By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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Woe unto you if you are caught eating, or serving, juvenile fish. Juvenile fish? Yes, that is fish that has not matured enough to be eaten.

Matured enough? What is this, some kind of Kafkaesque judicial labyrinth that neither the accused nor the prosecutor can put his mind around?

No, it is not something that was written by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the brooding Czech author who depicted situations of dark mystery occasioned by a sinister, oppressive and incomprehensive social and bureaucratic order. No, we are not there yet, but we are making good speed in that direction.

Let me go to prose. A gentleman sits down in a restaurant and orders a lunch of fish and rice. As he starts eating, someone enters the room, introduces himself as an official of the ministry looking after the country’s fisheries and demands to measure the fish to ascertain whether it was sufficiently grown when it was taken out of the water.

It turns out there is a required length from mouth to tail – 25 centimetres – meaning anything shorter than that was kidnapped from some lake or river in its adolescence, and that is a crime according to the laws that seek to curb overfishing.

It has been quite a challenge for the government to implement these fishing laws and regulations, especially because most of the fishermen are seriously poor and will bend any rules to eke out an existence.

So, fisheries officials have been going round impounding fishnets that are deemed to be calibrated to catch underage fish. This has rendered some fishermen jobless but it has not quite solved the problem. Whence, I suspect, the decision to follow the problem downstream, to the restaurant table and to take measurements with a ruler while someone is eating.

The fish is dead

It is important to catch the culprits as people eat the contraband, because then the fish is dead, which means it has been fished and it certainly is not being taken to an aquarium; and it is shorter than 25 centimetres so it was a child at the point of fishing. Flagrante delicto, in legalese.

There can be little doubt that this kind of impromptu inspection of fishy situations has been going around for quite some time, as that seems to be the preferred method of working for this government: Pounce when no one is expecting you, surprise everyone and make arrests of all involved, as television cameras roll to prove you are working very hard.

But there was just one small problem with this sneaky approach. This was no ordinary restaurant and the people eating there were no ordinary mortals.

It was the canteen at the House of Parliament in Dodoma, and the customers were mainly Members of Parliament and staff. This was, of course, an instant cause célèbre, as MPs rose in indignation and accused the ministry responsible for fisheries of having violated parliamentary privilege.

Ridiculous operation

In his good time, the Speaker of the House dissected the operation by showing how ridiculous it was: The use of a ruler and hands of the officer was most probably unhygienic; the fish could have been fished hundreds of kilometres away and transported to Dodoma and kept in a freezer for a couple of weeks before being cooked, thus losing some of the 25 centimetres; will Tanzanians now close their doors when they eat fish at home? There was even a suggestion that the executive was demeaning the legislative by invading the latter’s premises.

I think the Speaker missed the point, which is the growing arbitrariness of our rulers these days, with every petty official trying to prove to his or her superiors that they are hard at work when in fact they are mere causes of disruptions and annoyance. What made this incident noteworthy is the fact that it happened on parliament’s premises.

When it is done elsewhere, hardly anyone notices, and unfortunately these are the realities of our daily lives. I sincerely believe that bureaucrats think they own us and they can do anything they want with us.

As to the executive violating the sanctity of Parliament, this has been done over and over again, with the acquiescence of parliament’s own officials.

This business of the juvenile fish is but a case of over-enthusiasm of some silly and misdirected bureaucrat thinking like all of them around us.
It is laughable, but it is not funny.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]