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It’s a whole new jungle out there but our wise old leaders just haven’t realised it

Thursday March 23 2017

CCM just had its general meeting this past weekend. I like to occasionally tune into what the Grand Ol’ Party is doing, both for defensive purposes (what are they up to, really) and because who doesn’t love hours and hours of political speeches? Something important is bound to emerge.

Turns out this was the official launch of a period of reform for the party. From the outside it looks as though the same paternalism that we are experiencing under the current regime is being reproduced in a party whose best quality has always been its opportunistic fluidity.

That’s not a contradiction, by the way. The next four years are going to be fascinating, as we may be on the cusp of a credible political shift.

You know what hasn’t changed though? The people on the dais. If any of them was a day under 60 and not either working security, entertainment or the Youth Wing, then they were a miracle. So much old maleness going on there, just so much.

Why is this a problem, you ask? Something about social survival.

I have this hope that one day sooner rather than later we will be led by a contemporary of mine, or preferably someone even younger.

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As it is the laws don’t allow for anyone under 40 to run for the highest office in the land, but that’s just one post out of many. The median age of parliament and that of the Cabinet could use some steady decline.
I am thinking futurisms again and whether our culture of gerontocracy makes any strategic sense in light of the way the world is going.

Many times I have heard people applaud moves to restore what we consider our Golden Age, the beautiful days of discipline and low corruption under Nyerere. And I think it is okay to have a period in history to sentimentalise; everyone needs a decent creation myth to feel good about themselves.

The “African Socialism” that Nyerere embraced lends itself well to that, and the man himself was an impressive intellect and crafty politician whose machinations were at least obviously benevolent in intent. But trying to reproduce that in 2017 is a terrible idea; the world has changed beyond anything Mwalimu would recognise.

When I see these old men of long service on a dais still trying to run a country they were given custody of in their 20s and 30s, I wonder why so few of them appreciate the irony of it. One would think that based on their experience they would rather embrace the chance to take off the mantle of responsibility and place it on younger, stronger and most importantly smarter shoulders.

Science is the issue here. I’m coming to believe that there is a finite of amount of “stretch” that we have in us as people. At the end of the day, let’s admit that ideas are generational and by virtue of mortality we can only ever travel so far in a given lifetime, even ideas-wise.

I am getting increasingly worried about policy-makers making policies for a young nation in a technology-heavy world when they don’t really “belong” to these times natively.

What technology has done to our political culture is one example: Thanks to ICT, the monopolies of power that politicians used to enjoy have eroded. Our freedom of speech has us challenging people who still belong to a culture of elder worship, not the egalitarianism of contemporary life. Our employment/economic growth policies are another.

While the globalised economy is quietly panicking about the coming unemployment disaster driven by automation, we seem to be clinging to the belief we can still force industrialisation to come to our rescue.

I don’t know what the politics of the now or the very near future will look like, but I am rather certain mid-20th century approaches will not be a good fit. A better idea would be to let our politics evolve naturally.
If youth built the country 60 years ago, there is good reason to trust they can do it again right about now when the paradigm shift we are going through is challenging us alongside the whole world.

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

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