By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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Ah, the lumpenproletariat. One of the favourites of my late secondary school history teacher.

I am proud to say, coming from this lovely country that was once going somewhere but seems to be taking a turn towards a Banana Republic, that I am definitely a proletarian, but I protest the lumpen bit.

It’s been an eventful month in Tanzania vis a vis two annually occurring reports that, under normal circumstances, only attract the attention of economist types whose job it is to understand the implication of thousands of Excel tables for the welfare of your average tomato grower or bicycle repairman.

For the rest of us, the highlight has always been condensed into one sentence: “The economy is growing at x per cent.”

And it has worked. Tanzania’s government has always treated its populace as lumpenproletariat by default, and we haven’t done much about it.

There wasn’t much cause before: Social services however poor were making inroads into our proletarian state, investing and improving the only element that actually matters in a republic: Its people. Besides, the state was relatively benign on a continent with such low standards you have to dig several kilometres to find a principle or two.

So in this tacit agreement we the sheeple would remain peaceful and be not too forcibly fleeced. Thus the refrain every year that Tanzania’s GDP was growing at a rate of 7 per cent has been left widely uncontested.

Trickle-down economics and laissez-faire had done their bit in a couple of decades to cushion us from the impact of corruption, structural adjustment programmes and so forth.

Smartphones became a thing. Literacy in telephony is its own thing, it’s not taught in schools, which makes social media so fascinating and hard to regulate a phenomenon.

Jamii Forums is 10 years old now, if not older. We got television, multiparty politics and a whole new generation that might be proletarian but in a completely different way than in 1977. We grew up a little.

It sounds so obvious when one types it out, but somehow this Fifth Administration seems to have missed the countrywide memo.

First they took away our Bunge Live TV hoping to shut us out from what goes down in Dodoma. Which only created excellent opportunities for online and alternative platforms.

Then this year, out of nowhere, parliament got into a shoving match with the CAG over his annual report. And to ice the cake of dreadful mistakes, the government told the IMF not to make its Tanzania report available to the public.

So here you have a citizenry entering its adolescent phase in terms of democratic republican development, a proletariat armed with smartphones and the Internet, and two documents that have been Verboten! by Daddy State.

As everyone knows, the most effective way to make sure a teenager does not engage in an unwanted behaviour is to forbid them to do it. So guess how long it took to leak the IMF report?

Discussing this online with other wags, one suggested that we proles are still kinda too dumb to understand economic data. My reply: Sure, good point.

But underestimating a nation made up of mostly millennials and post-millenials seems rather ill-advised. Before I used to wonder what my government was thinking. Now I wonder if it is actually thinking. 1977 you could beat the citizenry at tic-tac-toe. It’s 2019 and we have learned 3D chess...

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