Tanzania: Former President Mpaka a Traitor to his Class? [opinion]

When former president Benjamin Mkapa opened his mouth in Nairobi at the Nation’s 50th anniversary, I knew instantly that he had put his foot in it again.By saying that during his tenure as head of state he favoured interviews with foreign journalists rather than Tanzanian ones because the latter were ignorant, he was delivering himself to the cutlasses of the Tanzanian media tribe who enjoy nothing more than bashing Mkapa.

 

Indeed, between the two, they have formed a club of active mutual non-admiration.

 

Mkapa’s love for foot-sandwiches is not new, nor is it limited to the media.

 

He once famously said that Tanzanians were intellectually lazy and lacked entrepreneurial savvy; before that, he had no less famously declared that his party’s manifesto, which had helped him get elected, could not be implemented.

 

To top it all, as he prepared to retire after 10 years in office, he declared that he had all but forgotten about agriculture.

 

Still, his most virulent attacks have always been reserved for journalists, whom he considers untutored, poorly read and ill prepared as they go for interviews and press conferences.

 

He once confided as much to Riz Khan, then of CNN, after they had had a non-interview in Dar es Salaam.

 

I reckon he knew even as he said those words at KICC that the reaction from the scribes in Dar would be knee-jerk, and that they would trot out the usual rejoinders about Mkapa’s own failings.

 

He surely must have known that they were going to ask him what he had done while he was head of media institutions, including the Information Ministry, the (now defunct) national news agency and the two main newspapers at different points of his career.

 

He must have known it, and I suspect that that is why he said, in a rather sardonic way, that nobody should try to sell him in Tanzania because there was no market for him there.

 

But somewhere during the panel discussion he was taking part in, he let slip the remarkable observation that he had turned traitor to his class, and this is what intrigued me.

 

Which class had he betrayed?

 

Traitors to their class are people who, having come from a certain background, grow to rebel against their origins and make common cause with their erstwhile class enemies.

 

It happens when a scion of aristocracy and privilege renounces his padded nest to live as a vagrant, or when a son of the peasantry abandons his dirt-poor class (perhaps by marrying money) and joins the aristocratic enemy.

 

I hope that is what Mkapa meant when he said that he had become a traitor to his class, especially on account of his having forgotten about agriculture.

 

Surely, if one is leading a nation whose population comprises 80 per cent agriculturalists and one forgets agriculture, one is a traitor indeed.

 

While making that statement he could also have been thinking of the business ventures he started while he was president, with his business address given as State House, Dar es Salaam.

 

These are the things that the papers in Dar, once again relishing another season of Ben-bashing, having been serving up.

 

They have also pointed out the obvious: That the Riz Khans of this world, in town for a couple of nights, are in no way capable of knowing what the real problems of a country are.

 

But if he meant, as he seemed to want to mean, that his betrayal was against the journalistic profession, then he falsely accused himself.

 

The fact is, Mkapa has never been a journalist, which explains his very uneasy relations with members of the fraternity.

 

In my dictionary, a journalist is one who, once upon a time, stood quaking in his boots before the news desk, with his notebook in his hip pocket, watching that ferocious beast they euphemistically call the news editor and wondering whether he should hand in his story now or wait till the look on the beast’s face became less ferocious.

 

This, Mkapa never did. Wherever he was posted, he was the Resident Chief Censor, in charge of ensuring nothing got printed that would spoil Julius Nyerere’s appetite.

 

Jenerali Ulimwengu, chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper, is a political commentator and civil society activist based in Dar es Salaam. jenerali@gmail.com

 

-March 29, 2010 by Jenerali Ulimwengu

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Source: www.theeastafrican.co.ke/opOrEd/comment/-/434750/887976/-/item/1/-/f3vm8r/-/index.html (accessed on 30.03.10)