Let me draw your attention to the fact that Tanzania has three major public projects taking place this year, with considerable overlap between them.
The most important is the Constitutional Review process, bravely and I hope impartially being spearheaded by teams collecting public opinions across the country.
Then there is the Census 2012, which might have a fighting chance of collecting credible statistics. And then there is the National Identification Card project, a most suspicious endeavour.
My government should have taken the time to think about how to integrate these three enterprises so as to save time, money and general aggravation.
Instead, they have generously offered citizens three different annoyances to manage, as if we have all the time in the world to cue up for bits of paper and avoid intrusive questions about our households.
The way our government treats us, you’d think it’s part of a nefarious plan to waste our productive time, thereby stunting economic growth for reasons known only unto themselves.
But considering the scale of the three exercises, and knowing my public sector like I do, I can appreciate that three different opportunities for massive “procurement” bills were irresistible. Cars to buy, public funds to mismanage, you know how it goes.
Clearly, I support the Constitutional Review process; let’s talk, indeed. And I suppose our administrators should attempt to count the population from time to time, just to get a clue.
But the National Identification Card thing is just that one step too far. I have enjoyed far too many civilised years of walking about with nothing but a slim wallet with a drivers’ licence in it to embrace this “Lete Kipande” (bring your ID) nonsense.
As soon as we get IDs, every single person who works for the government is going to become an agent of the Spy State. Worse still, the Big Brother who will be watching Tanzanians is probably not working in the interests of Tanzanians, per se.
Citizens have been worrying about economic pressures, and so we should for we must have bread. But the real story is always, always political.
There’s something rotten going on in the states of East Africa, to be sure. As a region we are dealing not only with our home-grown pathologies, we’re also dealing with all the increased pressures of this modern dystopia the world seems to be invested in.
There’s the spectre of terrorism, the ever-dreaded threat of civil unrest. Brawls with neighbours.
None of which is new, necessarily. We’ve more or less managed before. Tanzania has never needed fingerprints or bits of plastic to know what’s going on within its borders.
For all our easygoing smiles, there is no hiding in this country. We’re a people’s republic in a most organic sense.
And we already have systems of identification that we have mismanaged admirably for the past half century.
The census might be easier if we, for example, tried to improve our registrations of births and deaths and maybe even computerised some of our systems.
Heck, something as simple as perhaps having a real street address system — maybe even with area codes! — would help us along.
We have voter identification cards; why not make those biometric, how about that? There are the aforementioned licences, and many places of employment provide identification.
It may sound extreme to call the ID project totalitarian in its politics, but that’s the trouble with certain “reasonable” requests to enforce administration. This is not a reciprocal relationship request, and it gives a touch too much power to the authorities.
So we get cards today, with the assurance that it’s good for us. Tomorrow, every person with a gun will feel quite entitled to demand identification, if for no other reason than to exercise a little petty power of their own.
We’re also going to become increasingly rigid and racist about notions of citizenship; any non-Bantu, anyone with a funny accent or a poor grasp of Kiswahili will be targeted. It’s going to give our creeping xenophobia manure on which to flourish.
It is going to erode the social cohesion and fraternity that was after all the entire point of the Nyerere-ist philosophies we still hold dear in spite of the slings and arrows of modern life.
And it’s all going to start with that one little card, all because the Americans have waged their everlasting war on terrorism and everyone is the enemy, even Tanzanians.
Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]
