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BY LUSEKELO PHILEMON
26th November 2011
East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) Speaker Abdirahin Abdi
The treaty forming the East African Community (EAC) needs to be amended so that legislative members are elected directly by the voters in their respective countries and not by their national assemblies.
Responding to questions from reporters attending an EAC-GIZ training on regional integration in Bujumbura, East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) Speaker Abdirahin Abdi said civil societies, ordinary people and other stakeholders had a big role to play in pushing the agenda forward.
"As EALA we've no mandate to work on this…it is the task of the partner states, CSOs, ordinary people and other stakeholders to champion the idea so that the treaty is amended and the members are directly elected in their countries," the EALA Speaker said.
Currently, EALA members are elected by their countries' national assemblies, which is percieved as undemocratic as they are not representing a specific group of people in the region.
He, however, said lack of enforcement mechanisms was one of the reasons that made EAC's partner states reluctant to implement key protocols in the regional bloc.
He said: "We have no enforcement mechanisms in place to compel member states to implement what is agreed in EAC apex bodies. This is a critical challenge," he said.
He noted that although there were some agreed protocols like the Customs Union and the Common Market the member states were reluctant to implement what had been agreed.
Abdi said since July last year, East Africans expected they would have a right to utilise opportunities embedded in the EAC Common Market Protocol "but this hasn't been the case."
On languages, he said it was very expensive to use many languages in the EAC, citing the European Union, which had seven official languages and was paying a lot of money for translation.
Recently, there was an appeal from Burundi to include French on the
list of official languages of the Community, but the request was turned down by the EAC Council of Ministers.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN