Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza submitted his papers to the electoral commission as international pressure continued to rise on him ahead of a regional emergency meeting in Dar es Salaam this week to try to resolve the political crisis. By Friday, only President Nkurunziza, who is seeking a third term in office on the ruling party CNDD-FDD’s ticket, and the opposition UPRONA candidate Gerald Nduwayo had submitted their papers to the National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI). Another candidate, former rebel and FNL leader Agathon Rwasa, said he was still “considering submitting” his candidature by the Saturday, May 9 deadline. Other opposition leaders convened an emergency meeting ahead of the deadline. “So far we haven’t yet made any decision on whether or not to contest,” said Jean Minani, the chairman of FRODEBU Nyakuri. President Nkurunziza, whose decision to seek a third term in office has sparked violent protests in the country, has announced that, if elected, it would be his last term. Those opposed to his candidature accuse him of violating the country’s Constitution, which sets a two-term limit, while his party argues that he has been elected by universal suffrage only once, and thus qualifies to seek re-election. A ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court that President Nkurunziza is free to run for another term failed to end a second week of protests in which the death toll rose to over 12 and the number of refugees fleeing the country topped 50,000. UN Special Envoy to Burundi Said Djinnit called for...

The East African Community member states are delaying implementation of the EAC Common Market Protocol, thus denying the bloc full integration, says the East African Legislative Assembly. “The biggest challenge is delays and commitment in harmonising national laws to fit with the requirements of the protocol,” said Peter Mathuki, Kenyan member of EALA and chair of the Committee on Legal, Rules and Privileges. “Partner states must co-operate on harmonising policies; they must also share information and experiences on how to regulate markets,” he added. Mr Mathuki said that, over the past seven years, reforms in the EAC have focused on simplifying regulatory processes. The establishment of the EAC Common Market Protocol is in line with the provisions of the EAC Treaty. It provides for “Four Freedoms:” The free movement of goods, labour, services, and capital. The plan is to implement the protocol established in 2010 progressively until December 31. According to a report by EALA, 63 measures out of 500 key sectoral laws and regulations of partner states have been identified by the committee as inconsistent with the Common Market Protocol. Seventy-three per cent of these are exclusively related to professional services. In terms of movement of capital, only two — external borrowing and repatriation of proceeds from sale of assets — out of 20 capital operations are free of restrictions in all partner states. Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa) chairman Vimal Shah said that only when the protocol is fully implemented, the larger integrated market encourage more investment. According...

THE Chairman of the East African Community (EAC) regional Council of Ministers, Dr Harrison Mwakyembe, is on Thursday expected to table 201bn/- EAC budget for 2015/16 fiscal year. Members of the East African Legislative Assembly, who have just started their session here, will be debating and expected to approve the East African Budget for the next fiscal year. The EAC will this year table a regional budget estimated at 110 million USD, nearly 204bn/-, to cover the fiscal year 2015-2016, which starts next month. An official report from the Arusha-based EAC Secretariat as relayed by Mr Richard Owora Othieno, stated that the new budget estimates were agreed during the just-ended 31st Extraordinary meeting of the regional Council of Ministers’ meeting, which was recently held in Burundi. The meeting considered and adopted the fiscal year budget estimates amounting to 110,660,098 US dollars to fund the Secretariat, East African Legislative Assembly, East African Court of Justice and the Lake Victoria Basin Commission. The new budget is also to cater for the East African Science and Technology Commission, the East African Kiswahili Commission, the East African Health Research Commission, the East African Competition Authority, the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), and the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organisation (LVFO). Each of the five EAC Partner State is to contribute 8,378,107.60 US dollars towards the proposed EAC budget and each Partner State is to contribute 824,445.60 US Dollars towards the IUCEA Budget for 2015/2016. The council directed the Secretariat to fund the budget increase amounting...

Fears are growing the development of the East African Community could be undermined by the crisis in Burundi. 40,000 people have fled the country as protests continue about President Pierre Nkurunziza's decision to run for a third term. Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda have integrated Burundi into plans for projects, like a railway connecting the region with the port of Mombasa. The head of the United Nations refugee agency has expressed his deep concern. Speaking in Nairobi, Antonio Guterres said: "We are extremely worried. We have already more than 20,000 refugees in Rwanda. We have probably eight to ten thousand in Tanzania and probably four to five thousand in the Democratic Republic of Congo." Civil society groups say 13 people have died since protests began on April 26, although police give a lower number. On Monday the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, said he was "deeply concerned" about president Nkurunziza's decision to stand for office again. East African foreign ministers, have announced a crisis summit for next week, in Dar es Salaam, the economic capital of Tanzania. Regional development The member states of the East African Community have forged ahead with plans to boost the region's economy, aiming to create a single market. Multi-billion dollar projects, such as new roads, building a 1,720 kilometre rail line through East Africa to the export hub of Mombasa, or constructing an oil pipeline across the region, underline just how serious the EAC is about developing the region's economy. The Burundian capital Bujumbura...

BUJUMBURA, Burundi – A Kenyan official says ministers from the East African Community have travelled to Burundi to help seek a solution for the political unrest caused by Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza's second re-election bid. In the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, roads were barricaded Wednesday with tree stumps as protests by those opposed to the president's attempt to seek a third term continued for the second week. In Kinondo area of Bujumbura, police fired shots into the air to disperse demonstrators who had been staging a sit in. Edwin Limo, a spokesman of the Kenya's foreign ministry, said ministers from Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda travelled to Burundi to try to end the crisis. Vladimir Monteriro, a U.N press officer in Bujumbura, said a U.N.-facilitated meeting between government, opposition and civil society started Tuesday. Source: Fox News

We are sometimes poor students of the lessons history teaches us. By the time the East African Community (EAC) collapsed in 1977, it had become clear that the political and economic philosophies of its member nations had become unsustainably divergent. This held back countries like Kenya that had chosen to implement market-led economic policies while Tanzania placed considerably more importance on a state-led socialist model of development. It had also become clear that the 'Community' was a club of presidents and not necessarily a genuine community of the peoples of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It was thus that a good idea was often undermined by differences between leaders that were some utterly irrelevant to their citizenry. Over the past few years, we have seen a renewed drive at regional integration in East Africa. The underlying rationales, for example, of uniting the region's peoples into a larger market and doing away with the impediments to trade and commerce are entirely laudable. However, we seem determined to make some of the mistakes that brought us to grief in the 1970s. For East African unity to succeed, we need to learn the lessons of our own history but also make an effort to appreciate the kind of painful economic problems the more mature democracies and markets of the European Union is facing even as we speak. They have been in crisis management mode since the housing market crashed in 2007. The idea of a single currency is particularly premature. Indeed, experience shows that...

As part of their overall push to better integrate the region and ease trade barriers, East African leaders are spearheading a campaign for heavy transportation infrastructure investment into the region. Yet ambitious projects like the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR)— proposed to link up Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi with Kenya’s Mombasa port—chug along slowly, particularly after controversy surrounding the project’s procurement contract has halted the rail’s progress into Uganda. The results of the Ugandan Government’s probe into the technical capacity of the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) and China Harbour and Engineering Corporation (CHEC) are expected to be released soon, after a committee visited the contractors in China themselves and examined similar rail projects in Ethiopia. Awkwardly for the project’s progress, Kenyan Government officials reportedly refused Uganda’s request for a similar examination—despite the Standard Gauge Railway project starting in Mombasa. Meanwhile, a series of highway renewal projects in the region have picked up momentum, perhaps for their relative simplicity compared to the construction of a brand new railway. Speaking at a recent event in Dar es Salaam as part of the Central Corridor Initiative, Rwandan President Paul Kagame delivered an appealing sales pitch to roughly 350 investors. “East Africa is a good bet for investors who have come to appreciate the good prospects before everyone else does,” Kagame said. The initiative is a multi-modal trade and transport pathway through Rwanda, Tanzania, DRC, Burundi and Uganda. Though he noted that “no investment is risk-free, all the positive trends and...

Kampala. The East African Community (EAC) Secretariat is set to introduce 5,000 new standards to ease the movement of goods and services. Some of the new standards include seeds standards on maize, soya beans, sunflower, sorghum and groundnuts. Such standards will help address challenges of fake seeds in the market when implemented by producers and government. Other standards will be on sugar and sugar products such as chewing gum, liquid glucose used in industry, molasses, sugarcane and sweets. These will help facilitate trade in the region. Experts say the new standards could be an answer to the puzzled private sector whose products have been traded for more than 10 years but have no national standards. EAC Secretary General, Dr Richard Ssezibera, said: “Currently, EAC has 1,500 standards and we are bringing on board 5,000 more. We urge member states to domesticate them at the national level.” Missing national standards However, absence of national standards has hindered highly demanded products from enjoying the regional market. The products mostly affected are ladies’ beauty products and the companies which have gone through this trial are Movit and Samona. Mr Emmy Musasirane, the Movit director, in his submission, said: “We want the authorities to come up with provisions within the law to address the issue where a standard is not harmonised but a product has been in trade the country of origin for more than 15 years.” He called for a special consideration which is acceptable by the other partner states, “We have written...

Kenya has for the first time bought more goods from the United States in one year than it did from the whole of Africa, underlining growing commercial ties that are expected to deepen with the recent thawing of relations and President Barack Obama’s visit in July. US exports to East Africa’s largest economy rose to Sh168 billion last year compared to the Sh146 billion worth of goods and services that came from Africa, according to data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). At Sh146 billion, the value of imports from Africa dropped marginally even as the value of goods and services from the world’s largest economy tripled. The exponential growth of US exports to Kenya happened despite the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta standing out as a leading advocate of intra-Africa trade who has made a series of trade promotion trips across the continent since coming to office in 2013. “The value of imports from South Africa contracted from Sh70 billion to Sh63 billion in 2014. The value of imports from Mozambique and Nigeria also dropped by 60 per cent and 56 per cent respectively,” said the KNBS in this year’s economic survey report. Kenyan exports to Africa rose by four per cent to Sh241 billion, supported largely by increased purchases by Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. The KNBS data shows export volumes to Kenya’s largest market, Uganda, dropped by seven per cent while trade with Somalia also contracted by Sh3.7 billion. “The biggest reason...

THE East African Community is facing pressure to relax restrictions that make it difficult for the European Union to export manufactured and agricultural goods into Kenya, it emerged yesterday. The Kenyan-led EAC Economic Partnership Agreements negotiating team however maintained it will not yield to pressure, saying relaxing the restrictions on EU's exports would kill the two struggling sectors which are the backbone of EAC's economy. “The EU's move to seek elimination of export taxes will kill agriculture and industrialisation in the EAC,” said Joseah Rotich of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade during a roundtable meeting organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs. He said the exclusion of some products from liberalisation under the EPAs is aimed at safeguarding agriculture, industry and Kenya's market interest in the five-member trade bloc. The EU wants EAC to relax export taxes for its agricultural products, wines and spirits, chemicals, plastics, wood-based paper, textiles and clothing, footwear, ceramics, glassware and base metal and vehicles. “I fail to understand why EAC is protesting about a possible inflow of goods from the EU yet they are not talking about the huge amount of manufactured goods imported from India and China which have continued to hurt the local manufacturers,” EU trade and communications counselor to Kenya Christophe De Vroey said at the forum. He said the EPAs negotiations that were concluded in October 14 last year offer the liberalisation of 82.6 per cent of the EAC market for the EU imports within a period of...