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Tanzania is devolving into gangland, but let’s not talk about such things, Ok?

Saturday August 30 2014

Tanzania has been attracting some coverage lately, maybe because we’re a promising economy that insists on shedding its mid-century lefty rogue ways.

From without, the focus on growth and mineral wealth has the sort of determined insistence on a winning narrative that plagues African countries sometimes.

More comforting are the less enthusiastic reports that NGOs and what is left of the left produce, concerned with issues of equity and the unspoken dangers lurking beneath. Yet so far we have managed to avoid too deep a look into local crime.

One of the sharpest critiques this column has ever attracted was a complaint that I am “too tough” on my relatively peaceful and stable country. A critique I happened to agree with to the tune of maybe 20 per cent, with some room left over to consider the merits of said relative peaceful and stability. And although I don’t like to refer to them at all, the security forces have to be raised if the topic can be addressed.

In urban centres, stories are beginning to accumulate about murders, armed robberies of increasing daring, and shootings. Are we slowly turning into the Wild, Wild East and keeping quiet about it? In a typically Tanzanian political move to externalise negative publicity, just a few years ago it was not unheard of for the local press to intimate that thugs involved in organised crime were generally of foreign extraction or had help from “the outside.”

After all, we have always stood as an oasis of beatific pan-Africanist calm in the desert of human-rights abuses, aborted regime changes and various other democratic challenges that have faced neighbouring countries.

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Thus in contrast, and perhaps in especially trying financial times, we could always tell ourselves that some things are intrinsic. As in, Tanzanians are naturally peaceful folk. Aren’t they?

African countries are pitted against each other in competition to garner “world” favour via tourism and trade. We happen to do tourism very well here, and we understand one important thing: There is nothing as skittish as someone who has paid thousands of dollars to have a so-called exotic experience. The slightest hint of trouble and tourist dollars can dry up faster than spit on a Dar sidewalk in December.

Investors can be even worse, no country striving for middle-income status likes to see economic prospects slither off to the competition because of the threat of political instability, or worse. Only the development and aid industries have the stomach for that sort of thing.

So of course, branding and reputation is important. The only question is how far apart reality and the brand can be allowed to stray from each other.

My completely unscientific and purely anecdotal store of evidence seems to suggest that our carefully guarded “peace” and “stability” is facing a credible challenge from the inside.

I have witnessed a man siphoning petrol from a tanker during one of Dar’s traffic jams. Heard the stories of break-ins and people going so far as to steal laundry off lines. All of which actions point in the direction of the desperation of poverty and the crime it engenders, the “alternative” way to redistribute income, as it were.

My suspicion is that generosity of spirit is a social luxury, one that we managed to protect from erosion because relative to each other, we used to be smart enough not to let inequality squash the joy right out of living. And so relatively, our police force was a friendly bunch who didn’t need to bear arms. It all sounds very good on paper.

Unfortunately, here we go with inequality. Positive forecasts of economic growth seem to have come to us hand in hand with an increase in people’s disbelief in our general security. And concurrently perhaps, with the ownership of arms to protect material goods from predators. If that doesn’t sound like social devolution, I don’t know what does.

This is not a political concern that I am raising except perhaps to obliquely berate our security forces for being ineffectual in the face of the increasing local crime rate.

Although the middle and upper classes can be dramatic about these things, they do provide wonderful indicators of security trends. It turns out that we’re as vulnerable as any society to falling down the pitfalls created by inequality. It’s just that maybe we’re still being patient about it.

Burglaries and the rate at which night clubs are adopting a search policy to screen for concealed weapons have nothing to do with factions and parties and camps and everything to do with keeping it real.

There may be people who intend to be surprised at any spikes in violence in the not-so-distant future but I bet it will be the same people who are shocked by any manifestation of class-based revolution, not Tanzanians themselves.

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

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