East Africa Region set for a major infrastructure facelift

East African leaders have endorsed plans for a major infrastructure project that will link all the East African countries including South  Sudan, which has applied to join the East African Community. 

The project, which will consist of the Central and Northern infrastructural Corridors will cover all the member states of the East African Community and will help minimize delays in the movement of goods and people across the region. 

President Paul Kagame (left)with Kenyan governors recently.

The leaders made this important decision at a regional summit in Uganda’s capital Kampala on Thursday February 13, which brought together Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and officials from Tanzania, Burundi and South Sudan. 

Tanzania and Burundi which had since last year complained that the other three countries were edging them out of active participation appear to have softened their stand and sent representation although their presidents did not attend. 

Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda last year June launched a tripartite consultative summit focusing on improvement of infrastructure, initially leaving out Tanzania and Burundi in what was dubbed the “Coalition of the willing”, sparking off loud protests from Tazania’s President Jakaya Kikwete. 

However, leaders from the three countries in charge of the initiative have since assured the two countries that their tripartite consultations still promoted the goals of EAC integration.  

Speaking at the summit, President Kenyatta emphasized the urgency to fast-track the infrastructure project to help ease the movement of goods and facilitate trade in the region.

“The new central corridor will link waterways and power initiatives in the region,” The President told the summit.  

“I am certain that with concerted efforts of all of us, we can transform the region to an economic powerhouse in the continent and the world,” he added.

The President noted that major steps had been made towards the removal of in removal of non-tariff barriers to facilitate the free movement of people and goods since the 1st Tripartite Infrastructural conference last year. 

A special single tourist visa which will allow tourists to visit any of the three countries was launched during the summit. Kenya and Tanzania have also separately moved to ease tourist visits to either country including an arrangement where Kenyan tour firms will drop off tourists at designated towns in Tanzania.

As a mark of seriousness about easing travel by the people of the region, President Kenyatta and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame used their national identity cards as travel documents instead of their passports to enter Uganda. 

The three countries –Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda have agreed on the use of each country’s identity cards, students’ cards and voters’ cards as valid travel documents in the three countries.

Improved road network is critical to the region's growth.

Presidents and Museveni also underscored the importance of accelerating the implementation of various components of the Northern Corridor joint Infrastructural projects spearheaded by their countries.

Under the joint tripartite agreement, Uganda will lead the railway development and political federation sector while Rwanda is handle customs, single tourist visa and East African Community identity card. Kenya will lead the implementation of the oil pipeline and electricity generation.

Land-locked South Sudan, reeling from hostility from its northern neighbor, Sudan from which it seceded after 21 years of war, has applied to join the East Africa Community and has entered into agreements with Kenya to jointly fund the improvement of infrastructure from the Port of Lamu along Kenya’s Indian Ocean Coast. 

The new infrastructure initiative between the Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda is expected to be an additional improvement on South Sudan’s infrastructural needs as part of the Road Corridor will extend to Juba, the new nation’s capital.

Sudan depends to a large extent on Kenya and Uganda as its largest trading partners, importing most of its needs from or through the two countries. This explains the intense interest the two countries have hard in South Sudan’s recent outbreak of political and ethnic conflict.

Kenya, as the current chair of the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) is leading the peace process while Uganda has sent in soldiers to bolster the Juba regime against rebels led by former Vice President Riek Machar.

OPINION: WHY NGOs ARE NOT CELEBRATING DESPITE DEFEAT OF CHANGES TO LAW

By Suba Churchill

January 14, 2004 was exactly one year since the Public Benefit Organizations (PBO) Act, 2013 was passed into law. But the day’s passage was rather unremarkable. Neither the civil society nor the National Governmental Organizations Coordination Bureau charged with coordinating the sector observed the day. 

Civil Society activists demonstrate in the streets of Nairobi last year

A visit to the Bureau offices on the material day confirmed my fears that the office may not have been aware of what ought to have been an auspicious occasion. Most of the Bureau’s staff members were reportedly out of the office, burning the midnight oil to meet some performance contracting deadlines. 

To the PBOs, the unremarkable passage of the day did not come by surprise. The sector had spent the second half of 2013 battling proposed amendments to the law. The mischievous amendments, tucked among 47 other odd pieces of legislation in the infamous Statute Law Miscellaneous (Amendments) Bill of 2013 had proposed draconian changes which would have adversely affected the environment within which the non-state actors operate. 

All these were happening despite what has been celebrated as the hallmark of a liberal democratic system that the Constitution of Kenya 2010 has supposedly heralded. In such a system, pressure groups and other forms of citizen formations should be able to influence government decisions without undue government control. This assumes that there is substantial amount of independence and freedom from government control of the mass media – radio, television and newspapers.

But some of the laws that have been enacted under the watch of the jubilee government ever since the ruling coalition came into power raise more concerns that fulfillment of the text and spirit of the Constitution. 

Article 34 (2) is explicit on freedom of the media with regard to State control, providing that  (a) “the State shall not exercise control over or interfere with any person engaged in broadcasting, the production or circulation of any publication or the dissemination of information by any medium”. In paragraph (b), the supreme law is even more explicit that “the State shall not penalize any person for any opinion or view or content of any broadcast, publication or dissemination”.

But the two laws that parliament has passed on the media have provisions that offend both the text and spirit of the Constitution by providing for hefty fines against individual journalists and the media houses they work for. There is also excessive government presence in the Media Council which, by its nature ought to be a self-regulating mechanism run and managed by the media practitioners.

It is such happenings, and the fact that the government does not seem to be keen to operationalize the Public Benefit Organizations Act one year since the law was enacted that keep the civil society on the edge.

During the debate that ensued as government pushed on with the proposed amendments, it emerged that a significant section of the public does not seem to appreciate what constitutes the civil society. For starters, the civil society is the arena outside of the family, the State and the market. In other words, any citizen formation that can not be called family, corporate business or government is what is broadly called the civil society. 

Civil society is thus created by individuals for the purpose of advancing collective actions as organizations and institutions. Broadly, they can be divided into developmental or pressure groups. While developmental or interest groups are preoccupied with the welfare of its members or a larger community or society overall. 

Pressure or lobby groups on the other hand aim to influence the political decision making process – from laws to policies and programmes that impact on society. This influencing of public policy is a legitimate mandate but which the proposed amendments sought to criminalize.

The Sixth Schedule of the PBO Act is an elaborate description of areas an organization may be registered as a PBO. It lists such noble causes as provision of legal aid, promotion of agriculture, rights of children, culture, disability, energy, gender, governance and information as some of the core areas of focus for which a group can form and register a PBO. 

Yet, by seeking to limit foreign funding to fifteen per cent of annual budget for PBOs without providing alternative local sources, the government was stealthily seeking to fundamentally alter the enabling environment for the PBOs by denying them the resources they need to effectively influence policy on these issues. 

The amendments would have effectively rendered many PBOs incapable of delivering on their mandate. Civicus - the World Alliance for Citizen Participation defines enabling environment as a set of conditions, whether individually or in an organized fashion to participate and engage in the civil society arena. 

That environment is determined by the legal and regulatory framework that includes the registration process that should be quick, easy and predictable. Such laws and policies should also make it easy for civil society groups to form, operate free from interference, express their views, and seek resources without undue hindrances.

Suba Churchill is a member of CSO Reference Group and Coordinator of the National Civil Society Congress. Suba_churchill@yahoo.com