East African Court overwhelmed by cases as cash crunch bites

Arusha. A cash crunch is still haunting the East African Community (EAC), this time hitting more on its judicial organ.

The regional Court has been forced to suspend its sessions due to a scarcity of funds to bring the Judges to Arusha, where many of the cases are heard.

A session that was scheduled to be held here last month has been put off, while the planned session in August is likely to suffer the same fate.

The shocking development was revealed here on Thursday by the President of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ), Justice Nestory Kayobera.

He told the retired African leaders who visited the facility at the end of their forum on democracy that the court currently has a backlog of over 200 cases.

“These cases cannot be heard because of the financial challenges”, he said, noting that the cases were filed by litigants from all the EAC partner states.

Justice Kayobera told the high-profile delegation that some of the cases had been filed more than three years ago but could not be heard for lack of cash for travel costs.

In total, the files of 244 applications have been collecting dust on the Court’s shelves, some dating as far back as 2020, when they were first filed by the litigants.

He blamed the cash crisis on the failure of the EAC partner states to remit their mandatory budget contributions to the EAC expenditure budget in time.

EACJ received the lowest allocation compared to two other Community organs for the $103 million budget for 2023/24 tabled and approved last month.

The Court managed to attract only $4.4 million for its annual expenditure, compared to $50.9 million for the Secretariat and $17.6 million for the East African Legislative Assembly (Eala).

Since the regional Court was launched in 2001, a total of 650 cases have been filed, of which 406 have been heard and sufficiently determined.

Justice Kayobera said he was not sure as to when the 244 pending applications would be heard as the Court has been forced to put on hold its sessions due to the cash crisis.

However, he said he was aware that the cash challenges were not only confined to the Court but to the entire EAC and its other organs and institutions scattered across the region.

The delegation of retired leaders that visited the Court was led by former Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma, currently the leader of The African Democracy Drive initiative.

Others were the former Mozambican president Joachim Chissano, the former Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn, and a host of other democracy crusaders on the continent.