This past week, the annual Chipkizi Cup, a youth football tournament, went down in Arusha, Tanzania. A permanent feature of the competition is that the vast majority of participants are Kenyan, but the organisers have never found it fit to diversify the face of officiating to include referees from outside Tanzania.
As a consequence, the general feeling of many participants is that winners of this tournament are almost invariably drawn from the very small number of Tanzanian participants, as the thousands of Kenyans troop back to Namanga border, empty handed.
This year’s edition of Chipkizi Cup may indeed be summarised as a sham, given the poor officiating, muddled fixtures and rampant age cheating among participating teams.
Speaking of Namanga border, I have always wondered, as a citizen of Kenya carrying a passport labelled “East African Community”, why I have to queue for hours at the border to get an exit stamp out of Kenya and an entry one into Tanzanian, a ridiculous negation of the principle of free movement within the economic bloc.
To make it worse, the Tanzanian immigration officer goes ahead to indicate next to the entry stamp that I have a maximum of thirty days of stay in Kenya’s southern neighbour.
Beyond the smaller immigration issues, it appears that the community is grappling with much bigger internal issues and suspicions. To begin with, most political commentators have long noted that our EAC neighbours, especially the important ones like Uganda and Tanzania, have been keeping away from our national day fetes.
Uganda is our biggest trading partner. Data shows that the value of Kenyan exports to Uganda in 2022 hit nearly $700 million. Besides, the western neighbour is almost a sociocultural twin, if you consider the shared heritages and ethnic roots of several communities domiciled in both countries.
As if to crown it all, the Kenya Kwanza regime came to power carrying the nearly acknowledged title of a Museveni appendage, with President William Ruto almost falling over himself to declare the Ugandan leader president of the yet-to-be-created East African Federation.
It has therefore been surprising to see the long-serving Ugandan leader shun his supposed buddy in Kenya during national holidays. Kenya’s position, from a recent statement, is that the regional leaders haven’t been invited. Which says a lot.
Why would leaders of countries with little strategic value to Kenya, like the Comoros (with utmost respect), qualify to be chief guests at a celebration of one of Kenya’s most important days, if leaders of EAC partner states are not invited?
One doesn’t need to look too far for answers, in the case of Uganda. There have been reports of quiet trade wars between the two nations since Ruto came to power. But the more public disagreement over Kenya’s much-maligned government-to-government oil deal with gulf nations stands out as the straw that broke the camel’s back.
We already know that Kenya’s foreign policy is a tattered cloth of many colours, with little creativity and even less thought put into it. But Kenya’s business environment, where capitalistic sharks eat everything in their way, does not resonate well with the trade needs of its neighbours. The oil deal falls within this category.
Even as the controversy between Kenya and regional nations raged over the controversial G2G deal, which threatened the sustainability of our Northern Corridor and Kenya Pipeline’s operations, a more delicate geopolitical matter was happening in the DRC.
The Congolese government decided to end the tour of the East African Community Regional Force in eastern DRC, seeking instead the support of SADC forces. Congo’s gripe with its EAC partners is that the EACRF wasn’t tackling the M23 rebel menace properly.
Obviously, President Tshisekedi’s idea of a regional force in his country was one engaging in combat to expel the rebels, not merely pacifying reclaimed towns and waiting for M23 to willingly hand back territory.
Given Congo’s vast natural resources and a history of being exploited by nearly every organisation and military group that lands there, being expelled from the land, especially following the prestige Kenya had started to gain under President Uhuru Kenyatta as one of the honest arbiters there, must feel like a slap in the face.
Which may partly explain the strange emergence of a Congolese rebel group last week in Nairobi, dubbed the Congo River Alliance, whose declared aim is to bring down Tshisekedi.
Kenyan intelligence must have had prior knowledge of this group and must surely know by now that babysitting the declared subversion of a friendly EAC partner does not fall within “freedom of press” in strict political terms.
Even worse, subversion is a two-way traffic. Once Nairobi openly becomes a melting pot of Congolese rebel groups, the DRC will have no qualms in actively supporting the subversion of the Kenyan state. It becomes a dangerous cycle.
We hadn’t caught our collective breaths when CS Kipchumba Murkomen, appearing on a TV show on Monday night, referred to another friendly EAC nation, Rwanda, as an “autocratic nation”.
The outrage was instant.
For a brief moment there, when the DRC and Kenya seemed to be at loggerheads over the expulsion of EACRF forces and the launch of a Congolese rebel group in Nairobi, you would have assumed that this made Kenya a close ally of Rwanda, if you understand the existing dynamics between Rwanda and Congo. But you can always trust that the Kenya Kwanza government wouldn’t tell left from right, even if it hit it in the face.
Many years ago, the original EAC, an otherwise brilliant idea that would have led to valuable regional integration, collapsed because of ideological and political differences between its partner states. If the current community faces pitfalls ahead, the foregoing suggests fingers can be pointed towards Nairobi.
This time, there is no ideology and philosophy to point to as a cause of the schisms. If you ask me, the problems point to simple incompetence and lack of skill on the part of the Kenyan regime.
Someone once pointed out that “no comment” is a valid comment when confronted with difficult questions. Either the Kenya Kwanza senior government officials need a refresher course on statecraft, or their boss needs to remind them that when out doing interviews, it is okay to leave some questions unanswered until they consult ministry technocrats (if they even do that in the first place).
Nairobi Senator and ODM secretary general, Edwin Sifuna, has captured the situation perfectly in the past by reminding the regime that the capacity to embarrass the government, a quality worn by senior regime officials like a badge of honour, was well known before they were appointed to high office. Therefore, the state cannot act surprised that loose tongues and lack of skill in managing state affairs, prevalent among its senior cadres, are a surprising thing.
What should instead be of much worry is that while incompetence and naivety rules Nairobi, the words and actions breed suspicions and mistrust within the EAC, which effectively slow down the realisation of the peace and tranquillity necessary to achieving the economic, political and cultural objectives of the bloc.
There is too much at stake in terms of trade and development with our neighbours, for the destiny of this country to be left to the mercy of loose-talking political appointees!
The writer is a political commentator