Welcome to the East African Community, a high-end club where the membership fees are optional but the grandstanding is mandatory. President William Ruto has summoned his fellow “Heads of State” to Arusha this March to discuss a $89.3 million hole in the budget. It’s the first time they’re meeting in over a year because apparently, everyone was too busy winning “elections” to check their bank balances. Only Kenya and Tanzania have bothered to pay their $7 million dues for the 2025/26 cycle, proving once again that in this region, being a “partner state” is just a polite way of saying you’re looking for a free ride.

The list of debtors reads like a “who’s who” of regional instability. The Democratic Republic of Congo joined the party, ate the buffet, and hasn’t paid a single coin of its $27 million debt. Burundi and South Sudan are trailing close behind with over $20 million each in arrears. It takes a special kind of audacity to sign treaties about “integration” while your neighbors are literally subsidizing your seat at the table. We are witnessing a regional “chama” where half the members have switched off their phones to avoid the treasurer’s WhatsApp messages.

The consequences are exactly what you’d expect: total operational paralysis. The East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) MPs haven’t seen a salary since November. Imagine being a “Honourable” member earning $7,000 a month on paper but having KCB Tanzania breathing down your neck because you can’t cover your loan installments. Even the Inter-University Council and the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organisation are starving. When the people supposed to be “oversighting” the region are too broke to buy fuel for their V8s, you know the dream of a united East Africa is officially on life support.

Now, David Sankok and his colleagues are suggesting a “new formula” where each country pays for its own representatives. It’s a hilarious admission of failure. They’ve finally realized that expecting a broke neighbor to pay for your lunch is a strategy for starvation. If they move to this “direct payment” system, the “Community” part of the EAC becomes nothing more than a shared WhatsApp group. It’s no longer about regional integration; it’s about making sure your own paycheck clears before the whole house of cards collapses.

This regional financial meltdown isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s a symptom of a much larger rot we’ve seen before, where old systems of financial loyalty are being discarded for survivalist tactics. As we noted in The Great Uncoupling: The Quiet Death of the Unipolar Financial Order, the world is moving away from centralized trust. Here in East Africa, we aren’t even “uncoupling” from the West; we’re uncoupling from common sense and basic accounting.

Expect the Arusha summit to produce the usual results: a glossy communique, a group photo of men in expensive suits, and a “commitment” to pay that will be forgotten the moment their private jets clear Tanzanian airspace. Ruto wants the heads of state to “pronounce themselves,” but in Nairobi, we know talk is cheap. Unfortunately for the EAC Secretariat, “pronouncements” don’t pay the electricity bill or the EALA MPs’ mortgages. The regional dream isn’t dying; it’s just being evicted for non-payment of rent.