Editor,

RE: "What a troubled supermarket teaches us about integration” (The New Times, October 18).

In every boardroom with exposure to East Africa, you can be sure senior analysts will be pondering their companies’ political risk from the elections in Tanzania and the likely consequences of the growing likelihood of Burundi reverting to full-blown civil war from today’s bloody anarchy.

But for the people of this region, the possible political fallout from any botched management of Tanzania’s impending elections is very easy to understand.

Ugandan, Rwandan, Burundian, and Congolese traders as well as their shippers and forwarders are still counting their losses from Kenya’s 2007 post-election mayhem. A real case of all our houses catching fire when our neighbours to the east play with matches in their own.

Mwene Kalinda