Independent consultant and blogger in Dar es Salaam
It is customary to run into the beginning of a new year in a column with a certain amount of fervour and anticipation.
You know, to make January seem like a dynamic departure from the endlessly unspooling ribbon of life and human civilisation. We’re not doing that today. I rather propose to carefully walk into 2025, a year full of continuations that will bear keeping an eye and a brain out for.
Y’all know my enduring obsession with leadership, in all its glorious dimensions. In the humdrum of life, it makes sense: parents, teachers, bosses and whoever lead the rest of us “naturally” and thus the world goes round. I have never bought into hierarchy easily, but this 21st century is starting to make my inner anarchist seem quite sane.
Let’s start far away: I am one of the billions who have observed the US elections with horror while refusing to comment this time around — Americans are spoiled for attentions as it is and it has not improved their character as a global citizen. Sure, you say, Mr Trump is over there and we’re over here, surely the fallout won’t be too bad? Maybe.
But he is — with all due respect — a geriatric man whose daily pronouncements, though taken seriously by a rudderless press, would put him in a gentle care home in my much more reasonable society. Yet here we are, and Mr Trump is a manifestation of a world that seems to have substituted fame for substance — with dire consequences.
Like, his fellowship with Elon Musk. I don’t know what happened to that poor man, but I am willing to crowd fund for his therapy at this point. Power corrupts, and absolute power makes broken people utterly rotten.
Whereas once it was annoying, alarming, immoral to have Mr Musk use the (frankly, kinda made-up) power of his anti-charisma to take over a public space in social media, now he is in a weird relationship with the president-elect that gives him direct influence on major policy issues?
If you step back for a minute and think of it all over a coffee, none of it makes salt-of-the earth sense. Yet here we are. And I wouldn’t talk about these matters of power, toxic masculinity, deranged oligarchs and the tainted love that they attract if it were not for the way that my country — and region — is full of vocal Trump and Elon apologists in the chattering online intellectual class, no less. Where is our self-respect?
To be fair, leftists and other alternative thinkers — once the product and pride of Tanzanian political life, rich with debate and disagreement — have become scarce and even unfashionable. It has crippled us mentally.
What is fashionable nowadays is culture of youth encouraged to ruin themselves via sports betting, womanhood reduced to transactional beauty, discussions about the Miracle of Artificial Intelligence which sound like evangelical exortations, and an irritatingly casual shrug of the shoulders that says: ‘Ndo maisha’ as if there is nothing to be done but run headlong into it all.
To which I say: piffle. This is 2025, and I do declare that common sense is overdue for a comeback. As is slow movement, deep thinking, and ambitions beyond the slight rewards of Andy Warhol’s ’15 minutes of fame.’ Join me, will you? Let’s walk with deliberation into this year and perhaps even enjoy it if we can.
Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report; E-mail: [email protected]
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