It isn’t by any means the only country where the government has an unhealthy interest in managing citizens’ access to information.

Every so often I hear something from the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority, TCRA, about regulating the use of the Internet in Tanzania, registering websites and blogs, that kind of thing.

This always makes me tense, because there’s simply no trusting governments when it comes to media freedoms. Even the most-well intentioned ones, I am sure, would cheerfully smother the life and independence out of the media if they could get away with it.

Luckily, we live in a world of pretty high transparency and it is generally frowned upon, not to mention increasingly difficult, to gag the Fourth Estate.

I don’t know what the TCRA has in mind, but really, we need to work on minimising formal procedures that bring citizens into contact with government offices.

Can you imagine the paperwork, trying to get something as ephemeral as a website registered? Somehow, the Tanzania Revenue Authority would find a way to join the party. And only a tiny minority of applicants would get lucky.

The whole idea is quite ridiculous, besides which I wonder what they think they would be protecting citizens from with all this regulation.

To date, things have cruised along without heavy-handed interference, and it does make me nervous because it can be easy to get complacent when things are so calm.

Then I hear of a government doing something like Turkey has done, blocking YouTube and Twitter.

When it comes to the video platform, I actually thought they were trying to protect their population from the monsters who lurk in the comments sections, but it turns out that the ban emerged because of accusations of graft at the highest level.

This is a pity. Governments are capable of influencing each other badly. No doubt someone here in Dar is watching the situation and mulling over whether it would be possible to do something similar if, say, damning evidence about something or the other were to emerge right around election time.

Whatever is going on in Turkey and a few other places notwithstanding, the worldwide trend when it comes to online media is progressive and Tanzania does hate to be left out of the fashionable set.

In spite of this, we seem to have a problem with conservatism in two ways. First, we don’t have a lot of really well-developed content outside of formal politics. Worse, we are still averse to conflict and controversial topics in our public dialogues, which doesn’t help expand the range of content.

Online, it is a different story. The anonymity possible there makes it easier for people to express themselves; something about the egalitarianism of the online experience makes people a lot more candid, there is less inclination to be formal or to censor content.

That’s where the fun stuff happens, ranging from rumours and conspiracy theories to breaking stories complete with leaked documents. Online media here at least isn’t competing with legacy media, whose relationship with the powers that be already has a routine cast to it.

And it has been a while, I suspect, since traditional media helped people organise against power in a progressive way.

The movements of the 21st Century may not be all that robust, Tahrir Square and the Occupy movements having shown themselves vulnerable in the face of state violence, but they are very well documented and easily organised with not much more than a smartphone and some free social media sites. It is a brave new world.

This is how the Media Bill slipped out of my mind until this past week. As it is, the Bill has a habit of showing up at unexpected times, part of the strategy of the establishment. It is a good one: Every two years or so, slip the Media Bill into parliament and hope it’ll pass quickly without anyone noticing.

When that doesn’t work because the media has eyes in the back of its head, let things calm down until everyone is distracted by the latest scandal. Dissect the Media Bill and distribute parts of it here and there in other legislation and hope the media doesn’t notice.

The media notices. Retreat again into ominous silence while the draft for a new Constitution struggles mightily to come to fruition. Trouble is, we’ll need an enabling environment even if the draft constitution doesn’t survive this Assembly.

I am just thankful that the Turkish experience around their elections reminded me that the times to be most vigilant of a Media Bill are coming upon us fast, especially because the establishment has been so very suspiciously quiet of late.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]