Tanzania at 50: Despair and despondency among the poor, nonchalance among the rich
This Friday, the people of Tanzania and their well-wishers across the globe will be marking the 50th anniversary of the Independence of Tanganyika, pretty much the same way human birthdays are remembered, depending on the circumstances surrounding the commemoration.
Birthdays are a time to give thanks to Providence for having survived the vagaries of a cruel world, having faced and conquered adversity and having marked up a few achievements which, meagre though they may seem, could not have been registered had one perished in infancy.
They are also times to look back with fondness and nostalgia to the days of carefree youth, when the world was our oyster and the sky was the limit, before reality set in.
There is thus time for jubilation tinged with regret, celebration juxtaposed with cerebration, enthusiasm tempered with realism. At 50, a nation can afford to give itself space to stop a while, stand back a moment and take stock of what it’s all about, where it came from, where it’s at and where it intends to go.
So, mirror, mirror on the wall, what is the meaning of it all? We have survived, but is survival enough? We see everywhere centrifugal signs that threaten our continued survival because the mere fact of being there for a certain length of time does not guarantee the repeating of that length of time.
That requires constant nurturing, diligent husbandry and visionary stewardship. Have we had all of these, some of these, or none of these? There can be no clear-cut answer, and we may want to err on the side of nuance when trying to provide answers.
Suffice it to say that we (as Tanganyikans of yesteryear and Tanzanians of now) can be proud of some solid accomplishments in our 50 years of existence, and the facts speak for themselves.
At the same time, however, we are called upon to acknowledge that for wanting the nurturing, the husbandry and the leadership alluded to above, we have exposed our achievements to inclement weather, and the elements are hard at work eroding and withering what we thought we had secured. I suggest that we are not out of the woods yet.
The national ethos has all but disappeared so that it’s not easy to state what “Tanzanianness” stands for today as opposed to other “nesses.” It cannot be wholly explained by belonging to a collective of humanity living within definite borders determined by foreigners, and enjoying certain citizenship rights ascribed to that collective and to those boundaries; there has to be something that sets us apart from the pack, as indeed there used to be.
The union that is Tanzania is contested on both sides of the channel; Kiswahili, the putative national language, has been relegated to a lingua franca, good for making political noises and selling njugu, not for scientific enquiry; we are not as “tribalist” as some of our neighbours but our politics is pre-tribal, based on family and assorted friends; in 1967, we proclaimed a most humanising policy, Ujamaa, but today we accept a most primitive, predatory form of exploitation of our people by multinationals and their local puppets; we report huge school enrolment rates in “schools” that lack the very basic qualities of a school; the young are jobless, hungry, angry; poverty has heightened, broadened and deepened among the majority of our people, justice eludes them…
There is despair and despondency among the majority poor; there is nonchalance and insouciance among the rich and powerful.
Two nations are emerging, one huge, dirt poor, desperate and angry; another tiny, filthy rich, absentminded and blind to the dangers it has created for itself.
Fifty years ago we lit a torch and placed it atop Mount Kilimanjaro to spread the ideals of Hope, Love and Dignity all over the world.
