EAC - Thumbs up Tanzania!

By James Katongana
Media have been awash with Tanzania’s indifference in speeding up the regional integration. Tanzania’s recent endorsement of East Africa Corporation monetary Protocol making it the first country to ratify it ahead of its peers gives hope that regional integration is on track.

This protocol was signed by the East Africa Heads of State and governments on November 30, 2013, in Kampala, Uganda during their ordinary summit in a bid to widen the scope of cooperation in the monetary and financial sectors among the member states.

This gesture by the Tanzania government demonstrates that Tanzania is not a stumbling block to regional integration.

This protocol will go a long way, like the deputy minister for East Africa Cooperation for Tanzania said, “the union will eliminate the costs attendant to juggling different currencies thereby reducing transaction costs and minimising inflation in the region, thus creating an economically stabilised region with a conducive environment for direct foreign investment and, therefore, uplifting the economic standard of its people.”

Of course, under the protocol, partner states are mandated to surrender their monetary and exchange rate policies to the East African Central Bank leading to a single currency regime within the region. The National Central Banks will retain the mandate of managing fiscal policy, fiscal discipline and harmonise them with other partner states’ National Central Banks.

Since November 30, 2013, it is only Tanzania that has ratified the protocol. We urge other partner states to follow suit.

In the same vein, we need to salute the Assembly of the Heads of State and Governments held in Malabo Equatorial Guinea recently under the chairmanship of President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, the current chair of the Assembly for directing that the East African Standby Force be ready to contribute towards regional peace and security.

The background to this is that under the OAU, African states did not provide appropriate tools for collective and comprehensive measures in times of violent crisis mostly due to the shared value of non-interference into the internal affairs of another state.

After the establishment of African Union in 2001, the non-interference clause of OAU was no longer valid as a series of violent conflicts in Africa erupted, most significantly, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. They anticipated that such scenario would erupt again. They, therefore, agreed to intervene in a member state in grave circumstances such as war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

We need to applaud the governments of Rwanda and Uganda for taking the lead in providing soldiers and equipment towards stabilising regional peace and security. In particular, Rwanda contributed a motorised battalion of 850 soldiers, 10 armored vehicles and 35 doctors and this no mean contributions.  Uganda pledged to provide a battalion of 736 officers of Uganda Peoples’ Defense Forces for the East African Standby Force. We hope other member states will honor their pledges.

The standby force include Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Comoros, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda but it is only Uganda and Rwanda that have pledged to contribute the force. Eastern African Standby Force is a regional agent of Africa Standby Force in the east of the continent.

The African Standby Force is an international, continental African, and multidisciplinary peace keeping force with military, police and civilian contingents that act under the direction of African Union. The African Standby Force is supposed to be deployed in time of crisis in Africa.

Its vision is to contribute to regional and continental peace and stability in the region through a fully operational and multidimensional joint and integrated Eastern Standby Force ready for deployment by 2015.

This vision is noble but there seems to be challenges; low level of awareness and commitment among member states, lack of institutional capacity and effective coordination of stakeholders etc. The delay in operationalising the forces has not helped stamp out insurgencies in Somalia, DR Congo and Southern Sudan.

The other biggest challenge is lack of consensus on whether the African Standby Force deployment should be the mandate of UN or AU, For instance, SADC and ECOWAS prefer UN security council authorisation yet AU would have interpreted the status of the Peace and Security Council of AU as a legitimate authority within the frame work of UN charter relating to regional arrangements.

All these are challenges that AU should look into seriously.

The writer is a Pan-Africanist

http://www.newvision.co.ug/news/658350-thumbs-up-tanzania.html