By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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Tanzania is truly in trouble.

Till about a week ago, we were, and I was, reporting about the disappearance of young people who may or may not have been known as individuals who may have rubbed the authorities the wrong way, mainly because of their youthful activism which may sometimes be accompanied with a degree of youthful exuberance and brashness.

Not that even such a juvenile happy-go-lucky disposition should attract unlawful retribution, no, but one can imagine situations in which the young can just be the young. Still, a proper law-enforcement climate should always seek to be even-handed and rational when dealing with members of the public, old and young alike.

Now, at the end of last week, right in the middle of the public complaints against the kidnappings and disappearances, we were treated to another shocking happening that told us again –if indeed we needed telling—that we are not out of the woods yet:

An elderly man with the main opposition party on a bus home gets pulled out of the bus at gunpoint — full military hardware, handcuffed and whisked away to an unknown destination as the other passengers on the bus look on speechless.

Read: ULIMWENGU: Who is this raining on Samia’s parade? We can only but guess

A day or so later the old man’s body is recovered in some vegetable garden on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, and the body shows signs of physical torture, and his face is disfigured with acid!

Who did that? What was the motive? Who is safe now? What are the authorities thinking? Where do we go from here?

Well, the president, for her part, tweeted – or is it Xed?—to express sorrow, and to condole with the said party and the family over this retiree’s killing.

For her part, The Speaker of Parliament reacted by uttering the no-brainer of the decade, “I hate death!” – as though it were possible to love death!—although she is the very one who blocked parliamentary debate on the kidnappings before this particular murder happened. The police do not seem to have any serious intent of getting to the bottom of this elderly man’s death.

Too many questions continue piling up without visible efforts to provide answers. As it is today, the people of Tanzania have been taken hostage by forces we cannot be sure we know, some hellish minions on the rampage, apparently undeterred by law enforcement, or political power, or by simple humanity and civility.

In the midst of all this I could not believe my ears when I heard the Inspector General of Police (IGP) stating that all was well in the country and congratulating his force for a job well done!

My first reaction was that the police boss was reading off an old speech text that he had had no time to edit, or, otherwise, he was out of touch with the realities of his country and the realities of the police force he is heading.

Either way, we are in trouble, and likely we will be in greater trouble as we dive into the cesspool that is Tanzania’s electoral cycle. I am cognisant of what is happening with the immediate political events for this year and the next.

I will state what I have been saying all along: President Samia is invested in this election cycle, both this year and next, because she wants to win at all costs, judging by the way she has littered the country with her posters carrying messages of attributes of her that she may or may not have.

How she wins these elections will be interesting: her predecessor, John Pombe Magufuli—here I have no apology-- was a political thug, which allowed him to strategically steal the election wholesale, instead of doing retail rigging by constituency.

Not only did this allow Magufuli to block the “usual suspects”—the opposition candidates—but also to eliminate those from his own party that he could not trust; if only they had the guts to speak out, they would testify to what I am saying: Magufuli stole the election from the opposition and from a good number of CCM people too.

Now, will Samia do the same?

Somewhere in the not so-long past, Samia was advocating reconciliation among her “4Rs”. I doubt she still remembers that, for she hardly mentions them these days as she gets closer to this year’s elections:

She once famously said (I am paraphrasing) that she will do what is right even if it means she loses the election.

Noble words, if you ask me, and a fitting epitaph for a lady of honour of whom one would be proud to call a leader.

Easier said than done, did someone say? But let’s all seek the proof of the pudding in the eating, and wait for what Samia will do in the forthcoming elections.

Our vigilance will be whetted by the fact that a challenge has been thrown the way of government: In court there is a case demanding that the local government elections not be run by the ministry of local government, which, incidentally, is currently headed by Samia’s son-in-law.

Interesting, wouldn’t you say?

Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]