The Myth of East African Federation: Between Lip Service and Institutional Failure

Abstract
The East African Federation has been described for more than six decades as an imminent political destiny rather than a distant possibility, yet its realisation remains perpetually deferred. This paper traces the trajectory of East African regional cooperation from the 1960s through the collapse of the first Community in 1977, its revival in 1999-2000, and the subsequent expansion of membership from three to eight states. It examines the treaty architecture underpinning integration – the Customs Union, Common Market, Monetary Union and the still-unrealised Political Federation – and interrogates the roadmap that was meant to deliver a united political authority. Using recent evidence, including the 2025 Tanzanian and 2026 Ugandan elections, chronic non-payment of Community dues, Tanzania’s protectionist labour and business measures, and Uganda’s dynastic political tendencies, the paper argues that intra-state authoritarianism and inter-state mistrust, rather than technical or economic constraints, are the principal obstacles to federation. It further argues that ordinary East Africans are, in practice, more integrated than their governments, and that the youth – digitally networked but institutionally excluded – represent the most credible constituency for reviving the federation project, provided certain civic and structural conditions are met. The paper concludes by identifying four structural reasons for the persistent failure of the federation dream and situates the discussion within a broader critique of instrumentalised Pan-Africanism.

• EAC East African Community
• DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo
• EALA East African Legislative Assembly
• MK Movement Muhoozi Kainerugaba Movement
• PLU Patriotic League of Uganda

Introduction
The idea of a united East Africa is older than the independence of any of its constituent states. Long before Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika raised their own flags, colonial administrators and nationalist leaders alike entertained the notion of a federated East Africa bound together by shared infrastructure, a common market and, eventually, a common government (Rukikaire, 2025). Julius Nyerere famously offered to delay Tanganyika’s independence so that federation could be achieved simultaneously with Kenya and Uganda, a proposal that never materialised (Rukikaire, 2025). More than sixty years later, the East African Community (EAC) – now comprising eight member states – continues to invoke federation as its ultimate destination, even as concrete progress toward that destination stalls. This paper interrogates the gap between the rhetorical commitment of East African leaders to federation and the institutional and political realities that continue to frustrate it. It argues that the persistence of the federation idea, despite its repeated failure, has become something of a myth: a unifying aspiration that legitimises the Community’s existence while shielding member states from the harder question of whether they are, in fact, willing to surrender sovereignty to a shared political authority.

The Evolution of East African Cooperation Since the 1960s

Formal cooperation among the East African territories predates independence, having its roots in the East Africa High Commission (1948-1961) and its successor, the East African Common Services Organisation (1961-1966), both of which administered shared services such as railways, posts and customs (East African Court of Justice, n.d.). These arrangements were formalised into the first East African Community through the Treaty for East African Co-operation, signed in June 1967 by the presidents of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda (East African Court of Justice, n.d.). The first EAC pursued a common market, a common external tariff and joint public services, with an implicit aspiration toward eventual political federation (Rukikaire, 2025).

This first experiment collapsed in 1977, a decade after its founding. The East African Court of Justice (n.d.) attributes the collapse principally to the absence of strong political will and inadequate participation of the private sector and civil society in running the Community. Other analyses point to the divergent ideological paths of the three states – capitalist Kenya, socialist Tanzania and an unstable, militarised Uganda under Idi Amin – compounded by Cold War pressures, disputes over the equitable sharing of benefits from joint services, and an overconcentration of power in the Summit of Heads of State with weak checks from below (East African Community, n.d.-b). The 1977 collapse is instructive precisely because the pathologies identified then – elite concentration of authority, weak civic participation, and divergent national political trajectories – remain, as this paper demonstrates, unresolved almost fifty years later.

The Resurrection of the Dream and the Expansion of Membership

The spirit of cooperation did not die with the 1977 collapse. Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda re-established links through the Permanent Tripartite Commission for East African Co-operation in November 1993, a preparatory step that culminated in the signing of the Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community in Arusha on 30 November 1999 (East African Community, n.d.-b). The Treaty entered into force on 7 July 2000 after ratification by the three founding states, and the reconstituted Community was formally launched in January 2001. Membership has since expanded significantly. Rwanda and Burundi acceded to the Treaty in June 2007 and became full members on 1 July of that year. South Sudan joined in April 2016, shortly after attaining independence. The Democratic Republic of the Congo deposited its instrument of ratification on 11 July 2022, becoming the seventh Partner State (East African Community, 2022), and the Federal Republic of Somalia, admitted in November 2023, completed its accession on 4 March 2024 to become the eighth member (East African Community, n.d.-a).

This rapid expansion – from three states with roughly comparable economic and political trajectories to eight states spanning stable democracies, post-conflict societies and active war zones – has fundamentally altered the integration calculus. As this paper discusses below, the admission of members such as South Sudan, the DRC and Somalia, admirable as an act of Pan-African solidarity, has strained the Community’s institutional and financial capacity and introduced security and governance asymmetries that the founding treaty was not designed to accommodate.

The Roadmap to Federation: Protocols, Instruments and the Present Impasse

Article 5(2) of the Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community sets out a sequential, four-pillar roadmap toward political federation: a Customs Union, a Common Market, a Monetary Union and, ultimately, a Political Federation (Ministry of East African Community, ASALs and Regional Development, n.d.). The Customs Union Protocol became operational in January 2005 and was fully implemented by 2010. The Common Market Protocol followed, coming into force in July 2010 and guaranteeing the free movement of goods, persons, labour, services and capital, along with rights of establishment and residence across the Community (Techish Kenya, 2025). The Protocol establishing the East African Monetary Union was signed in 2013, envisaging a single currency within ten years; that target has since slipped from 2024 to 2031 (The EastAfrican, 2023).

Political Federation, the fourth and ultimate pillar, has followed a markedly slower and more contested path. In 2004, the Summit of Heads of State established a Committee to Fast-Track the East African Political Federation – the Wako Committee – to examine ways of accelerating integration (Ministry of East African Community, ASALs and Regional Development, n.d.). Its 2004 report concluded that consultations had been insufficient to support concrete decisions, prompting a further round of national consultations between 2007 and 2009 to gauge citizens’ attitudes (East African Community, n.d.-b). In 2018 a Committee of Experts was tasked with drafting a federal constitution, targeting a draft by the end of 2021 and ratification by 2023; that timeline collapsed amid political tensions among Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda (Nyombi, 2023). More recently, the process has been reframed around an intermediate ‘Political Confederation’ – a transitional arrangement short of full federation – with a Committee of Constitutional Experts led by former Ugandan Chief Justice Benjamin Odoki and former Kenyan Attorney General Amos Wako conducting country-by-country consultations. Burundi and Uganda were consulted first, followed by Kenya in May 2023, with Rwanda’s consultations launched in Kigali only in June 2026 (New Vision, 2026). Two decades after the Wako Committee’s original mandate, the Community is thus still gathering public opinion on a document that does not yet exist in draft form for most member states – a pace that itself testifies to the gap between declared ambition and institutional delivery.

Intra-State Politics and the Federation Dream

A central argument of this paper is that the fate of the East African Federation is decided less in Arusha than in the domestic political arenas of its member states. Political federation presupposes a baseline of democratic legitimacy and rule of law that citizens can trust their own governments to uphold before they can be expected to trust a shared supranational authority. Two recent elections illustrate how far the region remains from that baseline.

Tanzania’s general election of 29 October 2025 was held after the country’s main opposition party, Chadema, was formally barred from participating for its refusal to sign an electoral code of conduct, and after its leader, Tundu Lissu, was arrested and charged with treason – a non-bailable, capital offence – following his ‘no reforms, no elections’ campaign (allAfrica, 2025). President Samia Suluhu Hassan was declared the winner with a margin variously reported between 97.66 and 98 percent of the vote (NPR, 2025). The announcement triggered the worst political unrest in the country’s recent history: protests erupted in Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Mbeya and Mwanza, met with lethal force by security agencies, with opposition and rights groups alleging that hundreds, and by some accounts over a thousand, people were killed (ImpACT International, 2025; Al Jazeera, 2025). The government disputed these casualty figures without offering its own estimate (Al Jazeera, 2025).

Uganda’s presidential election of 15 January 2026 followed a comparable script. President Yoweri Museveni, 81, was declared winner with 71.65 percent of the vote against Bobi Wine’s 24.72 percent, securing a seventh term and extending his rule to four decades (Al Jazeera, 2026a; allAfrica, 2026a). The poll was conducted under a government-imposed nationwide internet blackout, with reports of biometric voter-verification failures concentrated in opposition strongholds, heavy security deployment, and post-election violence (NPR, 2026). Bobi Wine rejected the results as fraudulent, alleged the abduction of his polling agents, and went into hiding after his home was raided by police (Al Jazeera, 2026b; NPR, 2026).

These episodes are not incidental to the federation debate; they are central to it. A community that aspires to a shared political authority cannot easily reconcile that aspiration with member states whose own electoral processes are widely regarded, domestically and internationally, as neither free nor fair. Disputed elections erode the very trust – between citizens and their governments, and between governments themselves – on which any pooling of sovereignty depends. They also raise an uncomfortable question for the federation project: political union among authoritarian-leaning states risks entrenching, rather than checking, the excesses of incumbent regimes, particularly where a federal executive would inherit powers currently exercised unaccountably at the national level.

Inter-State Relations and the Erosion of Regional Trust

Beyond domestic politics, relations among the partner states themselves have been repeatedly strained. Kenya-Uganda relations were tested in 2022 when Uganda’s then Land Forces Commander, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, publicly threatened on social media to capture Nairobi, prompting a formal apology from President Museveni and a diplomatic scramble between the two capitals (Al Jazeera, 2022, as cited in the broader record on Kainerugaba’s conduct). Rwanda’s relationship with the DRC has deteriorated over the conflict in eastern Congo, a tension serious enough that Rwanda, DRC and South Sudan skipped the EAC’s extraordinary Summit convened to address the fighting in January 2025 (Nation Africa, 2026). Burundi and Rwanda have their own history of mutual suspicion dating to the 1990s. Each of these bilateral frictions complicates the Common Foreign and Security Policy that Article 5(2) of the Treaty identifies as one of the three pillars underpinning political federation, alongside good governance and the effective implementation of earlier integration stages (Ministry of East African Community, ASALs and Regional Development, n.d.). A federation cannot credibly project a single foreign and security policy while its constituent states remain, in effect, strategic rivals or unresolved adversaries.

Concrete Steps Taken by Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania

It would be inaccurate to suggest that no progress has been made. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, as the founding states, have taken identifiable steps toward deeper integration: full implementation of the Customs Union and Common Market protocols, the introduction of an East African Community e-Passport, a single East African tourist visa, and the One Network Area initiative reducing the cost of cross-border mobile calls and roaming. Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda waived work-permit fees for EAC nationals (in theory) under the Common Market Protocol, and Kenya has cleared all of its historical arrears to the Community, alone among the partner states in having done so (The Citizen, 2025a). Kenya, Uganda and Burundi were also the first states to complete national consultations on the draft Political Confederation constitution, with Kenya’s round concluding in mid-2023 (The EastAfrican, 2023). These are genuine, measurable achievements. Yet they also throw into relief how much slower and more contested progress becomes once integration moves from technical, economic cooperation toward the pooling of political sovereignty.

Tanzania’s Ambivalence: Symbolism Without Full Commitment

Tanzania occupies a paradoxical position in the federation narrative. It is the historical custodian of East African unionist thought, home to Julius Nyerere’s Pan-Africanist legacy, and host to the EAC’s headquarters and Secretariat in Arusha – a status the Community’s own institutions credit to Tanzania’s leading role in founding the bloc in 1967 and 1999 (Tanzania Proud of Its Role in EAC, as reported by allAfrica, 2024). Tanzanian officials continue to invoke this legacy in public pronouncements, with successive administrations professing commitment to unity and solidarity. Yet Tanzania’s practical posture toward regional integration has frequently lagged behind its rhetoric. As early as 2010, Tanzanian officials confirmed that citizens of other partner states would still require work permits to engage in economic activity despite the Common Market Protocol’s entry into force, resisting Kenya’s parallel move to abolish such permits (allAfrica, 2010, as documented in the historical record).

This pattern recurred, more sharply, in 2025. In July of that year, Tanzania gazetted the Business Licensing (Prohibition of Business Activities for Non-Citizens) Order, barring foreigners – including fellow East Africans – from operating in fifteen categories of small and micro-scale enterprise, ranging from salons and mobile-money agencies to phone repair and tour guiding (The EastAfrican, 2025b). Violators faced fines of up to ten million Tanzanian shillings and imprisonment of up to six months, with non-compliant Tanzanian citizens who assisted foreign traders also liable to prosecution (The Standard, 2025). The EAC Secretariat formally protested, with the Principal Secretary for EAC Affairs describing the directive as a clear breach of Articles 13(1), 13(3)(a), 13(5), 13(8) and 13(9) of the Common Market Protocol, which guarantee free movement of persons and services and the right of establishment for partner-state citizens (The Standard, 2025). Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Trade and Industry warned that the measure effectively criminalised lawful East African investment and risked provoking retaliatory action (Business Insider, 2025, as reported in regional coverage). The episode illustrates a recurring gap between Tanzania’s symbolic centrality to the federation project – as host of its headquarters and heir to its founding ideology – and its practical reluctance to open its domestic labour and business space on the terms the Community’s own protocols require.

Financing the Community: Who Pays and Who Defaults

Nowhere is the distance between rhetorical commitment and material commitment more starkly visible than in the Community’s finances. Under the EAC Treaty, each partner state is required to remit an equal annual contribution to the central budget – historically around US$7 million per state – alongside a share calculated on assessed economic capacity. Compliance has been chronically poor. For the 2024/25 financial year, with a total approved budget of US$112.9 million, only Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda had fully met their obligations by April 2025, with Uganda in fact remitting slightly over its quota; the Democratic Republic of the Congo had paid only 14 percent of its assessed contribution, South Sudan 7 percent, Burundi 19 percent, and the newly admitted Somalia 50 percent (The Citizen, 2025a). By March 2025, member states collectively owed the Community over US$58 million (The EastAfrican, 2025a); by the following year the figure had climbed further. A report reviewed by the Burundi Times in May 2026 recorded the DRC owing US$27.7 million, South Sudan US$21.8 million and Somalia US$10.5 million, together accounting for roughly three-quarters of the Community’s approximately US$80 million in outstanding obligations, with Kenya and Tanzania alone having paid their assessed contributions in full (Burundi Times, 2026).

The consequences have been operational as well as financial. The East African Legislative Assembly was forced to suspend its activities for the first half of 2025, and the Secretariat resorted to internal emergency borrowing of over US$660,000 from other Community organs simply to keep EALA functioning (The Citizen, 2025b). In March 2026, facing what officials openly described as a risk of institutional collapse, the Summit – convened under Uganda’s incoming chairmanship after Kenya’s William Ruto handed over – agreed to waive fifty percent of all outstanding arrears as a one-off measure, provided member states cleared the remaining balance within two years, and adopted a revised funding formula combining equal contributions with GDP-weighted assessments from July 2026 (Nation Africa, 2026; Zawya, 2026). Tellingly, the Summit convened to rescue the Community’s finances was itself skipped by the presidents of South Sudan, DRC and Rwanda – three of the states most responsible for the arrears crisis (Nation Africa, 2026). A political union cannot be built on institutions that its own principal financiers – Kenya, Tanzania and, to a slightly lesser extent, Uganda – are left to sustain almost alone, while other members treat their treaty obligations as optional.

Museveni, Dynastic Politics and the Question of Leadership Legitimacy

A further argument advanced in the public debate over East African integration – and examined critically here – is that Uganda’s own domestic political trajectory, personified by President Museveni’s extended tenure and the visible positioning of his family within the state apparatus, constitutes an independent obstacle to the federation dream. Museveni, in power since 1986, has twice overseen constitutional amendments removing presidential age and term limits that would otherwise have barred his continued candidacy (Foreign Policy, as documented by Taylor, 2023). His son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has been progressively elevated through the military hierarchy – becoming Commander of Land Forces, then Chief of Defence Forces in March 2024 – while cultivating an independent political following through the ‘MK Movement,’ later formalised as the Patriotic League of Uganda, and repeatedly signalling presidential ambition, most explicitly in 2022 before appearing to step back in deference to his father (Taylor, 2023). Other relatives and allies, including Museveni’s wife Janet Museveni as Education Minister, his brother Salim Saleh, and his son-in-law Odrek Rwabwogo as presidential investment advisor, occupy influential positions within government (Taylor, 2023).

Is this a valid argument against the federation project specifically, as distinct from a critique of Ugandan governance generally? The evidence suggests it is valid, but only partially, and should not be treated in isolation. It is valid insofar as any federal arrangement would require Uganda, like all partner states, to accept binding external checks on executive power – checks that a leadership demonstrably resistant to internal constitutional constraint is unlikely to welcome. A government that has spent nearly four decades removing domestic limits on its own authority has little evident incentive to accept supranational limits on that same authority. It is only a partial explanation, however, because Uganda is not analytically unique within the Community: Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC and, as of the 2025 election, Tanzania itself, have each in different ways demonstrated comparable patterns of executive dominance, weakened opposition space, or contested electoral legitimacy. The dynastic and war-mongering critique of Museveni is therefore best understood not as the singular cause of federation’s failure but as the most visible regional instance of a broader structural problem: the reluctance of incumbent elites across the Community, not solely in Uganda, to subject themselves to any authority – domestic or supranational – that they do not fully control.

Citizens Versus Leaders: Is the EAC a Club of Presidents?

This paper further argues that ordinary East Africans are, in important respects, more integrated than their governments – and that the Community’s institutional design has allowed it to function as what might be termed a club of presidents rather than a genuinely civic undertaking. The Summit of Heads of State remains the Community’s supreme decision-making organ, a structure the East African Community itself (n.d.-b) identifies as one of the very features that undermined the first EAC in 1977 through excessive concentration of power at the apex and correspondingly weak participation from the private sector and civil society. That structural imbalance persists: key summits are still liable to being skipped altogether by heads of state when politically inconvenient, as occurred in January 2025, when the presidents of South Sudan, the DRC and Rwanda did not attend the extraordinary Summit on the fighting in eastern Congo (Nation Africa, 2026).

At the level of lived experience, integration tells a different story. Cross-border trade, intermarriage, labour migration and informal commerce have long bound East African communities together regardless of the pace of formal treaty implementation; the region’s shared linguistic and cultural ties, particularly through Kiswahili, predate and outlast the political vicissitudes of any single Summit. Public opinion evidence, while patchy, tends to confirm this asymmetry between civic sentiment and elite process rather than contradicting it: Afrobarometer’s 2021 face-to-face survey of Kenyans found that a majority already approved of the existing Customs Union and Common Market – measures citizens directly experience – even though awareness of, and enthusiasm for, the more abstract project of full political federation lagged well behind (Good Authority, 2023). In other words, where integration is concrete and lived, citizens embrace it; where it remains an elite-negotiated abstraction debated behind closed Summit doors, public engagement is thin – not because citizens reject unity, but because the process has given them little meaningful part in shaping it.

The Youth Factor: Succeeding Where Their Forbears Failed?

If political federation has failed twice under the stewardship of successive generations of East African leaders, this paper argues that the youth constitute the most plausible constituency capable of reviving it – but only if specific conditions are met. The starting point is sobering: the same 2021 Afrobarometer data found that only 28 percent of Kenyan youth had heard of the proposed federation, compared with 42 percent of the oldest cohort, indicating that governments have done a particularly poor job of building awareness among the very generation that would inherit any eventual union (Good Authority, 2023). Yet lack of awareness of federation as an abstract policy process should not be mistaken for youth disengagement from politics as such. Afrobarometer’s continent-wide 2025 flagship report found that while young Africans participate less than their elders in traditional civic activities such as voting, they are driving the fastest-growing forms of political engagement – digital activism and online public-affairs discourse – which are reshaping how political demands are organised and expressed (ACEPA, 2026). The youth-led protests that shook Kenya in 2024 over tax increases, and Uganda in the same year over corruption, demonstrate that East African youth are capable of rapid, cross-border-resonant political mobilisation when the stakes are concrete (The Conversation, as reflected in continental youth-survey analysis, 2025).

Grassroots initiatives such as the youth-led ‘Youth for East African Federation’ movement, which has set out a staged roadmap of coalition-building, campus chapters and a youth position paper for presentation to EAC stakeholders, suggest an emerging, self-organised civic constituency for federation distinct from the Summit-driven process (Youth for East African Federation, n.d.). For this constituency to succeed where earlier generations of leaders have not, at least three conditions would need to hold. First, civic literacy: the abstract architecture of federation – its protocols, its draft confederation constitution, its institutions – must be translated into accessible, vernacular public discourse, correcting the awareness deficit Afrobarometer identifies. Second, insulation from elite capture: youth mobilisation must retain independent, cross-border organisational structures rather than being absorbed into ruling-party youth wings, which have historically functioned as instruments of incumbent patronage rather than vehicles of civic demand. Third, sequencing pressure from below: rather than waiting for Summits to conclude constitutional consultations at their own pace, youth constituencies would need to exert sustained pressure for the EAC’s democratic-governance pillar to be enforced domestically – since, as this paper has argued, a federation of undemocratic states is unlikely to be either stable or legitimate. Whether the current generation can meet these conditions remains an open empirical question, but the digital and demographic resources available to it exceed anything available to the generation that watched the first EAC collapse in 1977.

Pan-Africanism: An Abused Term
Pan-Africanism recurs throughout the official language of East African integration as a legitimising reference point. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s accession to the EAC in 2022 was formally described by its government as a fulfilment of the vision of the founding fathers of the Organisation of African Unity, explicitly invoking Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba (East African Community, 2022). Yet this paper argues that Pan-Africanism, as deployed in contemporary East African political discourse, has become an increasingly hollow rhetorical resource – invoked to confer moral legitimacy on decisions of state expansion or personal political conduct, while the substantive content of Pan-African solidarity is simultaneously undermined in practice. President Museveni’s own public defence of his son’s inflammatory 2022 tweets threatening to annex Nairobi is illustrative: rather than repudiating the sentiment, Museveni characterised General Kainerugaba as ‘a passionate Pan-Africanist’ whose error lay only in using the wrong forum for expressing continental unity, not in the underlying claim itself. Similarly, Tanzania’s 2025 restrictions on East African traders and businesses were introduced by a government that, in the same period, publicly commemorated sixty years of leadership in founding Pan-African regional cooperation (allAfrica, 2024). The pattern in both cases is the same: Pan-Africanist language is retained at the level of ceremony and diplomacy, while policy substance moves toward economic nationalism and protection of domestic constituencies. This gap between rhetorical Pan-Africanism and practised exclusion is not merely inconsistent; it actively corrodes the credibility of unity claims among citizens who can observe the contradiction directly, and it should be named as such rather than allowed to pass as ordinary diplomatic courtesy.

Four Structural Reasons the Federation Idea Continues to Fail

Drawing together the evidence examined above, this paper identifies four principal, structural reasons why the East African Federation remains unrealised, distinct from – though related to – the individual episodes discussed in preceding sections.

First, elite capture of the integration process. The Summit of Heads of State retains near-exclusive control over the pace and content of federation, a concentration of authority the Community’s own institutional history identifies as a cause of the first EAC’s 1977 collapse and which persists today, evidenced by the routine absence of heads of state from consequential summits and the glacial, decades-long timeline of constitutional consultation (East African Community, n.d.-b; Nation Africa, 2026).

Second, chronic financial unsustainability. A Community that cannot secure reliable annual contributions of roughly seven million dollars per member state from all eight of its members – relying instead on emergency internal borrowing and periodic debt amnesties – lacks the institutional foundation on which a far more ambitious political and fiscal union could plausibly be built (The Citizen, 2025b; Burundi Times, 2026).

Third, divergent and deteriorating national political trajectories. The disputed 2025 Tanzanian and 2026 Ugandan elections, alongside comparable governance concerns in Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC, indicate that member states are not converging toward the shared democratic and good-governance baseline that Article 5(2) of the Treaty identifies as a precondition for federation, but in several cases are moving further from it (allAfrica, 2025; NPR, 2026).

Fourth, unresolved inter-state security and economic mistrust. From the Rwanda-DRC conflict to Tanzania’s protectionist labour and business measures against fellow East Africans, and periodic diplomatic friction such as the 2022 Kenya-Uganda tensions, the partner states have yet to demonstrate the level of mutual strategic trust that a common foreign and security policy – one of the three explicit pillars of political federation under the Treaty – would require (Ministry of East African Community, ASALs and Regional Development, n.d.; The Standard, 2025).

Conclusion
The East African Federation is best understood not as a project in steady, if slow, progress, but as a recurring national and regional myth – repeatedly proclaimed, periodically re-launched through new committees and consultations, and consistently deferred by the same structural obstacles that undid its first iteration in 1977. The evidence reviewed in this paper – disputed elections in Tanzania and Uganda, chronic non-payment of Community dues, Tanzania’s protectionist retreat from its own founding legacy, dynastic tendencies in Uganda, and a Summit-centred decision-making structure that leaves citizens as spectators rather than participants – together sustain the argument that lip service, rather than institutional capacity, is the binding constraint on federation. Ordinary East Africans, through informal trade, cultural exchange and support for the tangible gains of the Customs Union and Common Market, have arguably outpaced their governments in practising integration. Whether the youth can succeed where earlier generations have not will depend on their capacity to convert digital and demographic energy into sustained, independently organised civic pressure for domestic democratic accountability – the precondition, this paper has argued, without which no East African Federation can be either stable or legitimate.

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