allAfrica.com: Africa: Gazing At East Africa Through a Crystal Ball (Page 1 of 2)

The year is 2013 and the region has just entered a period called the 'Great Grab' of the EAC that will stretch to 2025.The ceremony is being broadcast live through an internet-based video link enabled after the 2010 completion of high speed fibre optic cable connecting Zanzibar, Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Kigali and Bujumbura.

By 2030 the population in the whole federation would have grown to over 200 million. Almost 100 million could be living in the three major metropolis of KamJinja (Kampala and Jinja), NaiThika (Nairobi and Thika) and Dar-es-moyo (Dar es Salaam and Bagamoyo).

Crude oil

Then in 2015, East Africans could be celebrating the first barrel of crude oil flows from Western Uganda to new refineries on the coast through the new Fort Portal, Malaba, Eldoret, Mombasa, Tanga pipeline. Global prices could hit US$250.

Then the bubble bursts when thousands are killed protesting at their evictions from their ancestral lands to make room for the oil pipeline. After all this happens EAC finally realises it is not getting as much of the US$250 per barrel oil price as was imagined. It would appear that the 87 per cent of the payment for the refined oil remains in the European banks which had lent the money to build the pipeline.

What if in 2018 the gas pipeline from Lake Kivu to Kigali through the KamJinja, Naithika and the east coast cities is targeted in a series of bomb attacks by an underground group protesting at its construction.

And then gas supplies for power generation are interrupted and large sections of the federation's huge cities are plunged into darkness for several days. Wouldn't this bring about looting and riots? Wouldn't the EAC elders, investors' financiers and pimping politicians get incensed?

So imagine a future where East Africans will still not feel better after all this. But why wouldn't they feel better? Why would they find shops full of food and clothes and furniture and other goods with non coming from their farms and businesses?

Why would they grumble about living in the dirty, poor distant edges of the town?

These are just some of the imaginative scenarios of a future East Africa contained in two books launched in Kigali, Rwanda, recently. The launch was presided over by Rwandan Premier Bernard Makuza and the EAC Secretary-General Juma Mwapachu. The launch forum also focused on Rwanda's future in the EAC.

Titled, 'What do we Want? What might we Become? - Imagining the future of East Africa' and 'East African Scenarios Research Compendium', the scenario stories according to Aidan Eyakuze, the Program Director of the project, explore East Africa's alternative futures.

According to Mr Eyakuze the scenarios are developed within the context of East African regional integration. The major objective is to provoke debate on the long-term future of the East African region against the backdrop of dynamic global economic, geostrategic and climatic contexts. "They are used by leadership executive groups, communities and individuals to imagine, rehearse and refine important strategic decisions. The unique feature of regardless of scenarios stories is that they represent futures that might have to be faced regardless of preferences," says Mr Eyakuze.

"The stories tend not to be about unattainable utopias nor are they irredeemably apocalyptic. They are founded on solid wide-ranging research and seek to combine an understanding of current patterns and trends with informed anticipation of likely, driving forces and other relevant variable to explore possible future outcomes," he adds.

According to Mr Mwapachu, the EAC Secretary-General, East Africa is not immune to the side effects of larger conflicts that are taking place elsewhere in the world.

For that matter East Africa is constantly on the move as it seeks the advantage of the emerging opportunities to improve the standards of living meaning that it faces a massive demographic challenge.

So what do East Africans want? What do they want to be? The book launched gives three possible scenarios. Here is one of the great imaginations. Early this year, the post election violence in Kenya created 300,000 new internal refugees in just three weeks.

Displaced people

The fighting in northern Uganda which lasted for over 20 years generated almost 1.6 million internally displaced people by the year 2006. This, according to research done by the Society for Internationals Development (SDI) is equivalent to 5 per cent of Uganda's population.

East Africa's so many conflicts within her borders are still by far causing more internally displaced people disrupting livelihoods and costing lives. The East African region according to SID's research is surrounded by threats and realities of violent conflicts which are posing a humanitarian burden to the region.

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