Weekly Sneak: Customize Your State

Every so often I have this recurring discussion: is Tanzania really a democracy or is she not? Reason being, we've had the same party in power since independence in spite of nearly two decades of multi-party rule. I get the premise- a change in party is a good measure of the robustness of a democracy, or its maturity. While I agree that this is not something that will happen in Tanzania anytime soon, that one measure* is no reason to go pretending we don't live in a democracy. It just needs a bit of tweaking. Anyways, this argument never fails to make me indignant. So of course I rushed back to my keyboard and pounded out another take on a familiar theme: polities are quite individualistic entities. You can't prescribe universal measures of democracy or change without looking at the reality of the political structure in question... and in Tanzania, we have a rather unique set of circumstances:

"This is a measure of how good we have it- we think that we can afford our complacency. Tanzanians know that we don’t have to take to the streets in order to effect change. We can and regularly do talk ourselves into it, however incremental it is. Multiparty politics have done us a world of good in the past decade: the political competition in Bunge is starting to weed out the weak, Zanzibar is coming along quietly as an experiment in power-sharing. We need not fear that Jay Kay will do anything ridiculous to try to stay in power indefinitely, like pretending not to know how old he really is. We can afford to anticipate a change in administration, and we can afford to let complaint be our main method of political action. But we shouldn’t end there."

I do find that the positive political articles are not particularly popular on the blog or in print- readers love a good rant, I guess we all have the taste for blood. And the macro-level stuff really tends to make eyes glaze over :) Well, sometimes I feel optimistic and it will be interesting to see if this one sinks or swims in next week's East African.

*Seriously, folks: we're not Europe. We're not America. Deal with it. And the quest for a political party that is not embarrassing to belong to goes on...

Vive la Revolution!

Had a bit of an Evil Moment with La Dee where we indulged some inappropriate humor. When we were kids back in the Stone Age, the World Health Organization set its resplendent African HQ in Congo- Brazzaville. When those natives got restless (un petit coup par ici, un petit coup par la), the WHO had to move and so it picked it's next solid destination: Harare.

So there we were the other day shaking our heads about how the AfDB was well settled in the "Paris of Africa"- Abidjan- before Cote d'Ivoire collapsed under its own weight. AfDB moved to another civilized part of La Francophonie: Tunis. At this rate, karibuni Arusha, aisee- it is the Geneva of East Africa. Mh, what's that? Riot? Enhe he he, ignore it. Just a little trouble with the natives...