The importance of being Tundu Lissu in this new age of arbitrary authority

The cavalier style of President John Pombe Magufuli is percolating down to new levels every day, with officials high and low seeming to believe that the more arbitrary you are, the better your chances of survival in this eccentric administration.

The latest has been the Minister for Legal and Constitutional Matters, Harrison Mwakyembe, who recently stated that he would deregister the Tanganyika Law Society (TLS) if it elected as its president a well-known opposition parliamentarian at its annual meeting in Arusha next month.

Here, Mwakyembe was only serving as a loudhailer, echoing the sentiments expressed by his boss a few weeks before. In effect, Magufuli had already expressed his displeasure at the likelihood of political party influence on the TLS conference.

But Mwakyembe is a lawyer – a PhD at that – and a renowned lecturer in his days at the University of Dar es Salaam. While one can cut Magufuli some slack for being a holder of three chemistry degrees and nothing else, it is much less acceptable when such gaffes are made by a “learned friend” of such standing.

Aside from the impropriety of the blatant interference in the workings of a professional organisation, Mwakyembe should know that his words amount to a campaign in favour of the opposition MP. The majority of TLS members are young lawyers, and many of them are not exactly ecstatic about the government. Telling them how to vote and how not to vote will not be taken too kindly.

Now, the politician in question is none other than Tundu Lissu, the principal legal man in the opposition and the main thorn in the government’s flesh, bashing Magufuli in parliament and outside it. He is a regular guest of the law courts before which he is regularly hauled to answer this or that charge of sedition.

Frankly, Lissu can be annoying, with his application of the kind of brutal logic that I know no African ruler would tolerate. Sometimes I suspect Lissu has chosen to be a disciple of John Maynard Keynes. Was it not the great economic philosopher himself who said, “Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking”? That is just what Lissu loves putting into action, and he does so with gusto.

What Keynes calls unthinking is exactly what we are suffering. Progressively, we have been made to lose that faculty that makes the human mind tick, the ability to observe phenomena, appreciate situations, make judgements and communicate intelligibly.

Of late, we have been told by Magufuli and his subalterns that there is no room for politics in the body politic, because elections were held back in 2015, and, unbelievably, that has all but ended politics except for a few timid attempts at what apologetic politicians call “internal” meetings.

The media is under attack, with draconian laws that seek to prescribe who can be a communicator, silly impositions of certificates, diplomas and degrees, totally unmindful of the fact that the right to communicate is a fundamental human right, very close in importance to the right to eat and the right to inhale oxygen.

No one should have the right to say who is a communicator and who is not, any more than they should have the right to say who eats and who doesn’t.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Maybe. In these crippling circumstances, wherein sacred principles are being trampled on and the human spirit is being slowly asphyxiated, Lissu joins the fray.

He criticises, rightly, the TLS for remaining silent and hiding “in the little cubicles of law chambers, even when our very constitutional and legal orders have come under the most vicious and sustained assault by those in power,” and promises to end all that. That’s what makes Magufuli and Mwakyembe afraid.

A strong and vocal legal fraternity is a bulwark against arbitrariness and the tendency of rulers to ride roughshod over people’s rights. Tanzania needs such a body, especially now when indications are that those in power would like to have the ability to do whatever they like without being held accountable for anything.

That Mwakyembe should come out so loud and so abrasive will not raise too many eyebrows, because he has, over time, raised eyebrows so often that they have refused to come down again. He needs to survive.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]