We must move away from the conference mentality

It is often said that the best way to kill a brilliant idea is to set up a committee to assess and discuss it. Unfortunately, bureaucrats make a living out of this kind of thing. Sitting and adjourning one meeting or conference after the other as the ordinary mortals wait for their resolutions. The future of the East African Community (EAC) seems to be facing the same syndrome. Way back in 1993, the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi and Tanzania’s Ali Hassan Mwinyi sat and agreed to revive the EAC. On November 30, 1999 a treaty for its re-establishment was signed. Once the revival process was up and running, July 1, 2007 saw Rwanda and Burundi officially admitted to the club. Last year in July the much touted EAC Common Market was also established. By now we are supposed to be much more East African than we were in 1999. But that is not quite the case. Instead, all we have seen is conference after conference in the different EAC capitals. Although I have not been lucky to attend any of these invite-only conferences, I really do not care. I am more interested in the day I will be able to see and live the fruits embedded in the several resolutions emanating from the hundreds of EAC conferences. The most recent was the 4th East African Media Summit held in Nairobi where the major pronouncement was the need to establish an East African TV and Radio. The good thing is that it was not a front page headline for any of the EAC publications precisely because it does not deserve that much attention. I am not against the idea of a regional TV or radio but the fact that it is coming more than 10 years after the community was revived should raise a lot of questions about our character as East Africans. Have we just realised that we need a regional broadcaster to foster integration? When even rebel groups are known to establish radios and newspapers to further their cause long before they can envisage victory. We do not really need conferences to come up with some of these pronouncements. Instead, we need to support the existing media houses and encourage them to increasingly carry a regional hue in the content. Editors should not just be sending their reporters to Arusha and other capitals when there is a conference. The coverage of EAC integration should be an ongoing effort. On any given day, a reporter or camera crew can visit a border post to see if the things said about the Common Market are being implemented by the immigration authorities. A documentary about the lives of people living at the border towns can go a long way in informing us on the progress being made or the stagnation in place as far as integration is concerned much more than a conference in Nairobi or Bujumbura. How about regularly interviewing EAC ministers on the progress of the integration process. Any journalist covering a story should be able to answer the question, “What does this mean for the region?” It is now common knowledge that many countries in the region have not bothered to amend their laws to allow the EAC to function in the utopian way we are often promised by our leaders. In some country’s law books, the term ‘East African Community’ still refers to the original three countries. Why the region’s media practitioners are not asking some of these questions is an enigma. Instead they wait for pronouncements from press conferences at the end of the EAC summits. Consequently we have remained strangers to our neighbours. Something happening in another country is often ignored by the newspapers, radios and TVs even when it stands to impact our lives in general. Burundi is hardly ever covered by the press in Uganda and Kenya for example. Sometime last year, Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga made a surprise stop in the town of Nyacyonga but it was a shame that the locals could not recognise him. Before we can designate a frequency for a regional TV or radio, I think we need to encourage the existing ones to do the region more justice. Instead of spending hours discussing the history of Manchester or Arsenal why not help people to know about events in member countries. ssenyonga@gmail.com