South Sudan joining the EAC has been roundly applauded. By becoming a member of the EAC, our cross-border economic and socio-cultural interconnectedness has only become tighter. And, as Dr Martin Luther King, the celebrated US civil rights activist is quoted to have once said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Whatever will happen hence in Ramchiel, South Sudan’s proposed capital city, as in the country at large – for better or for worse – we are in it together (see “Between Kigali and Ramchiel, may the best city win”, The New Times, August 01, 2012). South Sudan applied for EAC membership soon after gaining its independence from neighbouring Sudan in 2011. It gained approval earlier this week at the 17th Ordinary EAC Heads of State Summit in Arusha, Tanzania. By gaining EAC Heads of State acceptance, South Sudan fits the stipulated criteria to join the community. It has a market-driven economy, compatibilities in social and economic policies and has the potential to contribute to the strengthening of integration as required by the EAC treaty. And, due to its geographical proximity, it holds the promise to link the EAC to the north and central Africa regions. But South Sudan’s EAC membership should immediately mean two things: First, that South Sudan should be made stronger internally by prodding the new Transitional Government of National Unity to its obligations the Compromise Peace Agreement signed in August 2015. Provisions under the Agreement proposed a Transitional Government of National Unity that is set to govern for 30 months. It is also expected that a new Constitution of South Sudan will be put in place, doing away with the 2011 Transitional Constitution. Secondly, with a new total of 162 million people, the EAC market has not only just got bigger, but more interconnected. This should work for everybody in the region as the customs union allowing free flow of goods and labour continue to firm EAC integration projects even as the South Sudan economy continues to find its feet. As I observed here recently, South Sudan is now firmly a member of the Northern Corridor Integration Projects (NCIP) initiative, joining Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, the newest member of NCIP. Tanzania, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo are also looking to join. But there is an overhanging cloud. On the same day the news was being welcomed of South Sudan’s membership of the EAC, Herve Ladsous, UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, was quoted lamenting catastrophic humanitarian crisis that is worsening as warring sides are “dragging their feet” in implementing a peace deal. But ensuring the CPA works should be what the EAC membership should be about. The peace deal – the eighth, following a series of broken peace agreements – should serve to remind us of the inherent fragility of the Compromise Peace Agreement writ in the troubled history of its coming into being. Ours should therefore be cautious optimism. I will paraphrase the International Monetary Fund head, Christine Lagarde, when she delivered the 2014 Richard Dimbleby Lecture (See “What affects one country should be a concern for all”, The New Times, February 12, 2014). As Lagarde pithily cautioned, when linkages are deep and dense, they become hard to disentangle. In an interwoven labyrinth, even the tiniest tensions can be amplified, echoing and reverberating across the world—often in an instant, often with unpredictable twists and turns. The channels that bring convergence can also bring contagion. It is the colonial borders that sometimes divide us. And it will not be idle or fanciful to say that, in our humanity and mutual reciprocation, South Sudan and the communities among us and across the world have always been “blood” brothers. EAC membership is symbolic of this brotherhood, to which South Sudan should now owe its responsibility to keep the peace for the sake of all.
