📷 Photo: Author Unknown via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
VICTORIA, Seychelles — The Seychelles Commissioner of Police, Africa Sendahangarwa, has formally taken over the rotating chair of the Eastern Africa Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation (EAPCCO), assuming the regional police coordination role from Rwanda at a meeting of regional chiefs held in Nairobi.
The handover took place at the East Africa Standby Force facility in the Kenyan capital, where Sendahangarwa joined his counterparts from across the region to set the agenda for the coming term. EAPCCO sits inside the broader Interpol architecture, which operates through regional bureaus, a General Secretariat in Lyon, and a National Central Bureau in each of its 196 member states, and operates as a coordination platform for police chiefs in Eastern Africa.
Sendahangarwa told delegates that the region faces a transnational crime landscape that demands closer working between national police forces, particularly on drug trafficking, which has continued to track along Eastern African sea and air routes. He pointed to operations in the past year that have demonstrated the value of pooled intelligence and joint action, drawing on the work of national investigative agencies such as Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency and South Africa’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, commonly known as the Hawks.
The Seychelles police force, a National Central Bureau of Interpol, already runs a cybercrime unit with technical support from the international body. That domestic build up is expected to be a building block for Seychelles’ year at the helm, as the country looks to share what it has learned and to learn from peers running similar small state operations.
Sendahangarwa framed the year ahead as one in which EAPCCO members should be ready to act on early intelligence and to coordinate across borders on cases that span more than one jurisdiction, the Seychelles Police institutional profile records. He also underlined the importance of partnerships with international counterparts, including the African Union’s mechanism for police cooperation, known by the acronym AFRIPOL, which works alongside Interpol to strengthen police collaboration, combat transnational crime, and maintain peace and security across Africa.
The chairmanship gives Victoria a higher profile in regional policing for the year. It also dovetails with a wider public order agenda at home, where the fight against drugs has been a focus of recent donor support, including the recent donation of trained service dogs by Russia, a gesture that Seychelles officials publicly credited in the same week as the Nairobi handover.
The priorities that the new chair outlined in Nairobi line up with what delegates described as a regional threat picture that has not changed in its fundamentals in recent years: organised trafficking, cyber enabled fraud, and the cross border movement of people and contraband. The expectation among the chiefs present is that EAPCCO will continue to coordinate joint operations across the region in the year ahead, with Seychelles as the convening force.
Sources cited: 1. Wikipedia, “Interpol”,
