad for solutions. And the most attractive proposition on the cards at the moment is the East African political federation.

The benefits of regional integration are often presented in economic terms. Writing in The EastAfrican last week, World Bank officials Johannes Zutt and Andrew Roberts outlined how a single market of 120 million people with a gross domestic product of $60 billion would prove a boon to East African citizens, attracting more investment, trade and tourism.

The potentially greater benefit of a politically integrated East Africa would be the possibility that it would swallow the ancient ethnic rivalries that are a menace to the stability of many countries in the region. It would mean that the ethnic alliances formed to win elections in Kenya and to some extent in Uganda would end.

All the major wars of recent years in East Africa have tracked an ethnic divide. What better way to swallow these conflicts than to create a new super state in which the ethnic arithmetic that attends our politics becomes irrelevant?

There are obvious challenges in the path of political integration. The European Union, sceptics say, has been pursuing economic integration for over five decades but is nowhere near political integration. The challenges in East Africa are different, and the attractions of political integration here are more obvious.

The borders in this region are recent demarcations introduced by colonialists. They are irrational and divide communities across borders. Political integration in East Africa would be easier to achieve than in most other places in the world.

In 2005 presidents in the region promised a political federation would be in place by January 2010 and that the region would be fully integrated by 2013.

Those deadlines will be missed, but the failure to meet targets should serve as a rallying point for civil society activists and MPs in the region who appreciate the need for greater integration to put pressure on the politicians to make headway towards the long-term goal of a united and more ethnically integrated super state.

This will ensure that countries like Rwanda, Burundi and Kenya do not return into the primitive ethnic conflicts that nearly tore them apart in the not-too-distant past.

mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com