East Africa’s standard gauge politics

A new standard gauge railway line is currently under construction in East Africa.
Financed and built by the Chinese, it is supposed to link Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan and ease and lower the cost of transporting bulk goods.
There is more that binds the eastern African countries than just shared borders and this standard gauge railway. They are also bound by a standard kind of politics.
Despite this new transport investment, the internal politics of the countries through which that railway is supposed to go still resemble the way politics was in the late 1890s when the original Uganda Railway was constructed by the British.
It is still very much based around tribe and the Big Man.
Kenya and Rwanda are the focus of the media during this month of August because of general elections held in the two countries.
Since independence in 1963, Kenya has been all about tribe and ethnicity in its politics. It has never tried to hide this fact.
It might have the highest skyscrapers and largest shopping malls and residential areas in East Africa but the politics remains parochial.
To estimate who will win a Kenyan general election, one only need to study the most recent Kenyan population census.
That is because Kenya votes along blocs of tribal alliances. Since the late 1960s the central Kikuyu region has tended to ally with the Rift Valley Kalenjin. It is the same alliance in the 2017 election campaign.
President Uhuru Kenyatta is a child of modern, digital technology Kenya, as is his deputy president William Ruto. But in the 2013 and 2017 election campaigns they had to reckon with the reality that even in the 21st Century tribe is still thicker than terabytes in Kenya.
There is no sign that this will change any time soon.
In Rwanda, elections after 2000 have been even more humorous than Kenya’s.
Kenya’s election campaigns might be parochially tribal, but they are very competitive. There is real campaigning, calculation, the formation of alliances and the deployment of campaign teams.
In Rwanda since 2000, it has been the story of one man and that is president Paul Kagame.
Apart from physically towering over most of his countrymen, Kagame towers even more over the country’s politics.
Even if he didn’t campaign, he would still win with landslides into the mid-90s per cent. Even before he announces that he will contest the election, Kagame has already won by a huge margin.
From 1994 when the RPF took power in Kigali to 2000, there was at least a semblance of weight in Rwanda. There were a handful of prominent Hutu politicians either as chairman of the RPF or president.
Since Kagame moved up from his position of vice president, he has become the face of Rwanda in more ways than any recent African president has been the face of his nation.
In that sense, Rwanda’s is just another standard gauge political formula that resembles 1970s Africa.
Further along the standard gauge railway, we arrive at a station called South Sudan.
Like Kenya and Rwanda, South Sudan is a raw, ethnic-based society. The civil war waged by the SPLM starting in the 1950s was all about security of the identity and territory of the Black, mainly Christian South Sudanese.
Ever since it gained independence in 2011 and no longer having the northern, mostly Muslim Republic of Sudan to worry about, the major tribes of South Sudan turned on each other in December 2013 in a civil war.
There was a brief period of peace but the civil war resumed in 2015.
Finally we get in the last leg of the standard gauge railway and arrive in Uganda.
Like Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda was hailed by the naïve US administration of president Bill Clinton in 1996 as a breath of fresh air, the leaders as a “new breed” in Africa.
Over 21 years later, the “new breed” of African leaders are still in power and are starting to be in power longer than the Big Men of the 1960s and 1970s who were much despised around the world and in their countries.
Just as a Kagame win of more than 90 per cent is always guaranteed even before Kagame has thought of running for re-election, it is definite that the Ugandan Constitution will be amended to lift the limit imposed in 1995 on the presidential age, as the presidential two-term limit was lifted controversially in 2005.
By 2018 or 2019, we shall have a new standard gauge railway connecting these eastern African countries. They are already bound by a common 1960s-style Big Man and tribal politics.