East African Community

He was a minister for...

the East African community, so to speak.

When he died, he was Deputy Prime Minister, you know, all that.

But he tells a story, and it was, you know, very, very night in the world, pan-Africanist and pan-East Africanist.

So he tells the story where near one of those, you know, the elections in a campaign in Tanzania, he is invited by this, I think it was also an East African community minister or something who came from near those, you know, the border.

So, yeah, so he invites him to come and help him in his campaign.

He was running a very tough campaign against Chadema.

And so these are some of the reasons why I think that call to work together as a continent is very, very important and more so now than before.

Regional organizations include the Economic Community of West African States, the Southern African Development Community, and the East African Community.

There are several initiatives that are also going on to help build those regions and communities as well.

The interesting thing is that even though all these are happening right around the same time, you may find one person looking at, let's say, AI ecosystem development, and it doesn't necessarily speak to a similar initiative maybe at the continental level, and we're not necessarily talking together.

We're here.

We're part of the East African community.

We're supposed to have a market of 300 million people.

But it seems that we have consistently failed to understand those economies of scale.

And I'll lean on the work that we do with Azai at RMB in part and in other parts just anecdotal.

The entire East African community.

Mm-hmm.

It looks impressive.

the colonizers, the slave traders, the big men, the multinationals, the multilaterals.

And he says, if we get extracted again, who are we going to blame? And this is where initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Agreement start to show the way.

Here, the region that is really showing the way is the East African community.

Because those borders have come down and that artificial construct is removed.

Yeah.

Then we have seen the regional blocks, Komesa, East African Community, SADAC, ECOWAS, the one in the north as well.

These are important.

Then within the framework, we are now seeing very systematic For instance, I'll give you an example.

We have seen the East African community, we have seen SADC, and we have seen KOMESA coming together to create the tripartite.

So systematically, the economic blocs are beginning to coalesce.

The ultimate is the Africa continental free trade area.

And I think this is one of the things that we need to see a bit more conversation from the Africa Union and even in other regional bodies.

Like even in East Africa, we have not seen that kind of conversation happening within the East African community.

We have not seen that conversation happening within SADC.

So there's, I think, opportunity there to s- to learn from hap- what happened.

It's, it, it's a question of how countries can also coalesce together, um, to ensure that, uh, their economic power is able also to match some of the economic powers that come with, um, these big tech companies.

Um, so i- instead of dealing with, uh, if it's Meta or Google or anything, then, uh, there's the regional, um, harmonization of how countries then work together.

Is it how data moves within a region like East African community, then so be it.

So I think, uh, the economic power of, um, of big tech can be matched by the regulations at a national level.

So the Kenya Finance Bill 2026 proposes a 35% excise duty on imported glass bottles, a measure that effectively reinstates a sin tax on this packaging material for the first time since a previously simi- uh, similar levy was struck down by the East African Court.

So they're saying the proposed duty applies to glass bottles imported from the East African Community partner states.

Right.

Removing the exemption previously gran- granted by the Finance Act of 2021.

I think so

...

the same, we had an agreement with Tanzania to get glass from them, but now we, we're evaluating that agreement altogether because it's from East African Community partners like South Africa, Uganda, and the EAC.

Okay, my overall question is, sin tax is a-