Economic boils in kettle to explode

It has been nicknamed a process of pressing boils, a notion authored by President John Magufuli when inaugurating the 11th Parliament, and he had indeed started doing just as much right after he was sworn in.

For about two weeks he sent permanent secretaries and top officials of executive authorities helter-skelter before picking his prime minister. Only later did he then pick a full cabinet.

A number of observers, failing to pick actual fault with what the president is doing but overly worried about the sheer unpredictability and evident lack of procedure, as accountability is in the first place something programmed, seek furtive answers.

A few such voices have queried over the kind of system the president is seeking to build, so that it takes care of its own problems and no need would arises for sudden visits of the president or the prime minister as is now habitually the case.

JPM and his close aide know that no system can substitute their presence.

What is also evident is that the wrongdoing is more or less systematic, that it should be expected more or less of all ministerial departments and executive agencies.

There is virtually no public organization where top officials will decide to knock and fail to discover ‘boils’ in what those in charge of that department are doing, and often the charges raised against top public officials beggar belief.

In what manner could one comprehend whisking to court two public officials and a businessman who colluded in causing a loss amounting to slightly over 500,000 dollars?

It is also evident that in all cases that have been uncovered so far, little safeguard would have been expected from the superior or supervising body, in the sense of a board of directors stopping mismanagement when it occurs.

Nor for that matter could it be expected that the ministry supervising an executive agency or parastatal organization could possibly have seen wrong things happening and take corrective action.

There was a perfect environment of legitimacy while it still was all wrong!

What one needs to sort out mentally is the extent to which this air of legitimacy has changed to clear illegitimacy.

The answer is that this isn’t the case, but an accident of some sort has occurred.

The bigwigs in the ruling party thought they were putting in place just a hardworking fellow who didn’t have obvious group loyalties in the ruling party.

They scarcely understood that they were working day and night to place in office an outright adversary, who doesn’t grasp their ways of doing things; someone who comes right out of a colonial set up where everyone lived with his salary.

Anyone in employment first treasured the job and couldn’t be bribed and lose his job as such loss was the worst he could imagine in life, ruining all expected opportunities.

Bit by bit that truism started being altered, especially in the wake of creation of more than 100 public corporations after the Arusha Declaration; 400 at their peak!

Standards to which people were used started declining, as clever people were those in parastatals, paid and lived differently from others.

Soon, as inflation caught up and the value of salaries plummeted, only those with some side activity could make ends meet, in which case those in government started forming companies so that they obtained tenders and thus made ends meet.

That became the starting point of local government politics, and at upper levels, links between major firms and top officials either in parastatals or ministries, executive agencies, etc: economic boils!

In much the same way the fourth phase government in particular accepted a formal decentralization of the whole system of levies, contributions, fees, fines and even taxes, what each organization conducts such activities as it sees fit.

It was a hugely beneficial system for broad ranges of public servants, where a low level police officer would rather easily build up to three houses for renting out, etc.

A top level bureaucrat in the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) thus succeeded to build 73 houses, aware that house prices rise while value of money calls. It’s just enterprise.

These efforts of the president and the prime minister, and even cabinet ministers to ‘press’ so many of these boils to restore sanity to workplaces and hence stop the corruption are at best unconvincing.

There is no new paradigm or sense of purpose in life similar to what there was at the time of independence, for instance reliance on salary.

It is as if the president had placed a lid on a boiling kettle; the question is whether he will also put off the heat and cool the water, or wait for the kettle to explode. Systems are known to throw out individuals who make life miserable.