Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki outlines progress towards an East Africa Common Market from which the region can develop and flourish.Fifty years ago I set off from my hilly countryside home of Othaya, boarded a train in Nairobi, and headed to Kampala to establish my new scholarly home at Makerere University. Travelling through the central Kenya countryside by bus, hearing the train’s engine roar through the vast Rift Valley, then briefly anchoring on the shores of Lake Victoria, before finally arriving in Kampala, the sounds of East Africa began reverberating through my mind.
I must say that this exposure to East Africa during my early days converted me into an East African. The socialisation I got through interaction with people from Uganda and Tanzania inculcated in me the true spirit of East Africa. It was a spirit that was put to the test in my latter days, when I served in government in the 1960s and 1970s. As Kenya’s finance minister, I remained fully committed to regional integration, in the knowledge that we were better off enjoying the economies of large scale production. East Africa’s railways and harbours, airlines and a host of other shared services, contributed to the economic strengthening of the region. By then we were ahead in our thinking and achieved, nearly 20 years ago, what many regional blocs are only now achieving.
