EDITORIAL: Without the social contract integration is dead in the water

By The EastAfrican

The uncertainty around operations at entry points between Rwanda and Uganda in particular and the trade tips between members of the East African Community in general highlight the deficit of a binding ethos and the discordant expectations among the EAC partner states.

Rwanda partially reopened its Katuna / Gatuna border crossing with Uganda on January 31, but travellers on both sides were in for a rude-awakening when they discovered it was only open to commercial traffic. The development was a slight deviation from the statement announcing the decision to reopen the border, with a promise that health authorities on both sides would work on Covid-19 protocols to facilitate movement of people.

Comments attributed to President Paul Kagame this week stated that the border closure and its partial reopening were the result of underlying issues that Uganda had indicated a commitment to address. Restoration of free movement would be subject to how the Covid-19 pandemic evolves, the Rwandan leader was quoted as saying.

It was a major setback for small-scale cross-border traders in Uganda and Rwanda, who account for a significant portion of intra-EAC trade and whose livelihoods depend on access to markets in the region. The developments between Kampala and Kigali are revealing because they expose the critical choke points that are holding back East Africa’s integration. They also expose the fallacy that economic interests can be advanced in the absence of a commitment to the basic values that define modern society.

East Africa’s economic integration is premised on a slippery hotchpotch of sloganeering and vaunted economic ambitions that appear to play second fiddle to the core instincts of rulers who are too preoccupied with personal survival or simply do not care to appreciate the building blocks of durable cooperation between states. While that could be the legacy of sensitivity to the environment under which regional cooperation was revived during the 1990s, it is time the region defined a new ethos for cooperation if economic integration is to survive as the bloc expands its geographical footprint.

Despite tensions and the recent exit by Britain, the European Union has survived the storms of economic integration because, at its core, it is premised on inviolable values such as human rights, human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law. Those are the fundamental values that were defined under the Treaty of Lisbon and no country that does not recognise those values can belong to the EU.

As Rwanda has pointed out, it’s the treatment of its citizens that is at the core of its decision to leverage the common border as an instrument of protest. For several weeks now, Uganda has been in the crosshairs of the international community over its human rights record. South Sudan has failed to guarantee the safety of businesses from within the Community in its territory.

States have a duty to honour their commitments under the EAC protocols and bilateral agreements. Yet, as recent experience has demonstrated, these cannot be banked on in a human rights and rule of law vacuum.

The present situation is precarious and the EAC Council of Ministers and the Heads of State Summit need to move quickly to rev up the rules and the rights agenda if the region is to see the promised land of an economically and socially integrated region.