Eric Otenyo WPSA 2008
Abeid Karume in 1972 and Julius Nyerere in 1999. For instance, in January 2005,
Zanzibar hoisted a new flag in a move pundits warned was the beginning to the break
away from the union (Sultan and Rwambali 2005). Zanzibar's major opposition party,
Civic United Front (CUF) has inclinations toward a return to independence. Also,
Zanzibar demanded greater share of the Union revenue from 4.5 to10 percent prevailing
in 2004 (Rwambali 2004). However, CCM led government officials denied the “greater
autonomy imperative" would lead to a break away from the United Republic of Tanzania
(McHenry 1997).
In brief, therefore, in the first three decades of independence, pressures to form federal
states in East Africa were mostly rooted in power sharing arrangements and confined to
individual countries. Often, the maneuvers were supported by global superpowers
seeking to build ideological allies in the region. Often, this came at a great cost to local
populations which had to trade off development assistance for authoritarian regimes, fully
backed by one or the other of the cold war protagonists.
Even though the political conditions in the seventies favored stronger centralized
systems, at the economic level, there was general consensus that economies of scale
would be derived through engagement in the regional economic block-the East African
Community (EAC). The EAC had emerged in the 1960s a Customs Union between
Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania (Ravenhill and Callaghy 1993; Robson 1968). By 1961,
the three countries had founded the East African Common Services Organization to
manage strategically important services such as railways and aerodromes. The Common
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Convention