By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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One of the unexpected outcomes of writing a column is the amount of questions one gets about the state of the Tanzanian media.

Having grown up in the single state media-controlled 1980s and 1990s, I am a very big fan of how far we have come with liberalising our media space. Thus, it is always a surprise to me that so many consumers are unhappy.

The general feeling is that the media is biased, addicted to controversy and generally unregulated. There is little truth to this: Like any profession, the media self-regulates to higher standards than the state could. But I understand the pleasures of taking people and social progress for granted.

Things have become different since the restrictions on media freedoms that have happened in the past few years.

Interestingly enough, a free media encourages quality precisely because the more credible and thorough your paper is, the more advantage you have over poor-quality competitors.

In a restricted space, newsrooms are put under pressure to sell under any circumstances, leading to a deterioration in overall quality. When you can ban newspapers for speaking truth to power, you deserve exactly what you get.

Which is why last week has been thrilling. Retired CCM secretaries-general Yusuf Makamba and Abdulrahman Kinana wrote a strongly worded letter that named only one person on a list of what are actually major accusations.

The named man is honcho of a toilet rag of “newspaper” and an all-round terrible person. He has been in operation, ironically, since this “clean” administration came to power and has done things that make professional newsrooms nauseated.

There seems to be no limit to his unscrupulousness and there was no way to bell him as the cat...until two senior retired party cadres had enough of him and whoever is using his outlet to create mischief.

This is so very pleasing. At last someone is talking about state capture; no matter how vaguely phrased, the letter was on a CCM letterhead – you kind of have to know this country to begin to understand what just happened.

I am hopeful that through this action we will come back to respecting the work that the free media actually does.

It’s not about the bottom trench of Nigerian movies and entertainers’ complicated love lives. It’s about the media houses and journalists who quite literally live and die by the code of speaking truth to power.

It is about the cost of having ethics. As much as idiots try to present my writing as anti-CCM, the truth is much more complicated than that. I have no party and never will join a group that tells me what to think, ever. But I ken what’s up with the internal fighting between factions.

So, yes: It is a relief and a hope that Makamba and Kinana did what they did. They have opened a door. Who dares to walk through it? We shall see. And we shall judge.

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