Editor 

RE: "It’s time EAC grew up and stood on its own” (SundayTimes, December 27).

Unfortunately, the Eat African Community’s beggar status is all too symptomatic of all our regional institutions and virtually all our individual countries even though the rest of the world could not prosper without our continent’s resources—unless we wean ourselves fast from pervasive dependence and begging by reorganizing our political economy and production to better serve Africa and her people, real independence will remain a cruel chimera.

Everybody else will feel entitled to continuing to order us around and telling us how to live and behave. What kind of independence is that? How can we Africans continue to subsist like this more than 50 years after most of our countries gained nominal independence?

Mwene Kalinda