Just 11 months after both Rwanda and Burundi joined the East African community, the sensitization and integration process for the East African community commenced.

At the revival of the East African Community back in 2001, the main aim was to make the integration as swift as possible so as to avoid the failures that led to its collapse during the late sixties.

The EAC integration process involves four stages. There is the customs union, common market, monetary union, and finally a political federation.

According to professor Anastase Shyaka, the chairperson of the National Consultative Committee (NCC) on fast tracking the East African political federation, it had been agreed that the customs union would be the first to be worked on.

The member states would sign a memorandum of understanding which would then be implemented, and an assessment made on whether it worked effectively as per set plans.

He said that both the common market and monetary union would follow the same procedures and from there discussions and debates would ensue on whether to have a political federation.

"This was the previous philosophy of the East African integration process," professor Shyaka said.

However the procedure took a long time as the heads of three East African countries had predicted, and so the idea of fast tracking came up to speed up the process of integration.

The result is for instance, that Rwanda has already signed the customs union agreement, but it will not be put into force until next year. The process of implementing the customs union agreement is in the process, while negotiations and mechanisms of the common market are underway.

In addition, governors of the central banks are discussing the monetary union while the possibility of a political federation is being discussed by consulting citizens.

"We preferred not to wait until the first stages were implemented and so we adopted a fast track mechanism through what is known as a 'compression' process," prof. Shyaka said, adding that all the activities were coordinated by the national consultative committee.

Public awareness

In order to create awareness about the process, NCC has embarked on a strategy with two components: communication and public awareness. The public awareness strategy is aimed at putting NCC staff in contact with the citizens to inform and sensitize them so that they can make well and informed decisions.

The targets in this strategy are secondary schools and higher institutions of learning, companies, institutions, civil society organizations. "This is our departure point as far as providing awareness to the citizens on fast-tracking the political federation," Anastase Shyaka said.

The second strategy is communication, where NCC hopes to pass the message especially in the print and electronic media. It further intends to introduce a "Kubaza bitera kumenya" program on the electronic media where it hopes people will actively participate and gain a lot of information from it.

Professor Shyaka pointed out that the aim of the cross-cutting strategies is to generate debate and discussions, raise critical challenges so that they can get addressed.

"We do not want the citizens to speak out. The leaders who draft the program need to know what citizens, as the end users, think and expect from the East African political federation," Anastase Shyaka said.

Concerning the challenges faced by the NCC, he pointed out that the overriding challenge is lack of awareness. "Surely the awareness is limited," he said. Another challenge he envisaged was pertinent and challenging questions often asked by people, especially the fear of loss of their culture and sovereignty. Yet he assured that it has been clearly articulated what the federation means.

Shyaka remarked that Rwandans are open-minded regarding their pertinent questions about favorably competing with other people in the East African community.

He said that others have pointed at key issues such as infrastructure and languages. Yet some find it an opportunity to sell some of the country's unique values such as the Gacaca court system and grassroots health insurance (mutuelle de santé).

Lingua franca

However, the five EAC countries have different cultures and so there will be a need to harmonize them peacefully. In this respect, Anastase Shyaka thinks that promotion of languages is important.

He said that Kiswahili language was chosen as a unifying lingua franca according to article 119 of the EAC treaty. He pointed out that strategically the language that rivals Kiswahili is Kinyarwanda, since it is a cross-border language.

He said that the reason for emphasizing on language as a component of culture is simply that languages are soft-power instruments of states.

"We will have to teach English and Kinyarwanda because we cannot lose our soft power instruments which are our local languages," he said adding that there is no country that could lose their local language at the expense of integration.

On what Rwandans stand to gain from the east Africa federation, Anastase Shyaka said that the geographical position has been somewhat disadvantageous to Rwanda in terms of import-export ratios. He expressed optimism however about Rwanda taking the advantage of the wider market created by the EAC.

"In my opinion there are thousands of opportunities in EAC, but the challenge is whether Rwandans are ready to exploit those abundant opportunities. The business community as well as Rwandans must start to sharpen their competitiveness."