Whoever wants to study how not to write a constitution — or how to botch any process they don’t want but must pretend they want — should travel to Dodoma to learn first-hand how it is done.

The ingredients are all there, so that you do not need to be a genius to fail in the effort. If you — even cursorily — scan the whole succession of events ever since the first statement was made about writing a “new” constitution, you will not need a handbook to guide in how not to go about the task.

First of all, make sure there is minimum consensus on all the major issues in your political, economic and cultural spaces. You agree, of course, that you are a nation, mainly because whoever colonised you bundled you together with all those others, and made you work for her as her chattels, and upon her departure she conferred nationhood on you.

And you came to like the notion of a nation, especially the trappings — your flag, your leaders, the national anthem, the slogans and the pomp — almost all copied from the departing lady. You even had people in uniform standing behind the leaders as they spoke.

You also maybe agree on the boundaries of the piece of real estate the lady left in your hands. Well, almost, because a madman on your borders can one day wake up with an idea in his head and cross one of those borders and declare where he is standing part of his country.

Or, much later, a lady in the opposite direction can come up with the idea that the sea you thought you shared together is all hers. The madman you may have had to beat back into his country and out of his job, and the lady you may want to encourage to learn from that lesson.

Apart from that you didn’t — don’t — have to agree on much else, and where there may have been too much agreement, you work to lessen it. You want education, yes, but what education? Do parents pay for their children’s school, or is the education of all the nation’s children the duty of the state? Do you have a unified curriculum for all schools, or does each school fashion its own education?

Is the medium of instruction Kiswahili or English? Or French? Or Gikuyu, Kisukuma and Luganda? To all these questions you have no answers, So, you leave them be.

Your country has discovered huge natural resources. Gold, diamonds, coltan, timber, gas, oil, uranium, etc… but there are signs of people wanting a bigger share of the wealth at local level. Do you give in to their demands, or do you simply send in the boys with the guns to beat some sense into their heads?

Are these and other questions related to the life of the nation too thorny, or too involving, or too irksome? Just leave them, and in the fullness of time, they will find their solutions.

But you can advance matters by writing a constitution, which might help in giving the answers sought. So, without wasting time in barren discussions, you appoint a team to draft a constitution, it works for more than a year, presents you with a report, which you in turn give to a special parliament, which you composed by amalgamating the ordinary parliament with a few people who will never agree on a thing.

Then, as you hurtle down the slope to futility, you allow the idea to thrive that the special parliament can jettison the constitution review commission’s work lock, stock and barrel. Around this notion, cabals begin to mushroom. Each party tries to rein in its members to toe a given line, but party lines are blurred in places.

You can see the confusion rising, along with the frustration of those who thought that this time there was a real chance for a new constitution. You now know for sure that those people in your own party who did not want a new constitution do not want a new constitution.

Then sit back and pray.

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]