Outsourcing our crisis to a late patriarch

Once again, a Nairobi-based publication has given us a trenchant cartoon on the Tanzanian political situation, although this time, mercifully, without arousing too much ire in Dar es Salaam.

An earlier cartoon brewed up a veritable storm some four years ago, when a Kenyan paper depicted the Tanzanian media as a bunch of sycophants falling over themselves in their scramble to be the first to lick Jakaya Kikwete’s designer leather boots.

The brouhaha that greeted that drawing within Tanzania’s media circles bordered on the hysterical, as commentator after irate commentator took turns to savage the hapless cartoonist and his publishers.

Who did the Kenyan cartoonist (actually a Tanzanian) and his bosses think they were?

Didn’t the Tanzanian media have the right to show appreciation of their national leader if he was doing the right things?

That Kenyans had no one in power to feel good about, was that the fault of the Tanzanian media?

Et cetera, et cetera, for a month of Sundays.

This time round, the commentaries have been as few as they have been staid.

The new cartoon depicted Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, whose life was being celebrated some four weeks ago on the 10th anniversary of his death, handling a class the old fashioned way, cane in hand, meting out corporal punishment to laggards, truants and other juvenile miscreants in his class.

Trouble is, the little offenders standing awaiting their turn under the rod can be identified as the main characters in the political soap opera that has been going on in Tanzania, in which supposedly mature men and women have been behaving like street urchins, trading insults and slurs with the expertise of fishermen’s wives.

The caption that goes with the caricature reads, “If Mwalimu were to come back.”

It is possible that the reason for the relatively quiet reception given the latest cartoon resides in a complicit public that wishes that the cartoon message were reality, that the Great Teacher himself were back and kicking butt.

As I have had occasion to indicate in this space, there are just too many Tanzanians who believe that had Mwalimu been alive today there would have been less corruption and people’s lives would have been better.

Even if this is obviously delusory, it is a firmly held belief among many a Tanzanian that Mwalimu Nyerere would have found a way to rein in the more egregious excesses of his children now in power, though it is of course understood that the caning would have been oral rather than corporal.

There are historical antecedents for this almost mythical belief that, were he still alive, Nyerere would have made a difference and that he would have found a way to punish the corrupt and the inept, the bigoted and the hypocritical.