Oh, right, Jay Kay! The excitement of this coming election has made me just as forgetful as the rest of the non-state media about the incumbent.

As he traverses the vast nowhere land that is the End of a Presidency, it seems right to meditate upon a development under his administration that has had an undeniable impact on the social fabric.

His has been a very media-oriented presidency, which somehow dragged a lot of conversations out into the open, for the most part.

To be fair, he is hardly the first. The introduction of media-president-public relations goes as far back as Nyerere. You haven’t lived a speech until you’ve heard old Julius giggle his way through a public address.

We also had Benjamin Mkapa, who was and remains as dyspeptic a character as any journalist worth their ink-stained fingers should be. Mkapa brought the seriously square belief in lecturing at the people on a regular basis back in the Nineties, so that Tanzanians could feel like we were being told what was going on with the government.

It was direct, it was healthy, it was dependable, and it was fantastically boring.

Then Jay Kay came along and... well. In light of the coming elections, I would be remiss not to mention that this man persuaded 80 per cent of the Tanzanian votership to vote for him in 2005. For a reason. A reason that may have had far too much to do with 20-foot billboards with his benevolent grin glaring down at people who were not used to full-colour ad pages, let alone that.

In the first flush of victory, Ikulu got itself a communications director, as did government agencies and ministries. Social media accounts were opened and the media and entertainment industries were generously treated as friends.

This new environment electrified both the media and entertainment industries.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible for the love to last forever — at least not for the journalists. The profession demands a minimum level of oppositional tension with the government; nobody can sell newspapers by being complimentary about the administration in edition after edition after edition.

After the very first unscripted encounter between editors and a freshly crowned Kikwete proved that the scribes at least had no intention of playing too nice, that relationship became managed.

A few months ago, the entertainment community of Dar es Salaam and beyond threw a party for Jay Kay to thank him for his support for the arts. It glittered and was full of lithesome young people and wealth and beauty and dancing.

In case you were wondering, there were no writers present and it wasn’t the platform for it. But this has been telling. The entertainment industry continued to prosper and flourish under the Fourth Administration, especially for those artists who reasonably kept their works and lyrics away from direct engagement with political themes.

The media industry, however, has faced challenges. I was fairly certain up until a year or so ago that the greatest positive legacy of Kikwete’s presidency would be a thriving, diverse and independent media free from the usual bullying that so many African states subject the Fourth Estate to.

The many incidents of journalists being attacked and threatened, and newspapers being banned, seemed to contradict this notion. Now, the Cyber Crime Act of 2015 seeks to further restrict the space for free and open dialogue, and the ever-lurking Media Bill hangs like a threat over the industry.

The Establishment with its long culture of silence and control was never going to make it easy for society to open up like this. Entertainment is one thing but the coverage and serious investigation of power and its ways is another.

It may be that Jay Kay and his administration came to regret inviting the journalists to do their job. In the past 10 years, Tanzania has opened the Pandora’s box of the Information Age. Maybe this is the proof that this was a media-forward administration after all.

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