Ex-ministers ought to guard against vengeful sentiments

The two were former Home Affairs minister Charles Kitwanga and former minister for Information, Culture, Arts and Sports Nape Nnauye, the first making a far more controversial statement with an announcement of intention to mobilize about 10,000 people in a village in his constituency to close down a water supply facility.

Nnauye, to the contrary, said that if the CCM government doesn’t deliver on its water promises, it may not win the next elections.

The first set of remarks was hotly challenged by an MP from the same region or kindred ethnic group as the former Interior minister, urging him to recall the oath of office taken when he was included in the cabinet, implying that loyalty – and even collective responsibility – doesn’t end with being a cabinet minister.

Ex-ministers are frontline advisers of the government and often expected to state a more reasoned case in case back benchers don’t comprehend government policy or course of action, not desisting from their habitual disposition because they hold no cabinet posts. Putting up s notice of organizing mass protests and disruption was a misnomer.

The second set of remarks was a more principled criticism and drew softer countering from the same MP who sharply differed from his neighbor MP Kitwanga, noting that it isn’t just water that the voters expect from the government in its five year term in office.

He further noted that during the previous four phases of government, plenty in electoral platforms wasn’t realized or implemented to the full, and that includes water projects to various areas.

In that case the MP was constrained to re-emphasize that the voters will have confidence in the government even in relative incapacity to finish numerous water projects, in which case no alarm ought to be raised.

Those familiar with elections research would probably recall that failure to realize water projects is the singularly most important area of concern for voters, as it touches most households with comparable intensities or bother, in ways that education and health or roads can’t match.

In that case Nape was right only partially, that many ruling party MPs would not be returned to the House (and would in that sense fail in the nomination process rather than fail to get the popular vote after being nominated).

The point is that they would be under considerable criticism as individuals and not as MPs from the ruling party as the former minister exaggerated, noticeably.

So there is much less criticism of the remarks by Nape Nnauye in comparison to Charles Kitwanga and thus it is in that direction that emphasis needs to be directed, that as the most vocal MP in that direction said, the oath of office is there for keeps and thus ought to be respected.

A former minister is strictly speaking a minister in waiting, as when the president has a gap to fill, it is upon former ministers that the first consideration goes, depending on circumstances all the same, as they have experience on the job.

More often than not, they have also cultivated plenty of confidence among the public, even if it is possible to make a hazy guess why they were axed at some point and in that context what befell Kitwanga compels a compensatory attitude of sorts.

The idea of compensation might not be known directly to ex-ministers or come up as an intention or deliberate disposition but arise as a reflection of mental torment, of seeking to show one’s worth in the wake of misfortune, of a hurt personality that has either not forgiven what took place, or seeks to reassert itself in an aggressive manner.

Both of those shades of sentiment are wrong, and the premise at a psychological level is that ‘apartness’ or psychological apartheid on the part of an affected individual, when he sees his own position as peculiar, and not just as another CCM MP. It is not something that can be gotten over easily, which explains why it recurs so often.