We got a new office but I love the road more

The idea of the East African Community has continued to be quite an enigma to anyone willing to take a deeper look at it. There seems to be a clear gap between what the people at the top of the food chain (leaders) and those at the bottom (wanainchi) have to say about the community.Our leaders and policy makers make the idea sound so rosy, Utopian and a genuine concern of theirs. That in itself is not bad. However, when you move the lens towards the ordinary citizens of the community otherwise known as the wanainchi you are hit by a rather different reality. Take the example of Kenya which is about to have a major election. How many times have we heard of the key politicians talking about the plans (if any) that they have for the community? And by community I am talking about the East African Community not the Kalenjin or Luhya community. However, those is positions of authority are wont to throw around the EAC terminologies of integration, one stop borders, free movement of labour and other search vocabulary to make their speeches sound more solid. Apart from Pres. Kagame, many leaders in the region only talk of EAC matters because their speech writers have slipped it into the text they are reading. I have also written on numerous occasions that it pains me when the process of integration is relegated to simply summits held in the different capital where delegates strut around with those big identification tags and laugh as they enjoy the hotel bites and drinks. It gives the feeling that integration is expected to be curved in these hotel ballrooms and not in the villages and towns of the five countries. It is therefore commendable that I am gradually starting to see a glimmer of hope as far as this integration business is concerned. Before I explain why, let me start by congratulating the EAC secretariat for finally finding a decent place to call home. An ultra-modern (and I wonder why everything new has to be described as such) office complex was officially opened in Arusha, Tanzania. The ceremony was graced by Tanzania’s Pres. Jakaya Kikwete, Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza and Pres. Mwai Kibaki. By the way have you people noticed that Kibaki is literally spending his last days in office launching everything he can launch? It was also not lost on me that this magnificent structure was put up at a cost 18.8m Euros a bill that was picked by the German government. In other words just like the African Union, the five East African countries could not raise money to build a home for themselves. My heart was rather softened by the ceremony to officially open the Arusha-Namanga-Athi River Road. This is a very crucial road that will ease life for people travelling between Kenya and Tanzania and will obviously boost East African integration, cross border trade, tourism and many other benefits.It is such projects that will spur the development of the EAC region because they link people of the different countries and get them working together in a simpler way. It is actually the first joint infrastructure project that the community has seen but certainly not the last. There is an ongoing project to widen and improve the road from Mbarara in Uganda all the way to Kigali. Once this one is completed it will also see an increase in the movement of both people and goods between Uganda and Rwanda and by extension, Burundi and Eastern DRC. I hope the roads that link Kenya and Uganda via Busia can also be improved and the same done for the Mutukula section that links Uganda and Tanzania. The same applies to those that link Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania. More importantly something significant needs to be done to improve the rail transport to inter link the different countries as this will lower the cost of moving cargo around. In the same spirit, something should be done about the water transport on Lake Victoria. The bottom line is that we need more ease when crossing from country to another and improving of the necessary infrastructure is a step in the right direction. As we work on the roads between the different countries we should continue cutting away on the burdensome bureaucracy and paper work involved when one is crossing from one country to another. After all we all brothers and sisters and the focus should be placed on working and living together as opposed to keep our borders as barricades that one is only lucky to go past.