By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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I remember in my younger youth that one of the benefits of living in Tanzania was the incredible number of public holidays that we enjoyed.

Back in this golden-hued past when optimism came naturally and even millennials were not afraid to pick up the telephone without caller ID, Tanzania did holidays right. Almost every month would come with an event to be commemorated or a cause to be celebrated, perhaps a disease to be battled and vanquished, or a social grouping acknowledgement.

Tanzania wasn’t your average public-holiday-having country, no Ma’m. Frankly, we were legendary.

Did a holiday fall on a weekend? No problem. Just let the next workday turn into a holiday so that we don’t miss out. Even the few places of leisure that existed back then rarely bothered to open during holidays.

This could be explained by the limited disposable income of the times, but in what remains of my optimism I like to believe it was because we practiced good holiday positivity.

Of course, not everybody was enamoured of this little quirk of ours. Time and time again we would hear our nascent private sector and other cranky employers who want people to be indefatigable like machines bemoan the loss of “productive” time. Boo to them! Our penchant for public holidays honoured human experience by providing something that has been vilified, commodified and is now scarce: free time. Free time makes people happy, happy people enjoy life more, and enjoyment of life is key to individual and social health.

In the end, the relentless demand for efficiency won and we trimmed down our mandatory public holidays to a more “suitable” number. Sometimes I wonder, with all the make-work and intensity of modern life and our continuous alienation from nature with all that entails, aren’t holidays actually more necessary than ever? Especially when the march of technology has affected everything it touches and increased efficiency across the board while requiring massive amounts of creativity and innovation which, paradoxically, thrive in free time?

Anyway here we are. Now that we have been standardised into whatever the global ‘best practice’ is, we are now down to the independences and revolutions, the union, labour (workers unite!), the big religious celebrations and year’s end. Nyerere Day was a thoughtful addition to the list, with potential for a future President’s Day perhaps?

This reduction puts a lot of pressure on these remaining holidays to provide a whole year’s worth of free time induced happiness to denizens of Tanzania. We have to make the most of them. Luckily for us the Tanzanian summer break has survived the assault of the maximum labour brigades.

Starting with Independence Day on December 9, there are no less than five holidays over the span of two months before we take a break until April.

Even the most determined offices have a hard time getting in the way of the Tanzanian summer break. Work slows down, the arrival into a new year is somewhat cushioned, and we remember that there is so much more to life.

This year, a few days before our Tanganyikan birthday on December 9, it was announced that we would not be throwing the usual big party to commemorate it. Instead, the funds earmarked for the 2020 celebrations will go towards improving a public health care facility.

I was prepared to be upset, after all traditions have their comforts and this is not how I anticipated our summer break would kick off.

On the other hand, this year’s cancelled celebration was made acceptable by the stated intent to invest in something with potential for a lot more good for a larger amount of people over a longer period of time. It is not the first time it has happened and it may be a mechanism we can use in future when the need arises. We still got the day off, of course.

This cancelled celebration inadvertently brought up an issue that has been floating at the edge of our public conversations: how healthy is our national wallet right now. Did we avoid an unnecessary expenditure? As we all know, Tanzania has not always been a middle-income country. In the rough times of the past when we were vocally, even brazenly broke, we didn’t forgo our holiday celebrations. I posit that we needed them all the more then — this is the closest we could get to a free festival.

Ever since we declared ourselves to be acceptably prosperous, it feels almost treasonous to ask about how we are faring money-wise. We may still face money troubles in our new income bracket, there might be fewer presents this time around. But we can only speculate when it comes to our economy.

Normally I would have concluded by making fun of our culturally-awkward Fathers Christmas and teased our engorged shops for their endless loops of Christmas songs from a playlist that hasn’t been updated since the 1970s. But this year is different. Virtue prevails. Nonetheless, if I can be greedy — ‘tis the season after all — I want to ask for a particular present under the tree. Isn’t it time, Tanzania, that we gifted ourselves Diwali as a public holiday too? I say we do it.

I wish you and yours a safe, healthy, free and happy Tanzanian summer break.

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