Take your bra off and just put the women in power
Tuesday January 01 2019
Let’s just vote women in as the majority of the leadership for the remainder of the 21st century. At the very least we can aim for a sample size credible enough to put the useless gender debate to rest. FOTOSEARCH
Tanzania spent December 24 watching our president and a delegation of worthies gather at the airport to receive Air Tanzania’s new Airbus 220-300 aircraft, the first of its kind to be acquired by an African carrier.
I witnessed my vice president and my prime minister dance full-suited on hot tarmac in the middle of December with the Canadian High Commissioner, who never once stopped smiling through a three-hour ceremony, and I conceded defeat.
After 50-plus years of keeping its shit together, Tanzania is becoming one hot mess.
“The world would be a better place if it were led by women.” Because dismantling the patriarchy is not about exchanging one set of genitals for another set of genitals, it is about changing the system, I tend to avoid this line of thinking but a friend said that as we contemplated Angela Merkel’s impending retirement. He supported his argument by pointing out that it is not a matter of moral superiority since women aren’t magically better people than men.
It boiled down to a rather dejected observation: For some reason, women in power are not quite as prone to the ravages of hubris and megalomania that ruin men in power.
My friends: This is not a comment about Tanzania alone. This is a comment about you, the men in power that you support, the world we thus create and share, all of us trying to live in it, and the horrors we don’t talk about because it is easier to pretend that patriotism means saying everything is fine even as it is not. And for God’s sake, stop defending the indefensible.
If there is one thing 2018 taught us all, it is that the manners and mores of yesteryear are simply not adequate to the current realities. So in solidarity with all the journalists and commentators worldwide who have also abandoned the old ways, I want to keep it simple this year: 2018 was dire and so far 2019 doesn’t look like being any better.
Saying that is as liberating as taking your bra off at home at the end of a long sticky day.
Because things are so bad, maybe we have never had it better. Paradoxical? Aye, for paradox is oddly enough a necessary ingredient for change.
Women are in no way morally superior to men? So what, let’s just vote them in as the majority of the leadership for the remainder of the 21st century. At the very least we can aim for a sample size credible enough to put the useless gender debate to rest.
Young people are disenfranchised? Well then take a leaf from Bobi Wine and “sexagenarios de ponte deicere” (throw the sexagenarians off the bridge) as Erasmus suggested, for each generation must do its part to build and not destroy the future for their progeny. You know those “in my day” tales of glory they put on endless repeat for us? Well, let us create some glorious stories of our own.
Need something to believe in? Meditate on what patriotism actually means. The first time the East African Community fell apart, one Tanzanian pilot promptly stole a plane from Nairobi and brought it to Dar. Since fate has duly punished Kenya with a ruinously expensive national airline, bless, I would be content in 2019 to give back those Airbuses we paid cash for.
It is time to stride into the 21st century, so let me end by not wishing you a happy 2019 so much as challenging you to make it so.
Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: [email protected]