Jenerali Ulimwengu
9 November 2009
opinion
Nairobi — Once again, a Nairobi-based publication has given us a trenchant cartoon on the Tanzanian political situation, although this time, mercifully, without arousing too much ire in Dar es Salaam.
An earlier cartoon brewed up a veritable storm some four years ago, when a Kenyan paper depicted the Tanzanian media as a bunch of sycophants falling over themselves in their scramble to be the first to lick Jakaya Kikwete's designer leather boots.
The brouhaha that greeted that drawing within Tanzania's media circles bordered on the hysterical, as commentator after irate commentator took turns to savage the hapless cartoonist and his publishers.
Who did the Kenyan cartoonist (actually a Tanzanian) and his bosses think they were?
Didn't the Tanzanian media have the right to show appreciation of their national leader if he was doing the right things?
That Kenyans had no one in power to feel good about, was that the fault of the Tanzanian media?
Et cetera, et cetera, for a month of Sundays.
This time round, the commentaries have been as few as they have been staid.
The new cartoon depicted Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, whose life was being celebrated some four weeks ago on the 10th anniversary of his death, handling a class the old fashioned way, cane in hand, meting out corporal punishment to laggards, truants and other juvenile miscreants in his class.
Trouble is, the little offenders standing awaiting their turn under the rod can be identified as the main characters in the political soap opera that has been going on in Tanzania, in which supposedly mature men and women have been behaving like street urchins, trading insults and slurs with the expertise of fishermen's wives.
The caption that goes with the caricature reads, "If Mwalimu were to come back."
It is possible that the reason for the relatively quiet reception given the latest cartoon resides in a complicit public that wishes that the cartoon message were reality, that the Great Teacher himself were back and kicking butt.
As I have had occasion to indicate in this space, there are just too many Tanzanians who believe that had Mwalimu been alive today there would have been less corruption and people's lives would have been better.
Even if this is obviously delusory, it is a firmly held belief among many a Tanzanian that Mwalimu Nyerere would have found a way to rein in the more egregious excesses of his children now in power, though it is of course understood that the caning would have been oral rather than corporal.
There are historical antecedents for this almost mythical belief that, were he still alive, Nyerere would have made a difference and that he would have found a way to punish the corrupt and the inept, the bigoted and the hypocritical.
In the 1990s, with Ali Hassan Mwinyi in power and a generalised belief that corruption was strangling the nation on his watch, Mwalimu walked out of retirement and took centrestage, publicly pillorying Mwinyi's government in numerous well publicised and well attended press conferences.
In those days, running up to 1995 and the first multiparty general elections, Mwalimu set himself up as the conscience of the nation and boldly said what he felt.
Unhappy were those who, while holding public office in government or the ruling party, drew his attention for the wrong reasons.
Once, the late Horace Kolimba, then secretary general of the ruling party, made a public statement claiming that Mwinyi had done a stellar job in his two terms as president and that he should therefore be supported for a third term, which would entail a major constitutional amendment.
It is hard to say whether such a suggestion, made by such a powerful party official in that monopolistic single-party environment, would have been shot down by any other societal force had Mwalimu not been around.
It was Nyerere who single-handedly took on Kolimba, calling a press conference of his own and telling the man to hold his peace, emphasising the importance of the two-term limit that was still in its infancy.
Nyerere then travelled to Dodoma, where he invited himself to the ruling party's executive committee meeting to drive the point home, telling Mwinyi in plenary: "I handed over power to you in 1985, and you have to hand over to someone else in 1995; otherwise my job is not done." That thinly veiled threat was enough to dampen any exuberance some cheerleaders may have started feeling.
He demonstrated this very personal gravitas -- in this phase he did not hold even a ceremonial title in any forum -- over and over again, from taking onto himself Benjamin Mkapa's presidential campaign in the face of the Mrema phenomenon, to castigating Mkapa for selling the National Bank of Commerce for a song. And the people listened to him, though Mkapa paid him no mind on the NBC issue, and then on others.
Sadly, Nyerere is gone forever and, though his ideas are alive and inspirational, we should not expect him to flog our thieves for us; we must do it ourselves.
It is only when we stop outsourcing our problems to a deceased patriarch that we will start taking our own lives and our nation's future into our hands.
As for those truant leaders, the more we have citizens brandishing their civic and political sticks to give them a good hiding, the more we will be sure that bad consciences will be matched by smarting posteriors.
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