April 25, 2009
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Citizens of East Africa
One of the outcomes of the strategic encounters in the first phase of the SID East Africa Scenarios programme was the establishment of a network of high-level East African citizens to reflect on various aspects of the regionalization process and to deliberate on how the regionalization process could be ramped up with a view to ensuring that it did not only meet its goals, but that it also captured the hopes and the aspirations of the majority of East Africans in the process. This network, ‘The Citizens of East Africa’ met twice in the last quarter of 2008 and brought together senior leaders from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi drawn from academia, politics, civil society, the private and public sectors. The participants who spanned various generations, covered a wide range of experiences in their discussions that ranged from reflections on the performance and fate of the first East African Community to the contemporary challenges that the fledgling regional institutions must surmount.
Whereas there the East African Community (EAC) is a reality, its ability to reach to all its citizens and to communicate to them as the EAC is constrained severely by its lack of resources as well as the relative indifference with which the community and its institutions are considered within the individual member states. In this respect, the governments of the member states have perhaps not done as much as they should have in creating a deeper appreciation of the community and why they, have signed up to join it. The relative disconnect between national political process and those at the regional level further exacerbates this as it is difficult for an individual citizen to see and understand how the regional process contributes to improving his/her wellbeing at the local level. Yet the potential for the EAC to play a transformative role in the lives of individual citizens exists and awaits to be tapped. For this to happen, there is a need for there to be greater awareness on what the Community stands for, where it is going and for this to find confluence with the challenges and opportunities that might arise locally, far from the regional centres of power and influence. This is the void that the Citizens of East Africa Initiative seeks to bridge.
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