President Kenyatta and his Tanzanian counterpart John Pombe Magufuli at State House Nairobi. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP The price of Tanzania’s onions imported by Kenyan traders keep shifting. It increased from Sh108 per kilo in February this year to Sh118 in April due to logistical challenges posed by coronavirus testing at the Kenya-Tanzania borders.
When President Kenyatta ordered the closure of the border except for cargo vehicles in May, and Tanzania retaliated by banning all cargo trucks, the price shot up to Sh150.
The volatile onion prices mirror the erratic relations between the two countries.
The challenges faced by onion traders are also representative of the woes businesses have to grapple with whenever there is a misunderstanding between the two countries, whose sibling rivalry is always never far from the surface.
ESCALATED DISPUTE
The question then is how does the trade between the countries look like? Who stands to lose more in case of an escalated dispute?
Tanzania has a nearly balanced trade with Kenya, importing goods worth Sh23.3 billion in 2017, while exporting goods worth 23.7 billion.
However, trade between the two countries has been on a downward trend since 2014 when Kenyan exports to Tanzania stood at Sh64.7 billion and in 2015 when imports from Tanzania peaked at Sh79.4 billion.
This decline tells of simmering differences and political grandstanding between the administrations in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that has resulted in cold war policies that have made it difficult to do business across East Africa’s big economies.
DOWN MEMORY LANE
The uneasy ties between Nairobi and Dar did not start yesterday. It goes back to when the two countries had just attained independence from the colonialists.
It was the closure of borders between Tanzania and Kenya in 1977 that finally killed the decade-old East Africa Community. The threats of border closures, seizing goods and discrimination have continued to date.When EAC was revived in 2000 trade slowly began to pick up between the two countries. Kenya’s annual exports grew from Sh10.7 billion in 2002 to Sh64.7 billion in 2014 while imports grew from Sh3.5 billion to Sh79.4 billion in 2015.However, with new administrations in Nairobi in 2013 and in Dar es Salaam in 2015, trade plunged to a decade low.Kenya’s isolationist policy of courting Rwanda and Uganda to the Standard Gauge Railway through “the coalition of the willing” was viewed as a geopolitical move against Tanzania. However, as the coalition […]
