SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2014

Anne Kansiime, Nameless are shining faces of a new, rapidly changing East Africa

Ugandan Anne Kansiime. FILE PHOTO

Ugandan Anne Kansiime. FILE PHOTO |  NATION MEDIA GROUP

In Summary

  • Important gesture: People are moving ahead of politicians and beginning to see the EAC bloc as one entity.
  • Nameless and Kansiime should be brand ambassadors of the East African Community of the future.
By MURITHI MUTIGA
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The first time I noticed the growing Kenyan influence in Kampala was when new Ugandan friends began to ask: What tribe are you?

The Kenyan students and businessmen who have flowed into Uganda by the tens of thousands in recent years have taken with them some bad habits, such as defining themselves in mainly ethnic terms.

But those students taking advantage of cheaper college fees and the traders expanding their frontiers are helping to deepen one of the most far-reaching integration projects anywhere outside the European Union.

With a bit of nurturing and if the presidents of Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda keep the tap of political will flowing, the East African Community could well become a game changer in helping to improve living standards in the region and attracting meaningful investment to a bloc which, together with the still somewhat reluctant Tanzania and Burundi, boasts a market of 145 million people.

The headline macro-economic figures are impressive but they don't tell the whole story.

Yes, the EAC has been the fastest-growing economic bloc in Africa, with an average growth rate of 5.8 pc over the last decade.

Total foreign direct investment flows trebled from $1.3 billion in 2005 to $3.8 billion in 2012.

But what's more important is that the people are moving ahead of the politicians and beginning to see the EAC bloc as one entity with infinite possibilities.

The entertainment scene offers a good taste of this. The most popular artiste in Kenya, at least going by social media postings, is the Ugandan Anne Kansiime, who is rivalled only by Dan Ndambuki as the pre-eminent player in the comedy industry.

Her tales about busybody landlords, about the protocols of how a lady should sit on a boda boda, status anxiety among urban parents about the performance of their children in school, all these themes are as instantly recognisable to a family watching in Kasese as they are to another in Kisii.

DEEPENING TIES

Now, the Kenyan artiste Nameless has taken this cultural love-in one step further and released a music video shot in Luganda.

The song, "Kiwojjolo" (Butterfly), a love song to a Ugandan girl, is, to my untrained eye, very well done but it communicates a deeper story about deepening ties across borders and is a welcome softening of the image of Kenyans as arrogant and culturally tone deaf characters.

There is nothing like learning another group's language to send a message of goodwill.

The Ugandan artiste Iryn Namubiru followed a similar path with her Kinyarwanda hit, Niwe.

All this is a metaphor for the promises that integration holds.

It is a scandal that Africa allows lines drawn on a map in Berlin in 1884-85 to determine how it does business more than a century hence.

Africa has the highest number of landlocked countries in the world and most borders contain straight lines because they were simply drawn on a map in a distant land.

Minds remain locked too. Where 63 per cent of all trade in Western Europe is between Western European nations and 40 per cent of all North American trade is among North American countries, in Africa only 12 per cent of trade is with fellow Africans.

This has to change — and is changing in the EAC, with the introduction of visa free travel and growing trade links.

Nameless and Kansiime should be brand ambassadors of the East African Community of the future.

***

People may complain about the relatively small size and high cost of Kenyan counties but the problem is that if you have very large jimbos, you will inevitably face wars of secession.

At least in the United Kingdom they are carrying out their business peacefully with Scottish voters threatening to divorce England in a referendum on Thursday.

It will be a close contest. But the degree of panic it has caused in London makes one appreciate the primarily economic model of devolution Kenya adopted in 2010.

Merging counties into larger, ostensibly more viable entities, should only come when the country enters the age of ideological not ethnically driven politics.

mutiganews@gmail.com