Business
East Africa’s new great oil game
Arguing for the interdependence of the region, he continued, “With the conflicts in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, the food prices in Uganda have collapsed to the detriment of the farmers that were getting used to the higher prices because of the bigger demand in the region.”
However, Uganda’s neighbors worry about the risks of the South Sudan conflict spreading and undermining regional integration. “If violence continues and escalates, we don’t want proxy militias acting on behalf of individual countries. That’s our main fear at the moment,” says a Kenyan diplomat in Nairobi who requested anonymity. He refers to the risk that Khartoum’s Islamist regime might exploit the South Sudan crisis for its own ends. It was that risk that partly motivated Kampala’s intervention.
The individual power plays within the region are a threat to the East African integration project. Last year, Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete urged dialogue between Kagame and the rebels in the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, precipitating a cold war within the EAC.
Frustrated by Tanzania’s hesitancy to fast-track regional integration, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya formed a ‘coalition of the willing’ that briefly threatened to break up the EAC. Uganda’s intervention in South Sudan and Ethiopia’s increasing impatience with Museveni’s intransigence on troop withdrawal are exposing similar fault lines.
Of proxies and brokers
“A split within IGAD is problematic. Kenya is desperately holding on to an honest broker position. We have refused to be a proxy for foreign powers in this conflict. It’s a major shift in our regional diplomatic orientation,” says the Kenyan diplomat, who is eager to shake off his country’s role as a Western client state.
Museveni has been strengthened by Uganda’s intervention and its close relations with the factions of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Army according to an analyst in Kampala, who adds: “Meles [Zenawi] is gone; Gaddafi and Mubarak are gone; Obasanjo and Mbeki are gone. When Museveni now looks across the political landscape he only sees one potentate… himself.”
Other diplomats argue that Uganda’s speedy intervention prevented much worse bloodletting in South Sudan: “If Museveni had not gone in when he did, it would be Salva in the bush right now. That was the difference.” Is the region, after a decade of peace and relative stability, staring at a possible return to a chaotic past? It is not an easy question to answer, says Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations in Nairobi and the government’s point man in the South Sudan crisis.
