Months later, the nearly 10-kilometre-long line of trucks queuing on the Kenyan side to pass through to Uganda and onward into the East African hinterland is still very much around.
There are many reasons for these nightmarish queues: Red tape, inefficiency by revenue authorities, volumes beyond the ability of borders to handle and even corruption.
However, they also reveal more profound—and troubling things—especially about Kenya and Uganda, how their attitudes toward commerce differ, the architecture of coercion in the two countries and their views of their place in the world.
Consider, first, when you are entering Uganda from Kenya. To get to the immigration hall, one has first to deal with two checkpoints operated by Ugandan security officers. One has a scanner and, as a private traveller, you are expected to take out your bags and put them on the machine.
After that, you go to the health area to present your Covid vaccination certificate and yellow fever immunisation card. You then head to the immigration hall and pass through a security screening machine. You are all good to go; sit in the car and head out. But just at the exit is another checkpoint; papers filled, car checked and ID cards sometimes requested.
All this happened over about 250 metres. After clearing the border area, about a kilometre ahead, there is a customs checkpoint manned by the military. They are supposed to check if the customs officials levied any precious personal items and goods you are carrying with you.
If you head straight towards Jinja and the capital Kampala, 35 kilometres later, you will again come upon a customs verification roadblock manned by the Ugandan military and police.
In this day and age, especially if you live in a dangerous neighbourhood like Eastern Africa, all this might seem perfectly normal. That is, until you make the return trip back to Kenya from Uganda.
First, there are often no trucks queuing to enter Kenya from Uganda. On a bad day, the queue is no more than a kilometre long. There is not a single security check or roadblock before you get to Kenyan immigration.
And when you are done with immigration and get your car ticked for the return trip, there is no other stop where you will be asked whether you paid customs taxes. The only stops will be the many traffic police-manned ones.
That’s when you realise the difference: Uganda is a politico-security state. Kenya is not. It’s an oft-muddled democracy, which has had only brief flirtations with setting up a security state in recent years.
Hard realities
Then it gets fascinating. You get the sense that Kenyan officialdom doesn’t think anything of value worth fretting over comes from the rest of East Africa.
The Uganda security officers and other border officials, who were harassing you and making you account for anything that seems to have cost more than a few dollars, also don’t expect that much of value is coming from the hinterland, so they are nowhere to be seen.
Sadly, these responses are informed by hard realities. For starters, though it is a coastal nation with big ports, customs and other import duties account for 6.4 per cent of Kenyan revenue, according to the latest data. For Uganda, it’s10.2 per cent.
Kenya can afford to be cavalier about a car with expensive suitcases crossing the border without them frisking the owners. Uganda might not have that luxury and, therefore, needs to pounce on travellers.
But more significantly, it’s expected that anything up to 90 per cent of containers that bring goods to the East African Community go back empty. We aren’t producing enough to export to the world—or the world doesn’t want what we make.
That partly explains the long queue of trucks waiting to enter Uganda from Kenya. They are carrying valuable things and have something to declare, which can take time to process. But when they come back from the hinterland, the majority of them are carrying empty containers. For Kenya, it is a big “nothing to declare” border operation, so they can more quickly wave through the “useless” trucks.
You see this reality on the surface of the highways. The left outbound side, which is used by trucks carrying heavy imports into East and Central Africa, is warped and often more potholed than the right inbound side, which only reckons with empty trucks returning.
A December 13 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) article tells us the meaning of those empty containers that we return to ports: Africa accounts for under five per cent of international maritime trade, and all West and Central African ports handle less than one per cent of the world total.
It is possible we export a lot of things (like software and financial services) that don’t need to travel by road or on ships. Please show us the data; we will change our story.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3
