NYAGA: Why Parliament should reject French as an EAC language

The EAC Headquarters in Arusha.

In 1938, Jomo Kenyatta wrote a fable called The Gentlemen of the Jungle. An elephant asks a man to shelter just its trunk from a storm. The man agrees. By morning, the elephant has taken the hut entirely, backed by a commission of jungle animals who rule that the new arrangement is perfectly fair. The man is left in the rain.

The EAC is living this fable in real time. On May 11, President Emmanuel Macron arrives in Nairobi for the Africa Forward Summit, the first France-Africa summit ever held outside the French speaking world. At this same time, Parliament will soon be asked to ratify an amendment to the EAC Treaty to make French an official language of the community.

Parliament should reject this amendment. The case against it is both geopolitical and institutional: what French represents as a language of power in Africa, and why and for whom this amendment is being made.

Language of Françafrique

First, the French language arrives in East Africa as the institutional vehicle of Françafrique, France’s system of postcolonial political and economic stranglehold over its former African colonies.

Across West and Central Africa, French linguistic presence came packaged with the CFA franc, a deeply controversial arrangement requiring CFA countries to peg their currency to the euro, stripping them of sovereignty over their own monetary policy. It is neocolonialism laundered as monetary cooperation.

Françafrique also came with French military bases and a dense web of political interference. The coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, however wrong, were met with roaring popular approval. They are the accumulated verdict of populations decisively rejecting this model.

The official justification for this treaty amendment is the integration of DRC. But opening EAC institutions to French, whatever the stated motivation, is opening the door to the same institutional influence that has defined Françafrique across the continent. It is actively inviting the elephant's trunk to shelter from the storm.

Rwanda, once francophone, offers the most instructive lesson on what French institutional penetration ultimately delivers. France's own Duclert Commission concluded that France bore 'overwhelming and heavy responsibility' for the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis.

While the genocide was not caused by the French language, the language became a painful symbol of partnerships with France. Rwanda’s response was deliberate: switch to English and exit the French institutional sphere entirely.

Integration through adaptation, not exception

Second, even setting Françafrique aside entirely, this amendment fails on the community's own institutional principles. When Rwanda and Burundi joined the EAC in 2007, both were predominantly francophone nations. Both adapted, integrated and conducted business in English. That was integration through adaptation, not through exception.

The DRC acceded in 2022, on full knowledge of the EAC's working framework. Now the community's foundational document is being amended for one member on terms never offered to others who faced the identical situation almost 20 years earlier. That is not inclusivity.

It is appeasement dressed in the language of deepening integration. Worse still, the DRC paid virtually nothing since joining EAC, accumulating millions of dollars in arrears.

Imposing permanent institutional costs on seven members to accommodate one that has not even met its basic obligations is not integration. It is rewarding non-compliance.

The unnecessary cost

Operationalising French across all EAC organs means simultaneous interpretation at every summit and council meeting, every legislative session, every court proceeding, translation of all reports, laws, directives and communiqués into three languages and continuous staff capacity building. For a community whose budget is already under strain from an $89 million arrears crisis, this expenditure is simply indefensible.

Invest in Kiswahili instead

The resources spent managing linguistic fragmentation belong to Kiswahili. Already spoken organically across all eight member states, including by 23 million people within DRC itself, it is a more practical bridge language within DRC than French is. It transcends colonial legacies, carries no foreign power's agenda.  

Rather than amending the treaty to add another colonial language, the community should fully implement Article 137 of the Treaty, which requires the development of Kiswahili as the community’s lingua franca. That means channelling resources into the East African Kiswahili Commission’s programmes including teacher training and integrating Kiswahili into national curricula in states where penetration remains incomplete.

Parliament's responsibility

Kenya's Parliament should decline ratification of this amendment. It would be a profound irony and a dangerous strategic error for the EAC to open the door to the very symbol of Françafrique, which has left a litany of instability and suffering across the continent.

In Kenyatta's fable, the man eventually burns the new hut rather than be endlessly dispossessed, and returns to his original home. The EAC need not wait for that outcome.

The writer is a public policy analyst, [email protected], X: @Nyagacm