Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga offers to lead talks on Tanzania EAC row

Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga. (Photo:Standard)

By Geoffrey Mosoku

Nairobi, Kenya: Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga has offered to intervene and end the suspicion that is threatening to break up the East African Community (EAC).

Raila wants EAC heads of State to appoint a panel of statesmen from the region’s countries to address outstanding issues that have seenDar es Salaam government threaten to quit the regional body.

“I want to propose to regional heads of State that a panel of statesmen from EAC be put together to work out a mechanism to resolve the impasse and put the union back on track,” the ex-PM told reporters at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi yesterday.

Raila indicated that he was willing to be Kenya’s representative on the panel while appealing to Presidents Uhuru Kenyatta, Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), Jakaya Kikwete (Tanzania) and Paul Kagame (Rwanda) to urgently pick the panel.

This is the first time Raila has come out to publicly state that he can take up an appointment from the Jubilee administration after he earlier scoffed at reports that President Kenyatta’s regime wanted to name him a special envoy.

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Raila warns that Kenya will be the biggest loser in the event Tanzania pulls out of the EAC bloc because it will be unable to access markets in the DRC and Malawi.

“Kenya and the rest of EAC stand to suffer economically if Tanzania were to team up with DRC and Burundi in another union. The Tanzania-DRC-Burundi coalition would effectively block EAC, Kenya included, from accessing the markets of central and southern Africa,” he noted.

“We must make no mistake about the potential might of the three States put together. DRC remains a virgin land of vast potential. It is famed to have natural resources, including potential for electric power sufficient for the entire continent of Africa,” he explained.

Instead, Raila wants Uhuru to push for a coalition comprising Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and South Sudan, which would jointly entice DRC to come on board.

Raila’s offer comes at a time when Tanzania has been seen pulling back and even missing key regional meetings in Kenya, Uganda and even Rwanda.

Uhuru, Museveni, Kagame, and Pierre Nkurunziza (Burundi) have met on several occasions in the last few months to launch ambitious regional programmes, but the Dar government has been conspicuously absent.

The EAC leaders were also recently joined by South Sudan President Salva Kiir whose country’s application to join the regional bloc is under consideration.

Tanzania’s minister for EAC Affairs, Samuel Sitta, recently told a charged Parliament in Dodoma that Dar es Salaam would not wait for a “divorce certificate” from Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, but would “shoot before we are shot”.

The minister spoke on the same day Presidents Uhuru, Kagame, Museveni and Kiir signed a host of protocols and agreements in Kigali, including free movement of goods and persons, infrastructural development and transformation into a single Customs Union.

The pacts were signed on the sidelines of the three-day “Transform Africa Summit” to which Tanzania and Burundi, both EAC member states were not invited.

Sitta confirmed that not a single Tanzanian minister attended the Kigali event. The only senior official at the function was the permanent secretary in the ministry of EAC Affairs.