The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
Patty Magubira
14 October 2008
Butiama — Mwalimu Julius Kambage Nyerere loathed having places or institutions named after him.
However, he later agreed following mounting pressure from across the country to honour him after he stepped down in 1984.
The desire to name schools, stadiums and many other public and private facilities after him spiralled after his untimely death in 1999, compelling the government to pass a law to curb abuse of the names of the founders of the nation.
The 1999 Founders of the Nation Honouring Procedures Act specifically targets Mwalimu Nyerere and the leader of the Zanzibar Revolution, Mr Abeid Aman Karume.
Neither an individual person nor an institution is allowed to name a place or a facility after either of them unless the establishment doe not mint money from services it offers to members of the public.
"A thin line though exists with the Julius Nyerere International Airport, the prime objective of the law is to honour works of the two leaders by employing areas in which their names can easily be remembered," explains one of Mwalimu Nyerere, Godfrey Madaraka.
The airport, according to Madaraka, who is a member of a committee formed to enforce the law on behalf of his family, is on one hand making money while on the other hand it provides services.
Other members of the committee operating under the central directorate in the President's Office (Civil Service) are drawn from the Civil Service itself, Attorney General's Office, Division of Antiquities and the Zanzibar National Museum .
The Director of National Archives chairs the committee whose responsibility, inter alia, includes to receive and consider applications for a permission to use any of the names of the founders of the nation.
Among the latest applications, which baffles Madaraka, is from the government itself. The government is intending to invest in a state-of-the-art conference centre in Dar es Salaam and name it after Mwalimu Nyerere.
"This being purely a business undertaking is an indication that the government is intending to break the law it itself enacted," he says.
"I was represented by my fellow member of the family in one of the committee meetings and was shocked to hear the government plans to amend the law to meet the needs of the centre," he wondered.
"A conference centre can in no way be defined otherwise, but as a business venture," he stressed and questioned the necessity to amend laws to meet short term demands.
Such amendments lacked consistency, he explained and called on the government to refrain from doing what it would not like to be done by members of the public.
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