Federation on the Brink
By KEITH KYLE
IF the East African Common Market vanishes in the next few weeks, we shall have to write off the chances of East African political federa- tion for years to come. The penalty seems dis- proportionate to any possible short-term gain. Could the 251 million Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanganyikans become one nation, it would count for something in Africa and in the world, alongside the 551 million Nigerians, the 191 mil- lion Ethiopians and the perhaps 16 million Congolese. Yet the crisis is not artificial. This Common Market, conceived in colonial times and for most of its lifetime depending for its ultimate sanctions on the common source of executive authority over the three territories in Whitehall, violates almost every known con- temporary principle of how a Common Market should be run. There is no binding treaty and, strictly speaking, there are no common institu- tions whatever. Even if you stretch a point and count the East African Common Services Organisation, this is completely lacking in the prestige and the formal and informal opportuni- ties of exercising initiative possessed from the outset by the Commission of the European Economic Community.
East Africa is an area of almost complete internal free trade, with a common currency and virtually a common external tariff, within which each of three national planning organisations works in total isolation from the others at the rapidest possible development of its own terri- torial economy. Tanganyika, which sparked off the crisis, has a Ministry of Development Plan- ning run by French planning experts, from which a flow of recondite statements in heavily gallicised English has been issuing for the last eighteen months. Now, as the relentless process moves into higher gear, approaching the starting line of the first five-year period, Planification' in Tanganyika has ground up against the in- tellectual confusions and institutional void of the East African Common Market. Hence the blunt warning to his fellow heads of government by President Nyerere, himself the originator of the idea that under African rule the Common Market should be transformed rapidly into political federation, that by May 12 Tanganyika must have freedom of action over tariffs and import quotas in intra-East African trade and over her own currency unless by then the same objects can be achieved by an interim device more consistent with future political union.
This is not inconsistency on Nyerere's part, nor is the situation from which it arises one that has been sprung on Tanganyika's partners. The recent report by Dr. Bertram Massell, an American economist, is only the latest to spell out clearly and conclusively that, using Massell's words, during the life of the Common Market `Kenya has gained relatively to Uganda and Tanganyika'; that 'the gains to Uganda and Tanganyika from continued association with Kenya are likely to be marginal at best'; that the problem of keeping the Common Market going resolves itself into a question of 'how much of a bribe must Kenya give to Uganda and Tanganyika to persuade them to continue the Common Market arrangements?'
The critical question is the location of industry within East Africa. Whether or not, in a fair and open field at the outset, Nairobi would have had all the natural advantages, several decades as the centre of European commercial activity in the region have given it an over-
whelming lead. Seventy per cent of East Africa's manufacturing activity is in Kenya and the bulk of that in Nairobi. Perfectly genuine fear exists that in the absence of a strong East African planning organisation, the existing pattern of development will be solidified.
The institutional vacuum of the Common Market has not helped. EACSO has had some able civil servants but their proper function has been to run some services, like the railways and the post office, which are self-supporting and others, mainly in the field of research, for which funds are voted by the Central Legislative Assembly. A minimal economic planning func- tion was very cautiously entrusted to the Organ- isation shortly before the member territories became independent, but, for reasons which a comparison with Brussels would make perfectly apparent, this has been an almost total failure. The Common Market as such rests on no more than a convention that Finance Ministers con- sult each other before their budgets, which are announced on the same day, that with some minor latitude they do not get their indirect taxes out of line, and that there is free trade be- tween the three territories. A third, quite separ- ate pillar of the status quo is the Common Currency, which is tightly grappled to sterling in a manner which allows no deficit financing in any of the three developing countries.
Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya agreed last year to give absolute priority to political federa- tion, solving these other problems of transition subsequently and in its context. But Uganda was awkwardly placed, because of her own in- ternal problems, to stick to this accelerated timing and unwilling, as Britain has always been in her relations with Western Europe, to sign first and negotiate afterwards. President Nyerere's sense of urgency aligned him with Kenya in trying to force the pace of federation. He perhaps assumed that once all three were inside, then was the occasion for Tanganyika to line up with Uganda to force concessions from Kenya. But Milton Obote's problems in Kampala were also real and a certain lack of mutual sympathy between Obote and Nyerere may have impeded a tactical understanding.
The present situation therefore is that momen- tum has been lost to the drive for federation but that the transitional institutions are unfit for a prolonged transition. The three possibilities are a fresh transitional system, a fresh drive towards federation or the burial of both federa- tion and transition. East Africa's well-wishers can only hope that the present search by an Emergency Committee of Ministers for the first will lead on to the second; this may have been the object which Nyerere had most in mind when he brought his colleagues to the edge of the void.
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