EDITORIAL: Monetary Union: Let’s get it off the ground

The East African Community (EAC) heads of State Summit slated for Kampala starts this Saturday. Given the mistrust among member countries, we can only hope that the leaders will take into account the interests of East Africa’s 140 million people.

The leaders of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi are expected to sign the Monetary Union Protocol which will set the EAC on the path to the third stage of its integration agenda after the Customs Union and Common Market stages.   Addressing the East African Legislative Assembly in Nairobi on Tuesday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said that, politically, the Monetary Union is a statement of the region’s partner states’ commitment to a shared destiny as East Africans and not just a group of neighbouring states.

It is time EAC states walked the talk on commitments. We need to reflect on how the region has implemented the first two integration stages, the Customs Union and Common Market. They should be widely discussed before presidents Jakaya Kikwete, Uhuru Kenyatta, Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame and Pierre Nkurunziza put pen to paper on the Monetary Union protocol. Their voices are paramount with regard to where they want the region to be in the next decade. The five leaders have a duty to give orders to technocrats on the direction the region should take.  Despite a 50 per cent growth in intra-regional trade in the five years of implementing the Customs Union (from 2005 to 2010), little has been done to free the EAC from Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs) to trade.

Businesses in the region continue to incur huge costs that arise from such NTBs as weighbridges, roadblocks, poor infrastructure, unnecessary delays at border posts and lack of harmonised import and export standards, procedures and documentation. We can do better if we have the political will.