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Imagine a university life without politics! It’s sterile

Monday May 21 2018
magufuli

Tanzania's President John Magufuli has told university students not to engage in politics. FILE PHOTO | NMG

By ELSIE EYAKUZE

Well, this is confusing. President John Magufuli told university students not to engage in politics as he addressed students at, you guessed it, a university. I appreciate his concern.

As President Magufuli pointed out, thousands of students are studying on government loans funded by taxpayers. They are an investment and, of course, we would like our money’s worth as they gain skills and build our economy after graduation. 

But. Semantics. It honestly sounded like university students, who are adults and voters, were being told not to engage in anything that might be labelled “politics”... a super ambiguous word in Swahili.

These days, if you disagree with anything the government does or says, you are accused of being political. If you vehemently promote or defend anything the government does or says, guess what? Political. If you simply ask questions? Political.

And certainly if you engage in student politics of any stripe like commenting on Tanzanians shift from being a friend to Palestine to courting Israel and how this is a historic departure from our international relations regime in say a political science class? Probably politics. 

It’s like, why is politics a bad thing? Universities are a crucible where young minds are heated and forged. They are a natural concentrated spaces for politics as students debate and learn and refine their own world views and how power should be organised within it.

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Politics is hardly a simple matter of knowing your Karl Marx, or choosing a party to register with. It is about your views on morality and fairness and feminism and development and what you will or will not do for money and which laws you think are just or unjust and should you become a lawyer, to serve your vision of a fair society. 

If our students don’t engage in political thinking at university level, what kind of undercooked professionals might we end up with in the workforce? Will they have the moral certitude we so badly need to really develop our society?

Politics is also about reacting to announcements that any students applying to get a government loan would be ineligible if their parents or guardians have a business licence.

You can imagine the outcry this caused and the intense debate about class, actual incomes, fetishisation of poverty, individual rights of the student — they have to pay the loan not their parents. 

It seems to have worked. In questioning the rationale and morality and applicability of this policy, documentation has emerged from the loaning body that this is in fact not the case. Students whose parents and guardians have a business license need not watch their chance at a degree fade away.

Students who are looking to make the leap from home — no matter how well off their parents might be —  no longer need to feel trapped. 

University is a good equaliser anyways and who knows where our next great minds will come from?

To be fair, we all know that sharp young Tanzanian minds were not going to heed the warning not to engage in politics. There are some forms of abstinence that just don’t happen on campuses.

But it did make me think that perhaps my president has a point about keeping politics out of universities... but maybe it isn’t the students he should be warning off. 

Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: [email protected]

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