I should have known something was brewing when, at the very beginning of the year, local radio stations started advertising Tanzania to Tanzanians quite aggressively.

Although broadcasting is dominated by independent entities of varied ethical and political inclination, the big stations seem to tacitly agree that promoting nationalism is worthwhile.

So we sing the song of ourselves to ourselves as part of public life, to luxuriate in our self-regard and remind each other that the continued health of the United Republic must transcend our schisms and frustrations. In other words, where there is smoke, there is fire.

The debate on the structure of the Union has swallowed the draft constitution without pausing to chew, the opposition camp has just walked out of the Constituent Assembly for the first time since it was convened and Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s status as the infallible Father of the Nation is under attack.

Dar es Salaam’s infrastructure has been knocked out cold by the yearly rains, lives have been lost due to flooding and we’ve just been warned that there’s more water on the way. In the past day or two, I haven’t heard the obnoxious boom of fighter aircraft overhead as they practice for our display of military might for Tanzania’s 50th birthday.

Clearly, someone was anticipating trouble. Nobody needs prophetic skills to know that Dar es Salaam and precipitation do not play well together, or to know that debating the Union was always going to be fraught, but the scale of the drama of the Constituent Assembly has been surprising. Latin American soap opera stars need to visit us for some professional training.

Timing really is everything, isn’t it? When the process for the constitution kicked off two or so years ago, I wondered who takes on the challenge of writing a constitution for an entity as complex as a 21st century nation-state in a hurry?

It didn’t seem worth quibbling about because the intention at least is decent and I am not even certain that The Establishment is capable of long-term visionary planning and execution any more or if crisis mode is the only mode that functions for them. If I don’t agree with the pace of the endeavour, I have learned to trust that when a critical political project isn’t convincing enough, someone is likely to try to thrust a parliamentary spear into its heart and kill it.

That said, we did create an absolutely perfect situation for the Union debate to come and bite us in the new constitution, didn’t we? It has only been brewing for as long as the Union has been around, getting stronger with time. It is also a perfect illustration of how far we have come: Tanzania at 50 is apparently not inclined to be dragged along behind policies that it has deep reservations about. The era of Ndiyo Mzee is past.

Whether and how the Union survives is an issue that I am very comfortable being ambivalent about. Just because you inherit a political situation doesn’t mean that you must chain yourself to the thinking patterns of the people who instigated it.

I have opportunistically asked as many of Nyerere’s contemporaries as I can get hold of about why they think the Union came about. I have received answers that sometimes contradict each other. No one ever mentioned a referendum: Like Ujamaa, this was something that our dear National Fathers didn’t allow within sight of a democratic process.

All these sacred cows are just chewing their cud and ailing under our watch. Is Nyerere so special that we should never talk about his humanity, or have people been deriving too much inspiration from North Korea?

How do we get to the bottom of grievances on both sides of the Union? Why should we trust our leaders with the present structure let alone multiple governments? And what will it take to get a reasonably decent constitution, seriously?

This isn’t the mood with which to approach one of the world’s most unique, admired and deliciously complex political phenomena on a big birthday. It is kind of killing the festive spirit.

Specifically, it is killing the festive spirit that radio has been working on for months. Whether state-engineered or otherwise, positive messaging has the simple function of boosting morale.

These wave-riders have made fun of our diversity of Kiswahili accents and invited us to laugh along with them, and it is nice to wake up to the message that it is fantastic to be Tanzanian.

It is a fiction that helps us hold the demons of civil strife at bay, to the best of our collective ability. Ain’t nothing easy about keeping your country together in this ‘hood of ours.

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