President Kenyatta urged member states to eliminate all the remaining barriers to free movement of people, goods and services.

“Barriers to trade in particular assail the spirit of the Common Market, Customs Union and the Monetary Union,” said President Kenyatta, calling for the removal of all obstructions to the growth of the community, stressing the need to allow free movement of people, businesses and capital within the community to provide opportunities for generating prosperity.

He also called on investors and other businesspersons to enhance their participation and commitment to empowering economic growth in the community.

“Businesses and traders in the small and micro-enterprises sector need to be enabled to trade in the regional arena. I commend the work done in this regard, especially through regional exhibition,” President Kenyatta said.

The President also said the envisioned integration will work as intended when underpinned by a sound infrastructure system, stressing that development of infrastructure connecting member states was key to the integration process.

To me it is incredible that policy makers would push ahead with any kind of monetary union given the very obvious lack of political will to make a real push for a true East African free trade area.

Let me instead repeat an old idea of mine – privatized and endogenous monetary integration in East Africa:

It is certainly not obvious that the present “monetary borders” in Eastern Africa are optimal. Just the fact that borders across Africa are highly artificial and to a large extent due to colonial history could e an argument for currency unions across different countries in Africa – including in Eastern Africa. However, there is no reason why such monetary integration should happen through the introduction of common (monopoly) currency in the EAC. In fact there might be a better privatised option in the form of the so-called M-pesa and other electronic payment forms.

Over the last couple of years M-pesa which is a mobile telephone payment system (M-pesa means Mobile Money) has become hugely popular in Kenya and in many ways M-pesa has led to a quasi-privatisation of the monetary system in Kenya and M-pesa clearly has the potential to become a fully privatised parallel currency in Kenya.

M-pesa has also been introduced in other Eastern African countries but the success has been much more limited in countries like Tanzania than in Kenya. I believe that the primary reason for the success of M-pesa in Kenya is the fact that authorities wisely have not applied banking regulation to the M-pesa. On the other hand M-pesa is much more regulated in other Eastern African countries, which most likely has hampered the expansion of the M-pesa (and similar payment systems) in other East African countries.

I believe that many of the advantages of monetary union could easily be achieved by enhancing the use of M-pesa style payment systems across Eastern Africa. The main advantage of currency union is the reduction of transaction costs, but this is also the main advantage of M-pesa style systems. So if the EAC wants to help monetary integration in Eastern Africa then it would make much more sense to agree on common regulation of M-pesa style payment systems and allow these systems to be used across the EAC. In that regard it should of course be stressed that this regulation should be as “light” as possible and should not hamper the development of electronic and mobile based payment systems.

The clear advantage of such solutions for monetary integration in EAC would be that it would become “endogenous” meaning that households and corporations would only use a “common” currency (in the form of for example M-pesa) if they benefit from the use of that “currency”. Hence, one could easily imagine that most companies in for example Tanzania and Kenya would start using M-pesa style payment systems also for cross border payments, while for example households in Rwanda would prefer another payment system. Monetary Union limits monetary competition. This should never be the purpose of monetary reform. On the other hand deregulation (and common EAC regulation) of mobile payment systems will enhance monetary competition and likely lead to a more efficient form of monetary integration. Said, in another way why not let the market decided on the size of the optimal currency area?

If the EAC nonetheless wants to go ahead with creating a common currency it should opt for a “parallel currency” solution where the national currencies are maintained and the common currency is created as a common “accounting unit”. This accounting unit could take the form of what George Selgin has termed Quasi-commodity money (QCM), where the money base is expanded at a fixed yearly rate for example 5 or 10% based on an automatic electronic algorithm. It would be natural that private suppliers of M-pesa style payment systems would use this common accounting unit as the reference unit of accounting.

This is basically a suggestion for a privatised monetary integration in Eastern Africa. If successful this would lead to monetary integration in Eastern African and significantly reduce transaction costs of cross-border transactions, which exactly is the purpose of the EAC’s proposal for monetary union, but it would avoid the problems associated with lack of economic and political integration.

Concluding, forget about East African monetary, focus on removing barriers to the free movement of goods, capital and labour in East Africa and leave monetary integration to the free markets.