President Paul Kagame and President Yoweri Museveni are the most fluent rhetoricians within the East African Community in their argument for the place of economic growth in creating modern and strong states in this continent.

Their speeches both at home and abroad are replete with economic development numbers and their national ambitions. The two countries being landlocked, these leaders have a more pronounced regional economic posture than the remaining member states of the East African Community (EAC) club have shown. This shared need for access to the ports of Eastern Africa explain the exuberance towards regional economic cooperation.

But the economic logic of regional openness is under severe test now because the necessary access across the borders for traders from either country into the other is no longer assured. This situation confirms that for EAC countries, the logic of economic opportunity that integration portends will not suffice to keep borders open. EAC has been cited as an example because it has made fleeting progress but with the direction towards single market and monetary union being in the long term plans. Learning from the EU, it is evident that the single market is a worthy ambition but a monetary union would be a reckless experiment.

No watchers can now state unequivocally that the EAC’s successes will continue for the foreseeable future. It is evident that the EAC has many bumps that must be navigated and that the economic logic alone is not sufficient to keep its momentum going, no matter what the bureaucrats based in Arusha and member states may state. When the spat between the two presidents was started, one didn’t hear strong objections from business lobbies based inside the two countries urging the leaders to act more sensibly and in accordance with the rules contained in the treaty. Clearly, the economic rhetoric became secondary to the political reality.

COMMON MARKET

I have always argued that the best possible version of the EAC would be the culmination into a single market. This was informed by the belief that a political federation that puts together all five countries with different political styles and governance ethos would be a futile project to pursue. I still believe that but I am a little wiser that apart from the business lobbies that have connections in all countries and can speak a coherent language with each other, there is no active set of political interest groups vouching for the rationale for political coherence.