By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan is in campaign mode, and she is doing a bad job trying to hide it. In a legal frame where campaign dates are supposed to be signalled by the electoral management authorities — like the referee blows the whistle at the start of a soccer match — all indications are that this particular match has been kicked off silently.

Silently, did I say? Hardly. There has been so much ado around the idea of the upcoming elections that one has to be committed to deafness not to hear. Electoral politics are here, and we better brace up.

I mean, it is going to take at least 18 months before we disengage the electoral gears at different levels. We have to begin with, literally, right now, as we approach our civic elections culminating in the fourth quarter of the year, before we embark on 2025, which will be completely taken up by the general elections.

Why these elections have had to be done in two phases taking up two whole years, search me, but all I know is that enough views were expressed over the past quarter a century to the effect that this was a very expensive way for a poor country to be running elections, and that there are different ways of doing it. But then our government does not need Google; it knows everything.

Read: ULIMWENGU: We either fix our problems or prepare to perish

Ideology-and-publicity chief

So, what has Samia been up to? A few months ago she trotted out onto the savannahs of the country a styled as ideology-and-publicity chief of the ruling party, the behemothic CCM, to call public meetings at which he receives people’s “grievances”.

The meetings have been packed, and the ideology chief has been eager to listen to the complaints, often publicly calling the various officials relevant to the complaints to give explanations on loudspeaker so the people can hear.

It has been an entertaining circus, and the crowds at the meetings must have left feeling that their problems had found solutions.

Only this is a masquerade — though Samia has, of course, lauded her envoy — for nothing will ever come out of such band-aid remedies to a systemic rot that has so entrenched itself in the society that to get rid of it one has to amputate a part of that very society in its governance faculties.

One thing has been very clear from the ideology-and-publicity chief’s bonanzas, and that is that almost all the complaints aired at these meetings point to injustices and crimes committed against lowly and powerless citizens by the government officials sent out into the local areas by the CCM government, and so the ideology-and-publicity chief has been effectively helping the opposition by showing how corrupt this party and its government are.

At times I was wondering whether this ideology-and-publicity czar was not shooting his party in the foot, or whether his own party was not seeing this the way I was seeing it. But then this is Tanzania and does as Tanzania does. We make sense even where we don’t.

But wait. In the lackadaisical manner this party operates, the ideology-and-publicity honcho was appointed and deployed before his immediate boss was appointed, and when the latter (party secretary-general) reported to his office, he found his subordinate already out there drawing crowds, a bit hard to rein in? We shall soon see.

Read: ULIMWENGU: We’re paying dearly for failure to talk

Now, this past week Samia herself mounted her own show with her new appointments to various provincial posts, including the crucial district and regional commissioners.

In a speech to give her foot soldiers their marching orders, it was clear, again, that she was in campaign mode, making critical remarks about the performances of her subalterns and offering tips on how they could do better to win people’s hearts and minds, and votes.

Overall, a cool performance, except that she was missing the point. When she was talking about the poor performance of the people she sends to the regions, or about the corruption networks that have grown parallel to official governance systems, she was speaking to the core of the problem in the governance systems she is inextricably saddled with.

Foreign to constituencies

The people she appoints to these positions cannot, in any way, be viewed as the representatives of the people over whom they rule. They are “foreign” to their constituencies, and they cannot be made accountable for the development of those territories. They are there to do a job and draw a salary, may be also make a little money on the side, and that is all. To expect them to be development agents is to expect blood from a cactus.

These people whom Samia has appointed, promoted or shuffled are her own creations and she cannot complain if they don’t seem interested in the welfare of “their” people, because they are not “their” people.

Perhaps this is hard to understand, but let me revisit one quote, though not verbatim, from her speech to her appointees. She told them that just like she was president of Tanzania, they were also “presidents in your areas.”

Question is, who elected them?