Disqueting reports reaching various media in the city of Dar es Salaam have lately revealed a scaring episode involving the leader of former servicemen who passed through National Service and have been pressing the government for jobs.
The reports say the leader, 28-year-old George Mgoba was kidnapped by persons who had introduced themselves as National Service Department officials for a talk on the issue. One he met and shook hands with them, that was sufficient.
Mgoba was apparently the project leader to demonstrate to the State House to press for their demands, which may have predictably irritated a number of agencies, and thus prepared the road for a showdown, a game of wits.
Such orientation indicates a moral handicap on those who plan attacks, beatings and near assassinations, that they have little to say on demands put up by groups of individuals, so they resort to force.But the use of force reinforces itself, removes the respect of law that people still have, and as a result police stations are being attacked and officers killed, etc.
This is perhaps just the third case in that sequence, but for a country that prides itself on peace and harmony, a tit for tat policy on those seemingly placing state security at issue, by near or far, is a risky undertaking.
Learning violence is a slow process, but once it has been consummated it is hard to put back the clock, and our neighbours are witnesses to this situation.
Even within our borders there are pockets of all sorts of violences that have persisted, whether political violence that has more so been seen in Zanzibar, or the civic and economic violence engulfing the regions.
Those in authority need to recall Mwalimu’s poignant phrase, “if you eat human flesh, you will persist” in the sense that one crosses a moral line, a conscience landmark, and from then on nothing seems to matter.
How far we have gone down that line can’t always be told a priori as lawyers are fond of saying, as results will later be in body counts.
Some New Year predictions for instance talked of wide scale disturbances during the general elections “but not war.” It is cold comfort, this mantra, that we shall do everything we can to wreck the country, but will fail.
It is true for instance that state organs feel nervous and itching for a fight when an individual issues a frontal challenge to public institutions, like demonstrating to the State House instead of just holding a rally.
It is true that a declining civic sense and a tendency to personalize issues, that everyone wants to address the president in person, is flawed. As Isaac Newton stated, it brings an equal and opposite reaction!
Perhaps there is work here for civic organizations to take up issues of tendencies of escalation of conflicts with the state, a penchant for forcing issues and not listening to the government’s point of view.
At present our political culture has something of annihilation dispositions, for instance the ‘vua gamba’ campaign in the ruling party that those who were involved in the Richmond dispute be removed entirely from political posts and party membership.
In psychological terms it is to bay for blood, unnecessarily raising political temperature, and making the nomination run potentially violent, compared to 2005.
We are not learning to differ about issues and letting each side have a say, but wish for a total position acceptable to a large section of the public, or the relevant crowd, interested in the matter.
This way the road is being prepared for more violence, commonplace these days with grabbing albino babies in their mothers’ arms. If babies are grabbed, what of strike leaders?
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
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