This laughable Bill will only deliver us a stillborn Katiba; let’s start again, shall we?

There has been more posturing and grandstanding than explanation and clarification and where we might have expected light, all we’ve got is heat.

It looks to me like we are about to squander another opportunity to do great things simply because of the desire of some politicians to score debating points by obscuring issues.

This state of affairs is not necessarily surprising for those who have followed the saga from its start. As stated above, the minister said there was no writing of a new Constitution, but those with particular issues they wanted to raise with the current one could do so by jotting down a list of likes and dislikes.

This produced an outcry from civil society and opposition politicians, who condemned the minister and called for her removal.
Surprisingly, the president promptly went public, saying a new Constitution would indeed be written and that he was about to take action to see to that. But the minister was not going to eat humble pie so easily, so she put together, hugger-mugger, a Bill that was so laughable that the only conclusion has to be that she wanted it to be rejected outright by parliament, which it duly was.

One reason it was thrown out was that it had been drafted in English in a country where that colonial language has been banished, but there were other issues too, such as the immense powers vested in the president in the whole process.

Now, she has tabled another Bill very similar to the first one, only it is in Kiswahili this time.

The opposition parties have rejected this one too, especially the declared intention to hurry it through parliament with a view to enacting it into law before it has been debated by the public. Once again horns have been locked, but the bigger bull has the bigger horns represented by a crushing majority in parliament. So, willy-nilly, it will become law.

The response of the opposition has been to boycott the debate on the Bill, so every time a debate session has started, they have walked out to demonstrate their displeasure.

The response of civil society, especially a motley group calling itself Jukwaa la Katiba (Forum on the Constitution) has been to threaten mass demonstrations across the land if the government goes ahead with a rushed process, which is exactly what the government is doing.

Are all these signs of big trouble coming our way, or are they just the symptoms of a tired governance structure sagging under its own weight on the one hand, and on the other a rising political desperation on the part of a population that feels the urge to break out of a cocoon but doesn’t know how? I don’t know…

Matters are further complicated by the absence of a culture of argumentation and disputation, which has given way to threats and ultimatums. In a polity where politics is dead and leadership has become dealership and leaders have become dealers, what counts is what seems to work today, for tomorrow might dawn without us.

It looks to me like this project is dead on arrival, squashed into lifelessness by an inept midwife and a mother too scared to push properly.

There was a case for no conception at all in the first place, for stillborns are a source of misery, not joy.

I have said it before, but it suffers repeating.

We have lost our way and need to retrace our steps to the point where we went astray, and from there determine exactly where we were headed when we set out. This constitutional debate among the deaf, without some basic entente, will only push us deeper into the wilderness.

Jenerali Ulimwengu, chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper, is a political comentator and civil society activist based in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]