On June 7^th, 2024, the East Africa Community held its 23^rd Extraordinary Summit of the Heads of State of the member countries. The EAC is a regional organization that brings together the countries of East Africa namely Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, Central African countries of  DR Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan, and the Horn of African country of Somalia. It is a disparate group of countries which consists of extremely fragile countries like Somalia, countries which have known no peace from birth like the DR Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan and quiet and inward-looking countries like Tanzania and dictatorships like Uganda and wheeler dealer countries like Kenya.

Accordingly, it must obviously have challenges and one such challenge involves one of its latest recruits, the DR Congo, which did not attend the aforenoted Summit, which was, indeed, an important meeting.

The Summit was to appoint the organization’s new Secretary General  Her Excellency Veronica Mueni Nduva from Kenya. Kinshasa did not attend the Summit and it did not even bother to apologize for its absence denoting that DR Congo is very unhappy at having joined the EAC and perhaps wants to opt out of it.

But that is not the only problem of the EAC. It appears that Kenya’s role of behaving as the controller and manager of the organization with Ruto, Kenya’s President, appearing to have abandoned his pre-election and even after election African rhetoric.

The economic profile of the region is not all that well as debts and deficit budgets mar the region. They seem all to be reliant on foreign assistance, which only extends and promotes foreign interference in the region’s affairs, thus denying the region’s own goals of internally generated development.