{‘’If economics are not okay, the Community will be shaky,’’ he said in a special address to the National Parliament in the capital Dodoma yesterday.}
He added that politics can come after working with economics.
“We want a federation built on a firm foundation which is well-planned, otherwise its survival will be dubious,” he said.
President Kikwete was apparently reacting to recent development of meetings of Presidents of Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda on railway infrastructure, port and pipeline projects among them, distancing Tanzania and Burundi Presidents—both active members of EAC– from the sessions.
The Tanzanian leader reaffirmed his country’s commitment to the EAC but stated would follow the gradual integration processes as stipulated in the Treaty signed in 1999 –Customs Union, Common Market, Monetary Union and eventually the EA Political Federation.
Tanzania, he assured, was not contemplating leaving the 14-year-old EAC and would continue to engage the other four partner states on the sober need of integrating through agreed pillars.
The Community has so far created the Customs Union and the Common Market and an agreement to achieve the Monetary Union is expected to be signed later this month.
He considered that Tanzania’s different position on issues of land, immigration and movement of labour might not be in good taste with the Partners and possible reasons of his country’s so called ‘’ sudden isolation’’.
‘’We want a strong and progressive EAC that benefits all its citizens’’, Mr Kikwete stressed, underlining that his country would not wish to see the repeat of the 1977 when the old EAC collapsed mainly because of divergent political and ideological differences.
Kikwete had met his counterparts from Uganda and Kenya in South Africa on the sidelines of the SADC-Great Lakes Initiative meeting early this week on the Democratic Republic of Congo crisis. However, not details have been divulged of their closed-door talks.
East African News Agency
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