Who should be president of East Africa? Go ask the taxi drivers

Any national intelligence service worth its name recruits heavily in the transport sector, for if you cannot monitor movement on the highways, at entry points and the bus terminals, then the state would be overrun in a short while.

And transport workers are not only well placed to gather information as they work, they can also cheaply transmit propaganda through unsuspecting carriers.

But even the laziest intelligence service will at least be well represented in the airport transport service. For that is where most well connected travellers, both nationals and foreigners, pass. 

Now with the East African “cow” (coalition of the willing) growing faster than its biological age as if it eats more sausage than grass, I am tempted to think that Comrade Paul Kagame owns all the airport taxis in the region or that RPF has recruited all their drivers — which amounts to the same thing.

Last year and the year before, when I travelled so frequently across the region that my passport got filled up long before its expiry date, I found these guys’ opinion undivided about who the best leader in East Africa was — Brother Kagame.

I suppose if you surveyed another category of workers — say, press freedom activists — you would get different results about the man. But try and sample airport taxi drivers in East Africa and they will to a man assure you that they yearn for Kagame’s leadership.

Now don’t assume that I went out with a questionnaire and started polling these guys. But what do you do when you are stuck in a jam from airport to city centre, confined in the cab with one other soul? You get talking about the day’s problems.

And it tends to gravitate towards politics. And if you speak Kiswahili, French and Luganda like I happen to do, then you will get it straight from the heart anywhere in the regional capitals.

“If only it were Kagame in charge,” they say at all the airports after enumerating the problems in the management of public affairs.

Even if you exclude opinion aired in Kigali, Kagame would win a poll at all the taxi stands in the other four capitals hands down. Is it the spectacles? But he is not the only bespectacled guy in the region.

Maybe it is his height that cab drivers admire. Or these drivers are all fitness fanatics and his refusal to put on weight after all those years in the chair that Uganda’s Godfrey Binaisa once described as “sweet” has won the cabbies’ hearts.

I haven’t travelled much this year, especially after the younger leadership that my president says is fixing East Africa’s anaemia took charge in Kenya.

So I haven’t engaged the airport taxi drivers of late and cannot say for certain who would win the East African presidency if the airport cabbies were a representative voter sample.

But maybe it is time those research companies that release interesting data now and then asked this simple question across the region: “Who would you vote for as President of the Federal Republic of East Africa?”

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism. E-mail: [email protected]