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[Pakira]

For some Africans, the answer to economic power lies in unity

NAIROBI, Kenya — For a Ugandan farmer trying to get a shipping container of coffee to Europe, the first leg of the journey is always the most frustrating. Because Uganda is landlocked, the shipment must go by rutted road to the Kenyan port of Mombasa, a 750-mile journey that rarely takes less than a month, $3,000 in shipping costs, one border crossing and sometimes protracted negotiations with Kenyan port authorities.

Getting the container from Mombasa to Europe, by comparison, takes $800 and a week or so at sea.

"Imagine every U.S. state with border controls and visas," said Susan Muhwezi, a presidential assistant on trade in Uganda. "That's what it's like doing business in Africa. How can we compete?"

Such economic frustrations are just one reason the continent is in the midst of an unprecedented push to look past its colonial-era borders and integrate.

Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in East Africa are pushing for a common currency and eventually a common president. West Africa has its own regional court of justice and an advisory parliament. Eventually, the continentwide African Union hopes to unite most or all of Africa's 53 countries to form a new and powerful world player: the United States of Africa.

More than a century after the partition of Africa by European colonial powers, "we're trying to put together the jigsaw puzzle to create Africa again," said Chungu Mwaila, an investment and development director at COMESA, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. Uniting the continent, he said, "is our vision."

In trying to solve the continent's persistent poverty and other glaring problems, its leaders are sorting through deeply rooted cultural traditions, colonial-era legacies and the new demands of a globalized world.

For many of the continent's nations, that means finding ways to overcome differences of culture, language and outlook and to unite in hope of winning a bigger share of world trade and a stronger international voice.

"If you look at our potential in human and natural resources, Africa can compete," said Mwaila, who is from Zambia, another of Africa's many poor, landlocked countries. "But our economies are too small and fragmented. Economically and politically, we cannot each survive on our own. We must integrate, so we can speak with one African voice when we go to negotiate."

Divided along the lines drawn by European colonizers, Africa is better known for its border disputes than for integration. About 70,000 people died in the first border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the two nations are threatening to fight again. Nigeria and Cameroon are at odds over the Bakassi peninsula, an oil-rich area awarded to Cameroon in 2002 by the International Court of Justice. Southern Sudan will get an opportunity to vote on secession under a recently signed peace deal with the Arab-dominated north.

But behind the conflicts and divisions, Africa is quietly following an international trend toward regional integration that has spawned free-trade zones and increasingly free movement of people and goods.

In East Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya in January relaunched their common market, one step in an effort to eventually turn the three members from individual countries into states of a single nation — one more economically powerful and capable of attracting investment.

Under the region's unification programs, member countries, which have created a unified advisory legislature, will begin coordinating their strategies for road building, railways, aviation, postal service, energy, agriculture and tourism. By 2009, they hope to have a common currency, and to persuade Tanzania to swap its national language of Swahili for English, the lingua franca of Uganda and Kenya.

Uganda and Tanzania also are moving to issue national identity cards, in line with Kenya's, that will allow citizens of the three countries to cross national borders without a passport. Visas have been eliminated.

Unification is hardly an unrealistic dream in East Africa, home to 80 million people. The three nations once were united under British colonial rule, though they split at independence. From 1967 to 1977, the countries tried to rebuild the East African Community, an effort that eventually collapsed as dictator Idi Amin ruined Uganda, Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere hung onto dreams of a socialist state and Kenya went down a capitalist path.

Today the obstacles to reunification are different but plentiful.

Tanzania, a poor nation with deep socialist roots, worries that building greater ties with Kenya and Uganda might lead to greater inequalities.

Uganda, struggling to defeat an armed resistance in the north, worries that unification may lead to other types of conflict and that more economically advanced Kenya will overpower its weaker industries.

Kenya, though excited at the prospect of expanding markets, worries that it may lose jobs to Uganda and Tanzania, where the cost of production is lower.

"Our priorities are not entirely the same," said Lineth Oyugi, an economist at the Institute of Policy Analysis and Research in Nairobi. "But the world is moving into blocs, and we have to do the same to survive. Integration is not a choice. We need it to move forward."

Uniting economically is no easy matter. Many African countries continue to levy high protective tariffs against neighbors seen as economic competitors and prefer to strike trade deals with Europe, the United States and Asia. In recent years, members of COMESA, the economic common market of 19 eastern and southern African states, have produced annual exports of $34 billion and imports of $46 billion, according to COMESA figures. But only about 15 percent of that trade is among member states, and such trade is growing slowly, despite falling tariffs.

Mercosur, the common market of southern South America, by comparison, saw its intragroup trade grow by 34 percent from 2003 to 2004 alone, while trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement grew 115 percent from 1993 to 2003.

African countries often have been hesitant to take steps that would make their products more competitive and ease trade with neighbors. In particular, most have balked at moving to specialize in segments of industry where they have the most advantages and giving up other segments to their neighbors.

Uganda, for instance, is best suited to growing cotton, while Kenya is better placed to make cloth and garments. But "each country wants to develop alone" and carry out each part of the textile-manufacturing process itself, said Muhwezi of Uganda.

What will be crucial for bringing political change, analysts say, will be convincing Africans to begin thinking of themselves first as Africans, rather than in tribal or national terms.

"Africa is divided, and the biggest threat we face is ourselves," Muhwezi said. "Integration, in every sense, is what Africa needs."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002320918_africaecon20.html
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avan yé sotil koté y fika
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