British statesman Harold Wilson once said that a week is a long time in politics. In East African regional politics, twenty-five years is apparently long enough to take a bold idea and quietly water it down into something else entirely.
That is roughly how long it has been since the revived East African Community Treaty was signed in 1999, bringing the EAC back to life after its 1977 collapse. A quarter-century on, the anniversary invites a hard question: Is this still the East African Community our founders imagined, or has it drifted into something closer to an East African Confusion — a bloc of neighbours pursuing gigantic, overlapping national projects instead of one shared plan? Nothing illustrates the drift better than the story of who gets a seat at the refinery table.
