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A week to go to Kikwete’s fantastic first 100 days
2006-03-20 08:44:00
By Rayner Ngonji
As President Kikwete’s first 100 days in office arrive, his way of administration has already become an animation, gripping the imagination of multitudes.
He has shown what kind of man he is. To be frank he has unleashed his claws and shown what kind of a leader he is.
Actually he is the man Tanzanians have for long been praying to have.
There is already a lot of positive gossip on the streets over his way of running things.
Within these days he has won people’s hearts and built confidence in him and proved to be a man who can conquer their development thirst. He is a man of action not mere words.
He doesn’t mince words. He calls a spade a spade.
When you talk of intervention in its real sense of intervention, Kikwete’s administration is the right prescription.
A crisis is a situation where immediate action is needed to calm the people.
Let’s say a burning issue is dividing people, where the formation of commissions doesn’t help much but rather worsens the situation.
For nearly 20 years now we have been used to solving different conflicts by constituting commissions. Some of them didn’t even work, in the sense that the reports were never made public nor told of the action taken.
When a man like Kikwete breaks the long tradition of silencing issues through commissions and decides to act immediately, it is something incomprehensible to not too few conservatives.
But for the common man his way of administering things has boosted the morale of cooperation amongst members of the public.
The way he has dealt with the problem of banditry, corruption and intrigues in serving the public has really created confidence in the government.
One area that has garnered praise from members of the public is the suspension of an operation of evacuating machingas and touts on the streets, which claimed three lives.
This is not the first time an attempt is made to evacuate the machingas from their businesses.
There had been several others of similar nature.
But all had failed.
What most previous operations achieved was massive looting of the goods collected under the pretext of cleansing the city, leading to these operations being seen as a way to gain by those involved in it.
There could be multiple factors leading to their failure.
However one principle aspect is that there were neither actual preparations nor study to establish the magnitude of the problem. It was being handled like a fire tender.
These people have been struggling for survival and as some of them have put there legally because they had been provided with licenses.
When you run a business of such nature however small it might be, it means there is a long list of people living on that.
There have been stories of some aged food vendors popularly referred to as ’mama lishe’ educating their children up to university level just by selling buns.
You can just figure out how crucial the tiny business means to such women and other middle and minimum wage earners is. So, under the circumstances any action to disrupt it or totally ban it altogether is means a lot…declaring hunger on them.
They don’t have a place to go and proceed with their activity. Is it a way of fixing them?
If the exercise had been genuine and effected with good intentions the authorities would have summoned the petty traders and any stakeholders, discuss the issue and reach a consensus on how to go about moving them.
These are human beings, they have their rights and belong to different lifestyles.
They have the right to know why they are being moved from one place to the other, where are they taken to and how strategic business wise is the new area?
It’s a question of logic and not of discipline.
Some of the money used in establishing the businesses has been earned under very difficult conditions.
Some might have spent years to save the few shillings they used in setting up the micro-business.
When you corrode it you create hard times for the concerned families instead of cleansing the city.
Nobody is disputing the need for a well arranged city, but what is being advocated here is there should be an acceptable system for both parties to carry out major changes to anyone’s livelihood.
Otherwise you are bound to meet with unavoidable resistance. Dar es Salaam is not the only city flooded with petty traders. They are found even in developed countries.
The only difference is that theirs is being run under strictly hygienic conditions since all roads are tarmac, are swept and drains are well cared for, and no mounds of rubbish pile up.
City authorities here can never learn anything about keeping the city clean. All they can do is to repeat plans of employing their ex-Std VII relatives to grab utensils from mama lishe or goods of the machingas, causing a terrible fracas in Mwanza.
Is there a solution to that, Mr Lowassa?
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