By TEE NGUGI

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One can be forgiven for thinking that regimes in East Africa attend a special school where they learn the fine art of abducting, torturing and killing critics.

In June , the Ruto-Gachagua regime stationed snipers on top of buildings to take out unarmed youthful protesters. Clearly on a warpath against its own citizens, the government also deployed the Kenya army in the streets of Nairobi.

Imagine these two scenarios. First, snipers training high powered rifles on the heads of youth, armed only with phones and water bottles, and splattering their brains on pavements and courtyards.

Second, Kenya army armoured vehicles with combat-ready soldiers patrolling the streets. Normally, snipers are placed on rooftops to protect high-value buildings from terrorist attacks.

The army is only called out of the barracks to fight an invading army. Unarmed youth are neither terrorists nor an invading army. The war against the citizens of Kenya has so far resulted in over 60 executions, hundreds of maimed, and numerous abductions and disappearances.

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How did we get to this point where a regime treats citizens protesting against its ineptitude and corruption as enemies of the state?

But it is not only the Kenyan regime that is at war with its own citizens. In Tanzania, harassment of the media and frequent arbitrary arrests of opposition supporters, that had become routine under the presidency of John Magufuli, continue under the current regime of Samia Suluhu.

Recently, a key figure in the opposition party, Chadema, was found tortured and executed under suspicious circumstances.

And in the lead up to the last elections in Burundi, human rights groups reported numerous instances of harassment, kidnappings, arbitrary arrests and assassinations. In Uganda, in the period before the last elections, there were widespread harassment, beatings and arrest of opposition leaders and supporters.

During a protest against the arrest of opposition leader Bobi Wine, police, riding on the back of a truck, did gangland drive-by shootings in Kampala. In just a single day, 40 people were executed. And just the other day, police shot Bobi Wine in the leg. There have been attempts on his life in the past.

What is the objective of greater integration of EAC countries? Is it only for more trade and free movement of people? What’s the use of having oppressed and exploited people moving despairingly from one country to the next? Should not the EAC base its integration project on the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights which states its goal as the realisation of “freedom, equality and dignity” of African people? Trade and commerce in an atmosphere of corruption, oppression and police killings is a nonsensical concept.

Democracy allows people to hold leaders and institutions to account thus ensuring that benefits accruing from more trade and commerce go towards improving people’s lives, not towards self-enrichment by leaders. To talk of EAC integration in isolation from democracy is a strategy that can only lead to more poverty and deaths.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator