This column last week catalogued some of the growing benefits of membership to the East African Community.

More than that laundry list at the micro level, however, there is the macro picture that is equally tantalizing.

Consider this: we know which country offers the formula for effective state management, how to use the state as a vehicle for delivering the ambitions of its citizens; we know which countries have resources but lack the capacity to convert them into meaningful by-products in the lives of their citizens; we know the countries whose populations are relatively more innovative in thought and practice; etcetera.

In the same space, it was also pointed to the elevation of Burundi to the leadership of the EAC Secretariat as not only being callous, in bad taste, and unconscionable, but that such a decision only served to undermine whatever positive imagery the ordinary person was beginning to develop about the future of the EAC.

As you read, the consequences of this, and similar, decisions will become clear. 

In any case, these micro and macro indicators seem to suggest that almost everything that is needed for a society to ‘take-off’ is in place in the EAC. More importantly, it seems clear that we all need each other, no single country presently has what it takes to catalyse this take-off on its own. Thus, collectively we have everything; singularly, we have nothing. 

Upon the formal entry of South Sudan to the EAC someone from Kenya implored the presidents in Arusha at the time to ‘now redefine nationality and see us become East Africans.’ This tweet speaks to the feeling of the vast majority of East Africans who, despite seeing its benefits, are yet to emotionally identify with it.

Why? The simple answer is that we are yet to transfer sovereignty from member states to the regional bloc through political federation; that we presently want to simultaneously eat our cake and have it. 

However, the more complex explanation is that the ordinary person feels detached from the EAC because the efforts to show him or her the tangible benefits of integration (railways, passports, calling rates, etc.) have not been matched with the soft elements that arouse the feeling of belonging, as East Africans.

The EAC is courting by flaunting material things, trying to buy love, when what it needs to do is to whisper sweet-nothings. It is neglecting the one thing that will make us want to be in a relationship with it, something it won’t achieve by buying us things: the power of imagination.

A state is both a psychical space and an idea. The former is where people belong physically, the latter is where they belong emotionally. The EAC has created a space but is yet to engineer a new imagination of the self and other as compatriots of this shared space. In other words, it has been good at geography but poor at psychology.

Statecraft is the grasp of this crucial distinction. The question that has had post-colonial nation building in Africa in a bind is this: Once you’ve taken care of who belongs where geographically, what is to be done to the ties that bind them together in this common space?

The success of any leader since independence is the extent to which they have been able to grasp what is at stake in terms of how to respond to that single question. It is the single question that determines legacy. The rest are details.

Because we were integrated into the modern state as subjects, our relationship with it has not had deep roots; it has been superficial in nature. As a result, we exist with it like a couple in a bad marriage, or worse: a forced marriage.

Save for a couple of countries, most Africans did not acquiesce to the state in which they belong today. This may be fine; what is problematic, however, is that they did not have a chance to establish a protocol of expectations between the rulers and the ruled – at the individual and communal levels.

As can be expected in a forced marriage, an abusive relationship ensued: It was violent and lacked basic consent. It would get worse. Due to conditioning, the state retained this violent and abusive characteristic for long. 

Thus, the most pressing task of any progressive leader has been to stop the violence – both physical and psychological – by retracing the path to consent. They’ve had to wrestle with how to create citizens out of subjects, a necessary condition for partaking in a healthy, loving, and symbiotic relationship of mutual support and well-being.

This is the real value that regional groupings like the EAC bring to the table. They must be the wells of emotional safety, a people’s therapy, the safe place, from the violent state that was bequeathed us and from which leaders are trying, with varying degrees of success, to repair. This is possibly the only source of emotional allegiance upon which the long-term success of such blocs rests.

The roads and railways are great. Beyond these, however, the EAC framers must draw for us a transcendental, almost metaphysical imagery. It must caress our heartstrings, make us wish to leave our troubles behind and walk with it into the horizon of greatness. Unless the goal is a forced marriage.