The third anniversary of an East African crime passed by recently without anyone remarking on it.
In early July 2021, eight Kenyans and a Ugandan arrested in Rwanda for hacking Equity Bank were handed eight-year jail terms and fined Rwf56 million (about $55,600 at that time).
The nine were part of a 12-man gang arrested in 2019 by the Rwandan Investigation Bureau (RIB), which included three Rwandan nationals.
They deserve what they got, but there was a sliver of good news in their crime — it was an impressive example of cross-country collaboration.
They are an unlikely example of what is beautiful about East Africa, and the contradictions of the region.
It is a violent region. War in South Sudan has sent nearly 1.5 million refugees fleeing to Uganda.
Over 20 million people internally displaced in Horn of Africa: IOM
They have turned the northwestern Uganda town of Bweyale into a lively and flourishing South Sudanese social and business community. Somalis and Ethiopians have streamed to Kenya and Uganda.
Refugees from the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have streamed in large numbers to Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda. Burundi refugees fled in big numbers to Tanzania and Uganda.
The government in Kinshasa accuses Rwanda of backing the M23, the main rebel group of over 120, in eastern DRC, a charge Kigali denies.
President Felix Tshisekedi has threatened more than once to invade Rwanda. Rwanda has told him he is playing with fire.
Going by how things turned out the last time Rwanda felt menaced by DRC, which ended in a Kigali-backed rebel war that ousted long-time strongman Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, Tshisekedi might do well to pack an extra bag should he make good on his threat.
For all the sabre rattling, no wall or fence has been built at the Rwanda-DRC border, which remains open. Pre-Covid, it was the busiest border in Africa, with nearly 100,000 people officially crossing daily.
One little secret about that is that a lot of people across in Goma on the DRC side, get their clean drinking water from the Rwanda side.
Until recently, it looked like there was no Ugandan milk or eggs Kenya saw that it didn’t ban. Uganda, of all things, was given to seizing Kenyan fish bound for DRC.
Tanzania went over the top, setting alight thousands of Kenyan – and Ugandan – chicks and chicken. In their numbers, Kenyan Subaru owners considered a menace for their high-speed drag races, chose the moment of the egg fight to link up with their comrades in Uganda for a Subaru fest.
Last year when Arsenal thrashed Premier League rivals Manchester United 3-1, wildly happy Kenyan fans thought there was only one way to celebrate: They headed to the eastern Ugandan former industrial city of Jinja to join a diehard group of Gunners who were having running battles with the Police that was trying to ruin the party.
Between 2019 and August 2022, Rwanda and Uganda had a border kerfuffle that kept their main crossing at Gatuna closed.
There were words exchanged, insults traded, and threats uttered. That didn’t stop RwandAir, which continued flights to Uganda and earned a tiny penny from it.
Uganda’s gripe with Tanzania at their common border never ends. Like it is with Kenya, Tanzania is often very moody about free trade and can be relied upon to block cargo and food trucks regularly.
If you arrived from Mars, you wouldn’t know electricity imports from Uganda are flowing in, and that a $5 billion pipeline is being built from Uganda’s fields to the Tanzanian port of Tanga, nearly 1,450 kilometres away.
Ugandan newspaper The Observer, recently published a story describing a swath of suburbs in Kampala as the “Little Horn of Africa”, because they are teeming with Eritreans and Ethiopians, with their restaurants, Orthodox churches, and all the works.
It called the suburb of Kisenyi “Little Somalia” because it is a haven for Somali migrants. Unlike South Africa, there is no xenophobia there.
That is not the Ugandan way, the country credited with easily the most progressive refugee policy in the world.
But they nevertheless have an unusual quarrel with the Ethiopians and Eritreans. An outspoken young man interviewed some time back in Kabalagala, the Eritrean epicentre in Uganda, said the problem was that the Eritrean girls don’t marry the local boys.
Hopefully, some clever Ugandan will explain to him that it is partly a demographic quirk.
Migrants are rarely many enough in a single place, that they can supply enough grooms and brides for both themselves and the host communities.
There is a curvy and comely Ugandan socialite called Gloria Bugie, who reportedly just broke the internet with her saucy social media photographs and video clips. Young East Africans are drooling over her.
A Ugandan blogger took to social media and claimed that because he had his finger on the region’s pulse like no other person, he could declare that East African men had finally agreed on one thing; that “Bugie was the one”. The audacity of it!
You have to love this family. It is nasty and wreaks havoc on its own. It is dysfunctional. They are not always very nice to others, but they just can’t keep away from each other and know how to make up.
They are a wonderful lot. The time one should be worried about East Africa is the day they stop fighting and burning each other’s chicks.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
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