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Empty words on development, while cashing in on plague
2007-08-13 08:42:35
By Rayner Ngonji
One of Tanzania`s major impediments to development is laxity on the part of our leadership.
No one seems to be seriously committed to national development, but there is no shortage of rhetoric mongers and rally (or may be rabble) rousers.
The third phase President Benjamin Mkapa himself acknowledged the existence of the problem right from the time he took office late 1995.
In his inaugural address to the first multiparty Parliament at the Karimjee Hall in Dar es Salaam on November 30 1995, the president said: `We Tanzanians are well known for empty words, something which is not healthy for our development.`
He denounced the habit and promised to wipe it out during his tenure of office.
Whether that has been achieved or not is not the issue in today’s discussion.
After all we all know the tactics of electoral processes in African countries. They involve all sorts of dirty games and intrigues.
Usually they are not only empty words but gratuitous assertions delivered on a regular basis, by government spokesmen to the hopeless populace.
Empty words are quite often well received, because their hollow content only becomes apparent some time later.
However, gratuitous words are quite often received with anger, disbelief and hostility the moment they are repeated, after people start seeing through them.
A good example of a gratuitous message was delivered by a harebrained functionary way back in the 1980s.
This memorable occasion to an astonished audience of unpaid cotton farmers, occurred in Mwaya Division in Morogoro Region in the early 80s.
There were reports of 50,000 tonnes of cotton piled up somewhere in the villages for a year or two.
The functionary when visiting the area, urged the diligent, hard working, underpaid cotton farmers to produce more, without even mentioning what measures were being taken to ensure that their cotton would be bought.
How could any cotton farmer be expected to listen to ministerial calls for increased production, when the 15 bags he and his family produced the previous year haven’t been bought yet?
About five years ago I accompanied the Minister of State in the Prime Minister`s Office to assess the outbreak of plague in Lushoto District.
The disease had for more than ten years menaced residents of the district and for the first time in history it extended its `wings` to Dar es Salaam.
When we were in the affected areas (in the villages) some villagers, bitter about the persistent outbreaks of the plague, were frank in what they said.
They told the minister in point blank terms that efforts to wipe out the disease would not succeed because some government officials in the district had converted the disease into an income generating project.
They charged that chemicals to fight the disease were brought by the government to the area in time, but the officials did not distribute them until the disease surfaced, when it was already too late to control it.
Plague is caused by fleas which are brought into homesteads by rats.
The disease is usually experienced during rainy seasons. The only way to fight plague carriers is by spraying and maintaining cleanliness in the houses before the rains start.
That is why the chemicals are brought in advance to make them reach the targeted places in time.
Thus, when the chemicals are applied in advance, the possibility of the disease striking hard becomes minimal.
But when the delivery of these chemicals is delayed until the disease surfaces, the chances of controlling it are virtually nil.
The moment the disease strikes, regional and district health personnel start rushing all over the place.
Looking very busy, they are actually contributing nothing to the much trumpeted war on the plague.
What they are doing is engaging in a series of ill-defined circulatory movements round the plague hit villages, which will enable them, a short time later, to walk majestically into the accounts department of the local government, and slam a hefty, authenticated claim for night allowances on the accountant`s desk.
While people were dying in Lushoto every year from this tenacious disease that laid low almost half the population of Europe in the Middle age, nothing credible seems to have been done.
Yet astonishingly enough, in Bongo, some resourceful government cadres were able to convert this plague into an income generating project!
These were very serious allegations, of course, no one expected the minister to act immediately without carrying out an investigation to establish the truth or otherwise of those allegations.
But at least those who offered the information should have left with the minister for a further investigation but this was never done.
What actually took place was just normal questioning of the local officers, who were, of course, the last people expected to spill the beans on this murky issue.
That is just one example among dozens of incidents of sheer negligence, where action should have been taken to rectify the situation.
What is even worse is that it now appears difficult for the government to discipline any civil servant accused of clear irregularity.
The regulatory bodies inside the one-party civil service have in fact now been turned into toothless bulldogs.
It is worth noting that disciplinary action which should quite obviously be taken in the public interest is not, why? Because some misguided people in power consider this as `giving in to opposition demands,` as they may in actual fact know what took place.
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