When Samia Suluhu ascended the presidency in the wake of the demise of John Pombe Magufuli, I did not exactly wax lyrical over the soft voice and even softer eyes, but I saluted her arrival as should a gentleman who observes protocol and usage.
I did call on all Tanzanian patriots to support her in her efforts to rid this country of something really hideous that had insinuated itself at very the core of our body politic and held our very soul in a mortal grip.
It is a shame that Tanzania had got to a place where people could openly vent opinions that celebrated police brutality, judicial hooliganism and political thuggery, all tolerated, nay, embraced under the departed president.
It happened
So, I make no apology, as decency demands it, that I saluted the arrival of Samia when it happened.
Those of my friends who told me it was too soon to hand plaudits to Samia, I understood. After all, she is just completing a mandate inherited from Magufuli; she is of CCM, by CCM and for CCM. But I could not ignore the wholesome effect that the arrival of Samia had on some of senior ruling-party turncoats.
Suddenly they had seen the light; they had travelled the road to Damascus; they had been born again. Shamelessly, they seemed to have retrieved their brains from safekeeping, after a five-year hiatus. After what I have seen of Tanzanian politicians I now understand why the word is, in certain quarters, a swearword.
But I called for people to give Samia the benefit of the doubt, some living space in which to work some magic that will restore our sanity and allow us to evolve like mature, self-conscious members of a polity that belongs to the higher echelons of homo sapiens, animals that can claim, cogito, ergo sum! I think, therefore I am.
Second thoughts
But I may be having second thoughts after a couple of things our president has said and done, and which I think do not sit well with the enthusiasm inspired from that time in March.
I have heard my president say that the president doesn’t make mistakes. But yes, dear lady, presidents make mistakes, and plenty of mistakes too, and some of them humongous mistakes.
I’m saying this openly to my president so that she may be disabused of wrong notions she may have picked up during the five years she was number two to Magufuli, who I said when he started out as president in the first term that believed he could walk on water. Well, now we know he couldn’t, and nor can Samia.
Second, my president has been saying that it is no time for political/ constitutional reforms because she is fixing the economy!
I don’ t want to use the proper English word for this, but let me say it is misguided,; just as misguided as Magufuli was when he insisted that development is roads, bridges, trains and dams.
All wrong, I am afraid, because it is Political Science 101.
My prayer to the gracious lady is that she be granted the wisdom to resist being a female Magufuli, because she could be.
The late president — a very transparent man, as I have already said — once or twice said that he wished God would save him from being big-headed. Well, He did not, and our current president might want to take the cue.
The fallacy we have been fed about fixing the economy has seemingly assumed a life of its own.
One does not “fix the economy” outside fixing people’s aspirations, yearnings and desires. The economy is not a brick-and-mortar shrine where we all go to worship.
Dizzying changes
While we are still at it, and before we get to starry-eyed, we need to resist the exhilarating effects of vertigo we may have suffered from the roller-coaster of all the dizzying changes we have gone through for the past three months.
While we do that retrospection, let us also summon our senses and look about us and take in what we see. There used to be a young man who went to school in the UK, which did not give him the education to know that you do not marry a wife a year.
I have been to Thailand and have observed how the Thai treated their king as a deity. They now do not rate above an over-priced beggar.
I wish my president well. I think she has acquitted herself quite well, given the little time she had to prepare herself for the complexity of the job, and the many voices she will find herself forced to listen to, some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning.
The more nefarious will come from her party, which has lost the moral authority to rule.
Jenerali Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv.