The idle youth have long been a source of irritation for the prescriptive class. Everyone who has a job or a school to go to thinks little of disparaging the clumps of young men that drift like urban tumbleweed, collecting at street corners and under shade trees.

Why aren’t they working, what’s wrong with them, complain the privileged. I am sure there are bad sorts in these collectives of the unemployed, but most of them seem rather harmless.

Recently, our president expressed his own disappointment with youth who spend all day playing pool instead of doing something productive with their time.

The Gaming Board of Tanzania decided to tackle His Excellency’s concern by issuing a ban on all playing of pool in public places except between the hours of 4pm and 11pm.

I imagine that if pool is played formally as a game of chance, the Gaming Board probably has jurisdiction over it. Outside of that, the ban sounds about as reasonable to me as the banning of scrabble or chess or bao or rope-skipping for that matter during official working hours.

This is one of the more amusingly illogical outcomes of the Bulldozer Effect.

Magufuli is a no-nonsense man through and through, which has its uses in governance for sure. His demanding and disciplinarian approach to the civil service has created an almost unbearable pressure to perform. It is now a matter of survival for functionaries to be seen to be doing something, whatever that something might be. Salaries, after all, now have to be justified.

The zealous reaction of the Gaming Board raises some a number of questions: Is this pool ban legal, and on what grounds? Being angered that folks choose to spend their day indulging in an entertaining activity is not legal grounds for banning said activity, unfortunately.

It’s not even a reasonable argument. Worst of all, it completely ignores the core problem – our high unemployment rate – in favour of a shortsighted “solution.” The youth are not perpetrators of unemployment, they are victims.

How this ban will be enforced is another concern. Will the government hire people to snoop around the city, fining establishments that allow pool-playing on their premises during work hours? Who is going to pay the pool police? Will it be from taxpayers’ money?

Will we unwittingly kick off the pool-playing black market and witness the mushrooming of illegal pool establishments, peddling their filthy wares to helpless snookerheads, luring in children to corrupt their tiny souls with a sport that requires dexterity, good eyesight and considerable skill?

Jokes aside, I was recently told a story about a fake Ujamaa village that mushroomed overnight so that local functionaries would have something to show Mwalimu when he came to visit their area. Unfortunately, Mwalimu apparently decided to lean on one of the banana trees only to have it keel over since it hadn’t actually grown there so much as been hastily and badly transplanted, thus exposing the zealots for the liars that they were.

History is littered with stories of people trying their best to please a Dear Leader but going about it completely wrong. Some are merely amusing on the level of banning pool, others are horrifying involving famine and the deaths of millions.

There are probably a thousand more plausible ways in which to tackle the core problem of the unemployment epidemic – some immediate, some intermediate and some long-term.

I would have gone the other way for immediate effect: Instead of banning pool, make it a competitive and potentially lucrative sport. In the long term, the government is going to put in consistent effort: Stimulate the private sector, be FDI-friendly, focus on low-tech industries that can absorb high amounts of human labour (people over machines) et cetera.

Politically, instances such as the pool ban have to be questioned for their reasonableness rather than accepted without complaint. I can’t help but feel that the state has no business dictating the hours and manner of leisure of a free citizen no matter.

In this matter, I stand quite opposed to my fellow citizens who think it is a great idea to conscript idlers into forced labour. If we accept the state’s bullying in the little things we’ll come to regret it when it bullies us on the big things.

So we have an incumbent who is apparently the envy of many of our fellow Africans. The point is to exploit the Bulldozer Effect smartly for real results, not just for the sake of appearances.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]