Outsourcing our crisis to a late patriarch

In the 1990s, with Ali Hassan Mwinyi in power and a generalised belief that corruption was strangling the nation on his watch, Mwalimu walked out of retirement and took centrestage, publicly pillorying Mwinyi’s government in numerous well publicised and well attended press conferences.

In those days, running up to 1995 and the first multiparty general elections, Mwalimu set himself up as the conscience of the nation and boldly said what he felt.

Unhappy were those who, while holding public office in government or the ruling party, drew his attention for the wrong reasons.

Once, the late Horace Kolimba, then secretary general of the ruling party, made a public statement claiming that Mwinyi had done a stellar job in his two terms as president and that he should therefore be supported for a third term, which would entail a major constitutional amendment.

It is hard to say whether such a suggestion, made by such a powerful party official in that monopolistic single-party environment, would have been shot down by any other societal force had Mwalimu not been around.

It was Nyerere who single-handedly took on Kolimba, calling a press conference of his own and telling the man to hold his peace, emphasising the importance of the two-term limit that was still in its infancy.

Nyerere then travelled to Dodoma, where he invited himself to the ruling party’s executive committee meeting to drive the point home, telling Mwinyi in plenary: “I handed over power to you in 1985, and you have to hand over to someone else in 1995; otherwise my job is not done.” That thinly veiled threat was enough to dampen any exuberance some cheerleaders may have started feeling.

He demonstrated this very personal gravitas — in this phase he did not hold even a ceremonial title in any forum — over and over again, from taking onto himself Benjamin Mkapa’s presidential campaign in the face of the Mrema phenomenon, to castigating Mkapa for selling the National Bank of Commerce for a song. And the people listened to him, though Mkapa paid him no mind on the NBC issue, and then on others.

Sadly, Nyerere is gone forever and, though his ideas are alive and inspirational, we should not expect him to flog our thieves for us; we must do it ourselves.

It is only when we stop outsourcing our problems to a deceased patriarch that we will start taking our own lives and our nation’s future into our hands.

As for those truant leaders, the more we have citizens brandishing their civic and political sticks to give them a good hiding, the more we will be sure that bad consciences will be matched by smarting posteriors.