Author: Publisher

A woman whose husband and three young children were slaughtered during the 1994 Rwandan genocide cried Thursday, 12 May, 2011, as she identified from the witness stand Lazare Kobayaga she contends led a mob attack up a mountain where she and many others had sought refuge from the ethnic carnage that was sweeping Rwanda.

Her account was the most emotional yet as the trial of Kobagaya entered its fifth day of testimony in a federal courtroom in Wichita, U.S. The government is seeking to revoke his U.S. citizenship for allegedly lying to immigration authorities about his involvement in the genocide.

The 84-year-old genocide suspect is charged with unlawfully obtaining U.S. citizenship in 2006 with fraud and misuse of an alien registration card in a case prosecutors have said is the first in the United States requiring proof of genocide. Kobagaya contends he is innocent.

An estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda between April and July 1994. Most of the dead belonged to an ethnic group known as the Tutsi, while most of the killings were carried out by members of an ethnic group known as the Hutu.

Valerie Niyitegeka, a Tutsi woman whose family farmed near Kobagaya’s village, recounted for jurors the events of April 15, 1994, when she, her husband, Appolloni, and their six children fled as mobs of Hutu men burned Tutsi houses.

“I was OK for my house to be burned _ as long as I am not dead,” she testified through a translator.

Niyitegeka detailed how she climbed _ and at times crawled _ up the steep, rocky mountainside of Mount Nyakizu with her youngest son strapped to her back. She described how the women and children gathered piles of stones for their men to throw as mobs of Hutus attacked.

She told jurors she was able to identify the elderly Kobagaya as the leader of the attacking mob because she recognized the way he walked and the cane he carried that day. She pointed at him in the courtroom : “He is there. He is the one.”

The defense tried to cast doubt on that identification by noting trees and other obstructions on the mountain that day.

During the melee as the family fled the mountain in the ensuing days, Niyitegeka was separated from her husband and three of her children. She testified she would never see them alive again. Their slain children’s ages were 12, 10 and 8.

Joseph Yandagiye, a 76-year-old Hutu farmer, testified about what happened to the children and their father, who sought refuge at Yandagiye’s house. After taking them in, Yandagiye went to run some errands. When he returned, he said he found a crowd of Hutus had already surrounded his house.

Yandagiye testified that when the crowd threatened him in an attempt to get into the house, Appolloni came out and told the mob : “Take me instead.”

Yandagiye also told jurors he initially followed the mob that had taken Appolloni and his children, but turned back after they told him they would make him kill them himself if he continued to follow.

Later that day, a group of Hutu men came to get him too, Yandagiye testified. It was then that he learned that Appolloni and his children had been killed.

Yandagiye testified that Kobagaya told the mob that they should kill him too because he had sheltered Tutsis in his house during a 1959 conflict. Yandagiye said another community leader, Francois Bazaramba, urged the crowd not to kill him but to punish Yandagiye by making him buy beer, which he did.

Bazaramba is a former Rwandan pastor who was sentenced last year to life imprisonment by a Finnish court for committing genocide.

The Rev. Ubald Rugirangoga was counseling inmates in a Rwandan prison in the wake of the country’s 1994 genocide when he was forced to truly practice what he was preaching. 

His mother, brother, and around 70 members of his extended family had been killed in the slaughter that claimed more than 800,000 lives, mostly minority Tutsis, over 100 days, at the hands of Hutu extremists.

Speaking mostly through an interpreter Tuesday to the Worcester County Bar Association, the priest said the man who killed his mother happened to be in the prison, but he didn’t know who he was. He said the man sought him out and explained what he had done. He asked Rev. Rugirangoga for forgiveness. 

“It was difficult,” he said. “I had preached to forgive, and I had to practice what I was preaching, so I had to search deep down in my heart. And I went up to him and I told him, I forgive you.” 

Even though he forgave him, the man who killed his mother still had his doubts. To further prove his forgiveness, Rev. Rugirangoga reached out to the man’s children, who were left without parents after the man’s wife died. Rev. Rugirangoga said that after forgiving the man, all the pain and anger just left. 

“I was free,” he said. 

Speaking in the jury pool room at the Trial Court building on Main Street, Rev. Rugirangoga told another story of forgiveness, in which a Tutsi woman took in the daughter of a girl, even though the girl’s Hutu father murdered most of her family. The two families had been neighbors, Rev. Rugirangoga said. The woman’s surviving son at first didn’t understand why the woman would take in the daughter of the man who made her a widow, but later he came around. And in a surprising twist, he ended up marrying the girl years later. 

Rev. Rugirangoga has been running schools in Rwanda where he mixes children of victims of the genocide and children of perpetrators of the genocide. 

He said it’s important to start early with children. He said the government has used his schools as a model. 

“I try to bring them together,” he said. “Hopefully in the future, with the history in our country, this will not happen again because I have to stand with these children.” 

He said it is a burden to carry anger around, and said if you can’t forgive, you are slowly dying inside. 

“If you carry anger around, you can even get sick, not knowing why,” he said. “It can lead to depression.” 

Asked a question about developed countries’ inaction during the genocide, Rev. Rugirangoga, who fled Rwanda by foot during the genocide but later returned, said he was not angry. 

“At the time of the genocide we were in survival mode, we couldn’t hear what was going on, who was helping or not,” he said. 

“But you have also, the U.S. and other countries that have shown support with the help they’ve offered us. If we’re forgiving the killers, then we need to forgive the grudge that nobody helped us.”

The Kansas case of an octogenarian immigrant is emblematic of the imperfect, highly-politicized, and even tainted process of doling out justice for the Rwandan genocide
On April 15, 1994, just days into a bloodletting that would leave nearly a tenth of Rwanda’s population dead, a mob of ethnic Hutus gathered in the village marketplace in Birambo. Incited and possibly organized by local Hutu leaders, the mob ransacked homes and businesses owned by ethnic Tutsis. In the days that followed, hundreds of Tutsis who fled into the nearby mountains were hunted down and killed. Seemingly anomic yet carefully organized, episodes like that in Birambo would be repeated thousands of times over the coming months, as militants, politicians, and prominent local Hutus stoked and even stage-managed a gruesome war of all against all.

Wichita, Kansas is eight time zones away from Birambo. It’s a strange place for a high-stakes legal and political showdown over how to punish or even identify the local-scale leaders of the Rwandan genocide, a matter that’s morphed into a debate over the legacy of the genocide itself. Yet the freedom of Lazare Kobagaya, an 84-year-old Rwandan immigrant and Kansas resident, depends on how these two interrelated debates play out in a federal courtroom.

Kobagaya is currently on trial in Wichita for allegedly lying about his involvement in the events in and around Birambo while he was in the process of applying for U.S. citizenship. The government, which began presenting its case last week, believes that Kobagaya helped lead and organize the Hutu mob in Birambo, and violated federal U.S. law by claiming on his N-400 naturalization form that he had never “persecuted (either directly or indirectly) any person because of race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” If convicted, Kobagaya faces jail time, the revocation of his U.S. citizenship, and deportation to Rwanda, where he would likely face another trial — this time for genocide.

On its simplest level, the case, which is the first Rwandan genocide-related prosecution in U.S. history, concerns what Kobagaya was doing during the opening weeks of the Rwandan genocide. But there’s a political and even historical dimension to it as well. According to defense filings, Kobagaya’s name never appears in records of the genocide collected by Human Rights Watch and the Rwandan government. The bulk of the evidence against him comes from eyewitnesses currently living in Rwanda, people who the defense claims were hand-selected by a Rwandan government that has used its own version of the events of 1994 to maintain its grip on power.

Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who was reelected in August 2010 with 93 percent of the vote, has made it a criminal offense to question his government’s official version of the genocide. Since Kagame is the former leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi militia that halted the killings in July of 1994, that version is as much about enshrining a Tutsi narrative of the conflict as it is about national reconciliation.

So Rwandan law echoes Germany’s well-known prohibition of Holocaust denial, and aims at preventing conspiracy theorists and genocide denialists from destabilizing the country. But opposition journalists and politicians, as well as foreign NGOs, have been targeted for spreading “genocide ideology” and “divisionism.” Rwandan prosecutors have aggressively pursued allegedgenocidaires or “genocide deniers” living abroad, while stripping genocide suspects of due process rights within Rwanda itself.

Kobagaya could well turn out to be a liar and a murderer — but he’s already emblematic of the imperfect, highly-politicized, and even tainted process of doling out justice for the Rwandan genocide.

• • •

How American prosecutors initially connected Kobagaya to the events in Birambo is unclear. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions division refused to explain how Kobagaya first appeared on the government’s radar, citing a department-wide policy of not commenting on ongoing cases.

The government’s suspicions may have originated with Kobagaya’s recent offer to record video testimony on behalf of Francois Bazaramba, a former neighbor whom a Finnish court sentenced to life in prison last year for his role in facilitating the violence in Birambo. In interviews with U.S. immigration officers, Kobagaya had claimed that he had lived in Burundi between 1993 and 1995. By offering firsthand knowledge of events in Rwanda in 1994, Kobagaya exposed his own lie.

The first motion filed in the Kobagaya case was a request for the Finnish government to share virtually all of the evidence it had gathered investigating Bazaramba, who was implicated in the genocide when his name appeared on a list of suspects that the Rwandan government published in 2006.

In a motion filed in January 2010, Kobagaya’s legal team offers its own version of how their client came to be accused of mass murder. “In this case, the United States is serving as a conduit for the Rwandan government to investigate and prosecute Mr. Kobagaya,” wrote lawyers Kurt Kerns and Melanie Morgan in a motion to dismiss the case filed in January 2010. The defense team alleged that Kobagaya had been investigated “at the behest of the Rwandan government.”

Presiding judge Monti Belot found “no evidence” to support the defense’s claim. Tom Ndahiro, a self-described “genocide scholar” who has been linked to Paul Kagame, also denied any coordination between the U.S. and Rwandan governments in identifying Kobagaya. “I don’t think this was a case conducted by the government of Rwanda but by the United States,” he told me. “I think there must have been something that triggered his — that made him come back to the limelight. Otherwise there are many people who are accused of that crime but who have been here without the U.S. government’s notice.” Ndahiro says he does not formally work for the Kagame government, but when I called the Rwandan embassy in Washington, D.C., for comment on the case, someone passed the phone to him.

The Rwandan government is playing some role in how the case has proceeded. Preparing for the case, U.S. prosecutors traveled to Rwanda, where government authorities helped to find witnesses and take depositions. In a later motion, the defense noted that “all of the government witnesses have participated in gacaca” — a sprawling Rwandan system of community-level courts dedicated solely to genocide cases — either as defendants, witnesses or victims,” and the government’s own list of evidence against Kobagaya includes “gacaca records gathered by the U.S. government in Rwanda.”

According to Duke University professor Madeline Morris, a transitional justice expert who has advised the Rwandan government, Rwanda imprisoned about 80,000 people accused of genocide-related crimes in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. The country’s existing court system would simply have been incapable of processing all of the accused genocidaires. “In the Rwandan context the problem of finding evidence was enormous,” Morris said. “A lot of people where dead, a lot of documents were destroyed, and a lot of people who were arrested weren’t identified.” The Rwandan government was leery of using the country’s courts to prosecute tens of thousands of suspects solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony. “I think that politically and internally within the Rwandan government there was a lot of ambivalence about what the results would be if people were actually able to use that law,” she said.

The solution was to create a new court system altogether. “Gacaca courts were to be based on informal testimonies by local people, including people who had had personal involvement in the genocide,” explained Ruth Wedgewood, a Johns Hopkins University professor and member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. The Rwandan government empowered ad-hoc community courts to try and sentence genocide suspects. But the gacaca “doesn’t have any formal court procedure,” said Wedgewood. “It doesn’t exclude hearsay or have a professional fact finder. Even if local people try to be fair they might be highly impassioned and there are no checks and balances.”

The result is a system ripe for government abuse. The gacaca courts were forbidden from trying Tutsis, even though some Tutsi militia leaders massacred civilians both during and after the genocide. And, said Wedgewood, it “appeared more and more frequently that Kagame was trying to attack his enemies” through the court system. If a political opponent seemed potentially threatening, the Kagame government could accuse him of trivializing or denying the genocide, or of using the memory of the genocide to stir up ethnic division. Defense motions cite at least one case of a gacaca witness later being prosecuted as the result of supposedly “divisionist” court testimony. The defense has claimed that the U.S. prosecutor’s reliance on Rwandan witnesses, who come from a country with limited free speech and gave their testimony as part of a dubious gacaca justice system, , amounts to a kind of witness tampering and a denial of Kobagaya’s right to due process.

• • •

It’s not terribly surprising that the U.S. government’s case depends on gacaca witnesses produced with the help of the Rwandan government. Investigating Kobagaya’s case would likely have been prohibitively difficult or even impossible without going through the Rwandan government and justice system. But a U.S. courtroom is not a gacaca court, and the case raises the discomforting question of whether individual, small-scale responsibility for the Rwandan genocide is even provable by the American standard : beyond a reasonable doubt.

What if the answer turns out to be no ? Despite the political and evidentiary challenges, basic moral and political necessity demands something more than just a blanket free pass for alleged lower-level perpetrators like Kobagaya — especially in Rwanda, where, in the years immediately following the genocide, killers often lived side by side with survivors of the ethnic group they once victimized. The possible civil rights violations inherent in this case, both in the United States and Rwanda, are worrying. But so is the prospect of letting off a perpetrator of one of the worst mass killings of the 20th century.

This dichotomy between victor’s justice and impunity might exist in Rwanda, but it doesn’t have to operate in an American courtroom. Though the two crimes are difficult to separate entirely, Kobagaya is being tried for lying to the INS, and not for genocide. Judge Belot has tried to make the trial less about its political and moral context than about establishing what happened in Birambo in April of 1994. He has explicitly forbidden the defense from presenting a socio-historical theory of Kobagaya’s prosecution, deciding that the role of the genocide in Rwandan politics is irrelevant in determining the defendant’s guilt.

Of course, the possible role of the Rwandan government in intimidating witnesses is relevant, and the prosecution, in responding to the defense’s motion to dismiss the case in January 2010, invited their opponents to use “the time-tested tool provided by the Constitution : cross-examination.” In this small way, the American justice system — a system where Hutu and Tutsi ethnic identities matter less than evidence and argument — is giving the Rwandan genocide the kind of dispassionate, coldly judicial treatment that it has seldom received. Even the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has never prosecuted any Tutsis, according to Wedgewood.

Belot has tried to banish from his courtroom the larger debate over how and whether justice for the Rwandan genocide can be achieved. Yet the question lingers all the same. An American court presents an unprecedented test case for establishing personal culpability for the most notorious mass slaughter since World War Two. If Kobagaya is acquitted, justice for the Rwandan genocide might become a murkier concept than ever before.

 – Armin Rosen is a New York-based freelance writer.

The first Rwandan witness at the trial of a Rwandan genocide suspect told a German court Wednesday how he was arbitrarily imprisoned and threatened in the run up to the mass killing of ethnic Tutsis by Hutus.

The trial of Onesphore Rwabukombe, former Hutu mayor of Mavumba in north-eastern Rwanda, began in Frankfurt in January. German law authorizes the punishment of acts of genocide anywhere in the world.

The witness, a 47-year-old Rwandan public prosecutor, said violence erupted in Rwanda and he was arrested on October 9, 1990, although he had committed no crime. Rwabukombe drove the truck on which prisoners were packed, and he was detained for several months.

At one point during his detention, the witness told the court, Rwabukombe took a rifle from a soldier, loaded the breech and aimed it at him.

’The only reason he did not shoot me was that a friend went and stood between us,’ the witness said.

He told the court that he had left Rwanda after his release from detention in March 1991 and had not been present during the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.

’I didn’t feel safe any more,’ he told the court.

Rwabukombe, 53, was arrested last year in Germany, where he has lived since 2002 and has been seeking political asylum.

Rwabukombe is accused of having given orders that led to the death of 3,730 people, mainly Tutsis who had taken refuge in a church.

The witness was the first of 17 witnesses from Rwanda who have been called to testify in Frankfurt. Prosecutors said that though this witness did not witness the genocide at the heart of the case, he was called so that judges would grasp Rwabukombe’s character.

A second witness, Cosolee Nyiramongi, 65, whose husband was killed in the bloodletting, was in Frankfurt Wednesday and was scheduled to testify next.

The Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) is set to see the first ever cross-listing of a company from a neighbouring country, opening a new investment opportunity for investors keen on diversifying their portfolio beyond Kenya’s economy.

The intended cross-listing of “at least two companies” from neighbouring countries is still at the discussion stage, but the NSE said at least one of the firms is expected to start trading before the end of this year.

Mr Donald Ouma, the head of product development and research at the NSE, said the new stock is expected to be listed by way of an initial public offering (IPO).

He, however, declined to reveal the identity of the firms citing client confidentiality, but said more details will be made public before the end of next month.

“We have held discussions about a yet-to-be listed stock from the region, the company to be cross-listed would be by way of an initial public offer,” said Mr Ouma.

Rwanda’s biggest State-owned lender Bank de Kigali’s is expected to be sold to the public later this year in an IPO, making it a prime candidate for the intended cross-listing.

At least seven Kenyan companies are cross-listed in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda stock exchanges, but no company from the region has listed its shares at the Nairobi bourse.

The cross-listed companies include Kenya Airways, KCB, Nation Media Group, Centum, Diamond Trust Bank, Jubilee Holdings and Equity Bank.

Regional markets

Safaricom, Stanbic Bank Uganda and Rwandese beer maker Bralirwa have floated cross-border IPOs, giving local investors a chance to diversify their investments even though they their exposure to neighbouring countries remains small mainly because the other regional capital markets are still at their infancy.

In Rwanda for instance, the Kigali Stock Exchange was launched in January this year.

It has only three listed companies, Bralirwa — the country’s biggest beer and soft drinks maker, Nation Media Group and KCB.

The expected cross-listing will take the tally of listed firms at the NSE to 56 with at least five other local firms, among them British-American Investments Company and TransCentury expected to list at the bourse before the end of the year.

In an interview last week, chairman of Dyer and Blair Investment Bank, Mr Jimnah Mbaru, predicted that the company most likely to be cross-listed at the local bourse would be Bank de Kigali, which is expected to sell 25 per cent of its shares to the public to raise additional capital to fund growth.

“The only offering I expect to go public and cross-list at the NSE would be the Bank de Kigali,” said Mr Mbaru, whose firm was a joint transaction adviser in the listing of Bralirwa.

He is betting on the capital requirements by both governments and corporations across the entire region to encourage fundraising activities beyond their jurisdictions- a key factor informing the ongoing push for the integrating of the regional capital markets.

Mr Ouma added that the NSE was working with the other stock exchanges to introduce a trading platform that would integrate their operations aimed at minimising price differentials in the specific markets for cross-listed shares.

How to spearhead a deadly militia in Congo, from Germany ? In modern times, one only needs a mobile-phone and a laptop to unleash a humanitarian catastrophe. German prosecutors are convinced that two Rwandans waged a brutal war some 6,000 kilometres away via telephone calls and emails.

Judges in Stuttgart this week will continue hearing evidence against two Rwandan rebel leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Known as the “The Doctor” for his PhD in economics, Ignace Murwanashyaka headed the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. With the help of his deputy Straton Musoni, he maintained the militia’s website, signed press releases and gave interviews about the group’s struggle against Rwanda.

But prosecutors in Stuttgart argue that Murwanashyaka and Musoni also directly ordered the burning of Congolese villages, the murder of 200 civilians, large numbers of rapes, recruitment of child soldiers and the use of human shields. Both men face a sentence of life in prison.

Handcuffed
They were brought to court last Wednesday, handcuffed but looking confident with six lawyers at their side. The prosecutor read out a total of 55 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes including mass killings and rapes as part of “terror campaign” in eastern DR Congo from 2008 until their arrest in 2009. 

They allegedly led a terrorist organisation from their sitting rooms. “We are talking about the full range of atrocities that one can imagine in a civil war,” federal prosecutor Christian Ritscher told a panel of six judges in opening arguments. The defence, however, demanded a dismissal of the proceedings saying the trial is purely politically motivated.

The trial poses a huge challenge for judges in Stuttgart. It is too dangerous for them to visit the crime scenes so it requires some imagination to picture what happened in small jungle villages thousands of kilometres away. Besides, they will also have to familiarise themselves with the history of the region, the type of crimes and the cultural context.

Numbering between 3,500 and 5,000 fighters, the FDLR is notorious for using rape as a weapon of war. It consists of former Rwandan Hutu government soldiers and militias who carried out the 1994 genocide. Since they fled Rwanda that year, the former génocidaires tried to topple the Tutsi-dominated government in Rwanda, without success. Although its European leadership is behind bars, the group continue its brutalities in the dense forests of Eastern Congo, where they control gold mines and collaborate with other fighting forces to sell mineral products.

Impunity
The FDLR leadership enjoyed considerable impunity in Europe. While some of them already had a suspicious past in Rwanda, they were never seriously investigated. Murwanashyaka – who has been living in Germany since 1989 and presided the FDLR since 2001- had been arrested earlier in 2006. He was released because of lack of witnesses. But after new inquiries Murwanashyaka was arrested again in November 2009, this time alongside Musoni.

Despite the many challenges, Human Rights Watch says the trial is groundbreaking. It is “a powerful statement that courts – even thousands of miles away from where the atrocities occurred – can play a decisive role in combating impunity,” says the organisation’s International Justice Advocacy Director Geraldine Mattioli-Zeltner.”The German authorities took an important step in carrying out their legal obligation to prosecute these horrific crimes.”

She says that Germany is “joining the expanding club of states that are willing” to fight impunity for international crimes. Although a local court in Frankfurt is dealing with a case against Rwandan genocide suspect Onesphore Rwabukombe since January, the FDLR trial will be an important test-case for Germany’s Code of Crimes Against International Law. Adopted in 2002 it allows prosecution of foreigners for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It is “extremely far-reaching” as it does not require any link to Germany says Mattioli-Zeltner.

Universal jurisdicition
Over the past two decades a dozen of countries adopted the principle of universal jurisdiction. They have allowed national courts to investigate and prosecute grave international crimes committed elsewhere. Most universal jurisdiction cases concerned Rwandans, allegedly implicated in the country’s mass-killings. Genocide suspects were recently arrested in Norway, Belgium and France, while a court in the US started a trial against a Rwandan last month and a Dutch appeals court is to deliver a judgement at the end of June.

The case in Stuttgart will be closely monitored by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, where Callixte Mbarushimana awaits his possible trial. After Murwanashyaka and Musoni were arrested, Mbarushimana worked as the executive secretary of the FDLR from Paris, where he was arrested last year.

Meanwhile, the trial in Stuttgart is scheduled to run until at least July while observers say it may even take up to one year.

(This story was first published by Radio Netherlands International)

The
East African Community is set to undertake a feasibility study on the
construction of an oil product pipeline from Uganda to Rwanda, easing fuel
supplies in the landlocked countries of Rwanda and Burundi, the EAC secretariat
said early this week.

The regional
body has obtained a grant of at least $600,000 for the study from the African
Development Bank, which will look at the viability of linking the two countries
to a pipeline project running from the Kenyan coast to Uganda, the EAC cited
Patrick Nyoike, the permanent secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Energy, as
saying.

“The
plan is to link Kigali [in Rwanda] by a pipeline from Kampala [Uganda], which
will allow petroleum products to be accessed from the planned refinery in
Uganda, as well as the existing refinery in Mombasa [on the Kenyan coast] and
international markets,” Nyoike was quoted as saying.

Uganda is
planning to build a 150,000 barrel-a-day refinery in its oil-rich Albertine
Rift basin following the discovery of at least a billion barrels of oil in the
past couple of years.

In March,
U.K.-based Tullow Oil PLC agreed on a joint-venture deal with France oil major
Total SA and China’s CNOOC Ltd. for the development of the oil fields in the
basin, which is expected to cost at least $10 billion.

EAC member
states are also planning to diversify energy sources within the region in order
to enhance security of energy supply, Nyoike was cited as saying.

The
regional body has finalized studies on the proposed natural gas pipeline from
the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam to Kenya’s Mombasa in order to end
overreliance on limited forms of energy. In February, Tanzania said that its
gas reserves had more than doubled to 7.5 trillion cubic feet following a
number of discoveries off the Tanzanian coast.

It is
expected that the project will contribute to the reduction of energy costs and
shield power generation from variability of weather and international crude oil
prices, Nyoike was cited as saying.

The EAC
member states are Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.