My column on this page last week — “The league of safely retired ex-presidents” — noted that in East Africa, Burundi and Tanzania are the richest countries in terms of living former presidents.
Wrong, a correspondent from Bujumbura wrote in to say.
Burundi does not just top the list.
It is way ahead in having the highest number of former presidents living inside the country in the East African Community.
I had named Sylvestre Ntibantu-nganya, Pierre Buyoya, and Domitien Ndayizeye.
I clean forgot Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, president from 1976-1987.
Like all other heads of state in Burundi, he is a life member of the Senate.
So, there, in Burundi, they don’t cast former presidents into the wilderness.
My correspondent also wrote, “Believe me, in spite of its past problems, Burundi is the place to watch because it has the most vocal civil society in the region and it is much more transparent than its neighbours. So much so that nobody, even the most seasoned analysts, can predict the outcome of June’s election.”
The question then is why, given all this, Burundi has this image of the “sick man” of the EAC?
You might say it’s because its official language is French, in what is now an Anglophone bloc.
But then, Burundi speaks Kiswahili, so they are in the fold.
Burundi’s isolation is sometimes exaggerated.
After all, two weeks ago, Nation Media Group and the Africa Media Initiative named the socially conscious Burundi broadbcaster Alexis Sinduhije as the Most Inspiring Journalist from Central Africa of the past 50 years, at the Pan African Media Conference held in Nairobi to mark NMG’s 50th anniversary.
Still, Burundi is too often in the EAC shadows. First, it could be because it doesn’t have flamboyant politicians.
It has no hat-wearing and quirky Yoweri Museveni, no edgy and football-loving Paul Kagame, no unnervingly Victorian Mwai Kibaki, no ambiguously man-boy Jakaya Kikwete.
Next, Burundi needs to produce a star footballer, rugby player, cricketer, or a bunch of long-distance runners like Kenya’s world-dominating brigade.
But mostly, it needs troubled and scandalous celebrities who will make their way into Uganda and Kenya’s often-merciless gossip press and celebrity-tracking blogs.
Someone, say, like Uganda’s Chameleone — a supremely talented hip-hop star who if he is not on stage wowing the crowds, is either embroiled in bar brawls, or having run-ins with the police, or wrapping his fancy around electricity poles, or inexplicably jumping out hotel windows in Tanzania in the depth of the night, or on his knees begging for forgiveness from his wife.
The Kenya and Uganda gossip press just love Chameleone stories.
In other words, Burundi needs to show some sparkle, but mostly its tormented social side.
Its East African street cred will come from showing it has streets littered with broken relationships, transvestite musicians, fading music stars clingingly desperately to the public limelight, bar fights, scams, and newspapers full of classified ads marketing all manner of bizarre aphrodisiacs.
Unless other East Africans see Bujumbura as a city with a sinful side, they will never embrace it as truly East African.
East Africans tend to be suspicious of people and places that are too proper.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected].
