Independent consultant and blogger in Dar es Salaam
Ali Mohamed Kibao was abducted in public and murdered last week, to the shock and horror of the nation. May his soul rest in peace, may his family be granted the solace of justice.
This latest brutality coming after violence upon violence meted out to opposition party members, outspoken youth and other Tanzanian civilians has elicited a strong reaction from the public- and from the international press. What is happening in Tanzania?
I do not have the luxury of writing about this as though this is our first brush with horror. It has always been there, if you read our history.
The standard narrative that “Tanzania is peaceful because it has nice peaceful people” is a woefully inadequate fairytale rendering of the situation. Tanzania’s peace is carefully crafted as part of her ongoing nation-building project.
There is a heavy hand behind it, iron fist in a velvet glove. Friends, this approach to governance has significant limitations.
Seeking to leave our brutality in the past, I have focused on positive elements such as cultural diversity and tolerance, language, a communalist bent, et cetera as our nation-building tools. I hoped that we could grow to respect our citizens as a polity and turn away from the cult of personality that underlies authoritarianism.
But no. We complain about an Imperial Presidency while cynically upholding it. You can’t breathe for people praising or blaming “Mama”, a childish mono focus that has comedians roasting us about it.
Hahaha, yes, it is funny until it isn’t.
Abductions and killings are not what we signed up for. What are we turning into? Countries are not built bloodlessly on goodwill alone, sure... but they are not built by the sword either. They are built by architects and policy makers and mothers.
Folks who need quiet predictability to craft institutions, structures, families and society. Yet here we are in 2024, sliding into the same dysfunctionalism I saw countries around the continent go through in the 1980s. Did we learn nothing from their mistakes?
This ‘Animal Farm’ Orwellian nonsense is not a plan. As a feminist I have enough on my plate trying to survive while missing out on the full complement of human rights, I don’t need to have to worry about the national project failing within my lifetime as well. I am too old to start over somewhere else and I don’t want to, my knees already hurt, this Tanzania thing has to work out.
We the public are finding it impossible to separate the government we interact with everyday from the thugs who murdered a man travelling to Tanga. Why should we? This is a police state. We know who has the real monopoly on violence, we know who can remain “unknown” with impunity. We are still looking for missing young men, journalists... we have not forgotten.
There are two paintings titled ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’- a beautiful and disturbing piece by Peter Paul Rubens done in the 1600s and a gorgeous horror by Francisco Goya produced about 200 years later.
Both masters used the pretext of Greek mythology as an excuse, I think, to give a stark message about politics, about power and madness. Let me borrow their talent and their two strong images to reiterate: What is happening in Tanzania?
Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report; E-mail: [email protected]
