What Amina’s failed African bid says about the ‘other’ EA

On Monday, Kenya’s Foreign Affairs minister Amina Mohamed lost the election for chief of the African Union Commission to Chadian foreign minister Moussa Faki Mahamat.

On Tuesday she said some of the pledges of support made by neighbouring countries were “deceptive”. Ms Mohamed went into the elections with many calling her the “front runner”. The East African Community countries had backed her, as had others in Igad.

But if reports are to be believed, Burundi, Djibouti, and perhaps most surprisingly, Uganda, threw her under the bus in the end. While Kampala has not yet spoken officially, sources there say Uganda decided not to vote for her in the seventh round because at that point she couldn’t win. The suggestion being that without any prospects for her victory, it was time to curry favour with Mr Mahamat who looked set to take it.

Not surprisingly, in Uganda where its own candidate, former Vice-President Speciosa Kazibwe, was felled quickly and ignominiously when she contested for the job during the deadlocked vote in Kigali last July, the media coverage of Amina’s fortunes was distinctly blasé.

Reviewing the Tanzanian media online, they seem to have greeted the developments with a mild yawn. We shall know more in the days to come, but for now what happened in Addis Ababa was a reminder of a very East African contradiction.

While many elsewhere see the EAC as a model of cooperation, it is also a fact of history that at various points the progress of one country or the other in the region has been dependent on the misfortunes of its neighbours.

The view in the rest of the old EAC, for example, is that Kenya Airways was born out of pillaging the assets of East African Airways when the first community collapsed in the 1970s. In Uganda and Tanzania, the nationalists still grumble bitterly about it.

When Uganda went to economic hell during the rule of military dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s, Kenyan businessmen grew rich through smuggling, and underhand dealing in Ugandan coffee.

In the 1990s, when Uganda was a reform star, Kenya was labouring under Kanu misrule and corruption, and Kampala exploited the opportunity to rise to regional leadership. Everything in this part of the world didn’t happen if it didn’t come to President Yoweri Museveni’s doorstep.

Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi then, facing growing pressure from “multiparty agitators”, was wont to point to countries like Uganda, Rwanda, and Somalia that had been torn by civil war, to warn of the dangers they posed.

Kenya then got locked in a race with Tanzania for the “island of stability in East Africa” crown. In early 2008 Kenya fell down, with its post-election violence.

That left Tanzania as the only EAC that has not fallen in national madness, the occasional eruptions in Zanzibar, notwithstanding. Whenever there are any of those fights on social media (tweefs), you can expect Tanzanians to point out that Kenyan is a land of tribally motivated political violence. By contrast, during the era of military rule for example, West Africa collapsed in misery together, with only Senegal in the end spared.

In South Africa, it was 50-50. While you had your Angolas, Mozambiques, and Zimbabwe descending into war or violent misrule, there was an equal number of countries that avoided the worst — Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, even the kingdom of polygamous King Mswati, Swaziland, and South Africa.

The small-minded exceptionalism that sometimes dogs East African regional politics isn’t as prominent in these regions. South Africa has a chip on its shoulder, yes, but it comes from a very different and conflicted place. And even where East African leaders are able to be big and overcome these reactionary pulls, privately the elite are still driven by some malice and pettiness.

It makes for spurts of energetic regionalism, as we saw in the first two years of President Uhuru Kenyatta, with the “Coalition of the Willing”, a loose agenda with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni to turbocharge joint regional projects, and the current state where things are quite languid, and the Kenya School of Law could announce that it will no longer admit East African students!

So while other EAC countries supported Amina in the early stages, the chances that they “wouldn’t die with her”, to use the expression, were always real. We are East Africans.