The council of Ministers of the East African Community (EAC) will this week meet in Arusha, Tanzania, with the status of negotiations regarding South Sudan’s application to join the community expected to be among the top issues on the agenda.
The council of Ministers of the East African Community (EAC) will this week meet in Arusha, Tanzania, with the status of negotiations regarding South Sudan’s application to join the community expected to be among the top issues on the agenda.
The council meetings are attended by the ministers responsible for EAC affairs of each partner state. This week’s meeting, which opened yesterday and runs until Thursday, is the 31st ordinary meeting of the council.
It normally takes place in three sessions beginning with that of senior officials of the EAC followed by that of EAC permanent secretaries before climaxing with the ministers’ meetings that mainly considers key issues forwarded by their technical officials.
Innocent Safari, the permanent secretary at Rwanda’s Ministry of East African Affairs, told The New Times, yesterday, that the status of negotiations regarding South Sudan’s application to join the EAC as a sixth member will be one of the key issues for the council to consider.
The Republic of South Sudan, which is currently embroiled in a contest for political power between President Salva Kiir’s government and rebels loyal to his former deputy Riek Machar, applied to join the EAC on June 10, 2011.
The EAC Council of Ministers then established a high level negotiation team to negotiate the country’s entry into the Community, a process that was initiated by the South Sudanese government delegation appointed by President Kiir on March 13, last year.
In November, last year, the South Sudanese delegation met the Secretary General of the EAC, Dr Richard Sezibera, and other senior EAC officials in Nairobi, Kenya, and discussed a wide range of issues including proposing dates to start the official negotiations.
Sources say negotiations have been ongoing and that the ministers will be furnished with updates from the engagements; ministers would then brief the Heads of State (the summit) before a final decision is taken on the application.
Other matters expected to take centre stage at the ministers’ meeting include the EAC Competition (amendment) Bill, which seeks to promote and safeguard fair competition practices in the region.
In a related development, Rwandan senior officials from the Ministry of EAC yesterday joined their counterparts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for a meeting to follow up the presidential roundtable hosted by President Jakaya Kikwete in March to smoothen operations on the Central Corridor.
The Central Corridor, which handles more than 60 per cent of Rwanda’s total external trade, is a multi-modal trade and transport passageway within the East African region with a road network linking the port of Dar es Salaam to Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo and Uganda.
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