Tanzania may be a feeble republic but it is by no means a monarchy

I sometimes have this uneasy feeling that someone out there is bent on making fools of all of us. What good that would be for whoever is behind such a move I do not know, but I am always wary of what seems to me to be the intensification of what the late Professor Chachage Seithy Chachage termed “collective imbecilisation”.

The noun in Chachage’s formulation, I was quick to point out at that time, does not exist in the English language, but the concept is useful as something we should be taking urgent measures to guard against.

For, it is true, someone somewhere is really working hard to “imbecilise” us collectively.

Such an enterprise is easy to manage when one stands in a fiduciary relationship to a body of people, when there is trust, faith and a measure of dependency.

Such is the relationship that usually exists between the public officials we sometimes do or don’t even elect on the promise that they will “bring development” for us.

Nonsense, really, because no person, however smart, can ever “bring development” for anyone else.

In most situations, and especially with the illiteracy and ignorance we have managed to keep our people in, they tend to believe everything they are told by those they consider their “leaders,” and lots of times they are willing to do the bidding of these people who they inexplicably hold in such esteem.

So, it was with some anxiety that I heard the Speaker of the Tanzanian Parliament addressing a rally in her hometown and urging people to “deal with” anyone heard “maligning” the president, who is also chairperson of the ruling party — the Speaker’s party.

I am using the phrase “deal with” because I failed to get an exact Kiswahili translation, but the interpretation of the slang the Speaker used could mean to take steps against another person, whatever those steps could be.

The lady Speaker used a couple of colloquialisms belonging to the urban underclass meaning to “take action” against such a person, and maybe she did not understand that she could have been unwittingly urging her people, especially the youth – her meeting was attended mostly by youth – to commit violence.

I say “unwittingly,” although I have trouble really believing that she could have missed the import of the words she was using, seeing as she taught law at Dar before she got bitten by the political bug.

Most likely she knew what she was saying, and that is my problem.

Violence has become the thread that runs all through the political discourse in this country, so much so that it sounds comical every time we hear some politician bragging that our country is an “island of peace and tranquillity,” something we lost forever ever since President Benjamin Mkapa’s policemen shot an unknown number of people in Unguja and Pemba in 2001, producing our own refugees who ran off to Kenya, and some have never returned.

We seem to want to go down the road of violence, even over trivial matters such as “speaking negatively” of the president. And yet the president is a public official, whose actions must stand acute scrutiny.

The people of this country employ all the politicians who run (or misrun) public affairs, and there should be no reason the people should be afraid to call them out when they fall short of expectations — which is all too often.

So, it is nothing short of outrageous for the Speaker, erstwhile member of the legal faculty, to want to silence criticism of the president.

The Speaker went a little further in her outrage by implying that her “ban” was for everyone inside or outside her party, concerning not only the president but “even myself.”

In other words, in that prohibition let no one forget the Speaker herself. She is also beyond reproach!

There seems to be a contagion in the behaviour of the ruling grandees, wherein they desperately seek impunity, almost as if they expect to misbehave and so seek to protect themselves before the misbehaviour actually takes place. They want “anticipated impunity.”

Of course, her statement has sparked angry retorts, especially from members of the opposition, who have characterised her words as unacceptable, divisive and likely to incite violence. As well they might, because our institutions have been seriously devalued by the presence in them of too many people who tend to have a rather acute sense of entitlement and too weak a sense of responsibility.

What has been termed “imperial presidency” is a real cancer in our polity, and one feels the necessity to deconstruct our power structures so as to install republican institutions, offices, processes and attitudes.

Still, it will remain difficult to make our politicians fully comprehend that ours is a republic and not a monarchy, and that in a republic there are no kings, queens, knights and courtiers. But, even with the difficulties I see, we have no option but to help one another understand the nature of the political system we chose a long time ago.

Ours may be a feeble republic, but it is not a monarchy last time I checked.

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