The Summit of East African Community (EAC) Heads of State convenes tomorrow in Arusha, Tanzania.

They will do the routine stuff: give stamp of authority to what the council of ministers will have decided, review the state of integration and the general health of the region, and come up with the usual statements expressing general satisfaction with the way things are going and urging faster implementation of agreed plans.

That is what they do in normal circumstances. But the situation in the region is not normal. In fact if they are honest, they will discover that the region is not healthy at all.

A partner state is sick and threatens to infect the rest if it is not treated immediately.

Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza, will probably be absent from the summit judging from his recent behaviour. He seems to be afraid of the light and people. So he prefers to be holed up where he thinks he will see neither.

The last time he appeared in public was when he met UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the African presidents who called on him to plead for an end to the carnage in his country.

He gave some vague promises, but most people have learnt not to put much store on such promises. The only certainty from the meetings was his wide grin which was as ambiguous as his pledges.

It could mean any number of things - a sense of relief from being brought out of the naughty corner, for instance, or an ominous baring of the fangs.

That is precisely the problem. The leadership in Burundi is so afraid of its own people that it would rather see them massacred. And so they have hired the FDLR tainted with the blood of Rwandans killed in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and home-grown militias it has inspired to do just that.

Tomorrow’s EAC summit will, of course conduct the usual business, but on Burundi it cannot be business as usual. East African leaders cannot look on as Burundians continue to die.

They have a duty to tell Nkurunziza, whether he is there in person or not, that enough is enough and the killings must stop. They must follow that up with definite measures to compel him to act as desired.

They cannot pretend that the situation in Burundi does not affect them. It does. Refugees continue to pour into neighbouring countries, stretching their limited resources and in the case of Rwanda, becoming a pretext for friction between the two countries.

The potential for wider regional instability and insecurity increases with the inability to resolve the crisis, and slows down the process of integration.

The leaders of East Africa must realise that the success of the various regional projects and the wider integration process depends on the whole region being stable.

They must also realise that lives of Burundians matter, if not for the fact that they are human, at least for their economic value. Other East Africans cannot do business with dead people, or with an impoverished and depopulated Burundi.

By now the leaders of this region must have got to the same conclusion ordinary East Africans have reached: that salvation for Burundi will not come from faraway places. It will come from within Burundi and from its neighbours.

Mission after another, from the United Nations, the African Union and various other places, have come and left the situation the same. Their failure to end the crisis seems to have encouraged the government to continue its programme of killing. It has now developed a dangerous plan of extermination.

They have learnt that the world gets horrified by mass killings done in a short period of time, as happened in Rwanda in 1994. They have now devised a longer term killing strategy in which smaller numbers are killed over a long time.

That, they have calculated, will not raise as much concern.

That is another reason they must be stopped. If it requires knocking out some teeth to kill the self-satisfied grin, so be it. If it means knocking some heads together, not so gently, let it be done.

There are opportunities for action now.

President Yoweri Museveni, the mediator, now has the time to devote attention to Burundi. The presidential election in his country is safely out of the way and he is assured of another five years in State House. Of course he still has the small matter of keeping Kizza Besigye in check.

Tanzania has been close to Burundi and, like Rwanda, is home to thousands of Burundian refugees. It is interested in stability there. President John Pombe Magufuli has proved he is a no nonsense man on the domestic scene. The hope is that he can extend that to regional diplomacy.

East African leaders cannot simply watch as Burundi slides into more chaos that is bound to affect the whole region. They have a duty to the people of Burundi and to the region.

jorwagatare@yahoo.co.uk