When EAC showed its good, bad and ugly sides

Considering what has happened since the last Sunday column, I am tempted to borrow the classic movie title, “The good, the bad and the ugly.” I watched this movie so long ago that I can hardly remember anything beyond the title. So I will stick to the title to explain the current mixture of events and news that swept across the East African community. Last week confirmed this region’s inability to put together a formidable football team that is worth talking about on the continental stage as all five national teams failed to qualify for the next African Cup of Nations tournament to be held in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Uganda which stood a formidable chance to qualify, seemed to self destruct at the last minute when the national team’s training camp quickly turned into some kind of tourist attraction, attracting different kinds of politicians who were bent on milking the impeding success of a qualification to the continental stage, something that has eluded the country since 1978! At the end of the day even the last minute win by Rwanda’s Amavubi was not enough to change the fact none of the five East African football teams was not good enough this time round. And this should not be tempered by the fact that football giants like Egypt, Cameroon and Nigeria also missed out of the same. At the individual country level, the week seems to have panned out differently. New senators were sworn in without much of an incident. I was able follow most of the proceedings at parliament as they were aired live on Rwanda Television. Later on in the week, some good news came in via my Twitter timeline that the former Mayor of Kigali City, Dr. Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, who had only recently become the Governor of Eastern Province had been appointed by the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon to serve as Deputy Executive Director and Assistant Secretary General for UN-HABITAT. In Uganda, the news that filled the air was simply bad news. A heated parliamentary session resulted in three ministers being accused of having received bribes from Tullow Oil with one alleged to have pocketed a whooping 17million Euros! Consequently, the term ‘oil curse’ is slowly making its way into the country’s common lexicon. As we were still trying to compute the bribe figure into Uganda shillings, three ministers hastily ‘stepped aside’ to allow investigations in another corruption scandal concerning the preparation of the 2007 Commonwealth summit (CHOGM). As if that was not enough bad news, on Friday, news came in that the crown prince of Ankole Kingdom, John Barigye had passed away in a Nairobi hospital. However the real ugly news was coming from the east in Kenya. In Kibaki’s territory, two Spaniards were kidnapped by what Kenyan authorities insist were Somalia’s Al Shabaab gunmen. The Spaniards who were captured in broad day light at the Dadaab refugee camp in Garisa were relief workers (doctors) with Médecins Sans Frontières. By the time of writing this, the Kenyan security operatives were still trying to trace the captives who are now thought to be in Somalia. Meanwhile, an Al Shabaab spokesman who spoke to Al Jazeera TV denied the groups involvement in all this. What makes this really ugly is that it is the third time in two months that foreigners have been abducted by gunmen and taken to lawless Somalia. A disabled French woman, Marieu Dedieu was kidnapped from her resort home in Lamu on October 1, while Mrs Judith Tebutt, a Briton was abducted and her husband was shot dead at Kiwayu resort in the month of September. Kenya is East Africa’s biggest tourism market and the kidnappings at the coast have made the area unattractive with so many cancelled bookings. With the attackers coming from Somalia, it is another reminder that our region cannot be peaceful with neighbours that are not peaceful. Although Burundi and Uganda have troops in Somalia under the African Union, the country is far from stable, and now some analysts are suggesting that the kidnappings are a new strategy for the Somali pirates to raise money. Just as the weekend began, US leader, Barack Obama wrote to Congress informing them of his authorisation for the deployment of 100 “combat-equipped” American soldiers in Uganda ostensibly to help find Joseph Kony. Without reading deep into this, the question we should ask is whether the guys that smoked out Osama Bin Laden can find Joseph Kony? Time will tell. Email: ssenyonga@gmail.com Blog: www.ssenyonga.wordpress.com Twitter: @ssojo81