PART 4: Fasten your seat belts, folks, the East African Century is already upon us

PUBLISHED ON March 5th, 2019

PART 4: Fasten your seat belts, folks, the East African Century is already upon us

China’s One Belt One Road, Kenya Airways and Ethiopian Airlines, a string of ports and local multinationals are already transforming the continent in ways undreamed of just a decade ago.

The past three parts of this series looked at the forces tearing at the East African Community as it approaches its 20th birthday, and were focused on keeping it together and building bridges over troubled water.

Which raises the question, what will the next 20 years look like for the EAC? Going by current trends, it is likely to be a dynamic two decades.

But there we have to take bets. For better or worse, it is going to be a totally different animal.

That future was one of the things on the mind of Joshua Oigara, group CEO and managing director of KCB, the closest thing to a pan-East African bank, when I met him a fortnight ago in Nairobi.

Mr Oigara’s self-effacing demeanour belies big ideas, and his view of the great possibilities in the region.

“If it does a few things right, Uganda can feed China,” he told me. Phew!

KCB is the only bank that operates in all the six member countries of the East African Community.

He says one reason for this is that the bank has been able to “work through and manage the contradictions that situations in EAC countries present,” an approach he says those who want to win in the region need to master.

“People would be surprised by the projects we have funded in the region: Hotels, mines, schools, hospitals, housing, agriculture,” he says.

Institutions like KCB that work regionally give credibility to the East African project, but money, says Oigara, is the easy bit, and it is not the magic bullet. The magic bullet is logistics and infrastructure.

“You can have a free market, yes, but it will come to nothing if you can’t move goods and services at all, or at speeds and costs that are competitive,” he says.

One Belt One Road

It’s one reason he thinks China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative could be a game changer, and deserves greater attention.

The OBOR involves infrastructure development and investments in countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.

“Belt” refers to the overland routes for road and rail transportation, called “the Silk Road Economic Belt”; whereas “road” refers to the sea routes, or the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

“Potentially, in the years ahead, China will be able to get goods to any part of Africa in a week,” Oigara says, and the OBOR could achieve in more dramatic fashion what the African Continental Free Trade Area is seeking to do.

What does China know that the rest of us have not yet cottoned on to? A part of the puzzle lies in East Africa, and the other in the Indian Ocean — where the region has its own “silk roads.”

Africa already has the largest working-age population in the world, and it is expected to hit 1.1 billion in 2034 — larger than China and India’s.

The world workplace is becoming African, and in Africa it’s getting ever more East African.

The Eastern Africa region (defined by the UN as 20 nations all the way from Djibouti and South Sudan to Mozambique) is the biggest by population at 457 million people currently, compared with West Africa at 402 million, while Middle Africa, anchored by DR Congo and Cameroon, has 178 million people.

Southern Africa (comprising South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland) has 66 million people, a population ranked fifth in Africa and one that is projected to decline in the coming decades.

Source: The East African

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of TradeMark Africa.