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Dr Azaveli Feza Lwaitama
THINKING CRITICALLY
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This is the first week of the year 2012, according to the Christian calendar or Western calendar, or Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII after he decreed it on February 24, 1582. Hegemony of Western Imperialism finds expression in the adoption of the Gregorian calendar as the international calendar. Therefore, while today is taken for granted to be nothing but Wednesday, January 4, 2012 it is actually, in the Islamic calendar Arbiai 10 Safar 1433. No wonder, one does not need to be Muslim to accept that Muslims are a dominated social group in the international arena.
The world is unfairly dominated by the Western Christian powers not militarily, economically, politically, and technologically but also culturally. Thus, as we all wish each other happy New Year, we are also, acknowledging that we are, willy-nilly, subservient to Western dictates in the cultural arena, as we are slaves of Western economic monopolistic strictures. We start the year 2012 in a climate of economic uncertainty as the prices of basic necessities threaten to sky-rocket even further as electricity tariffs rise and motor vehicle fuel continue to climb higher and higher from what they were in previous years. The politically motivated tension between Western powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran are poised to rake havoc to the delicate balance of terror in Middle East.
The eurozone woes and the terrible cold that afflicts the American dollar are bound to make the Tanzania shilling to continue catching influenza. It is hoping against to expect that Tanzania’s inflation rate will return to its glorious single digit times in the first decade of the twenty-first century when the influence grand graft and fraud were yet to establish their complete stranglehold on the Tanzanian state and economy.
It is hoping against to expect that the constitutional review process that the Tanzanian presidency plans to push down the throats of an economically wounded nation will lead to the scripting of a genuinely alternative constitutional dispensation for Tanzania in years to come. It is more than likely that the bitter squabbling over who will be the Presidential candidate on a CCM ticket in 2015 will preoccupy the minds of most of the ruling party elite. These top leaders will hardly have time to spare a thought on how Tanzania’s may pull itself out of current economic quagmire.
Tanzanians who care must adopt as their New Year wish that they will seek to improve reflective civic skills in order that they may truly become what this author and Prof Sirkuu Helsten, in book called Civic Ethics Handbook for Development, published in 2004 with Oxford University Press, called “autonomous moral gents”. In 2012, Tanzania will be saved from plunging further into the abyss of professional ethical decay by having some dedicated number of the agreeing to serve as “autonomous moral agents who can make independent moral judgments and take responsibility for their actions”.
The year 2012 may witness many instances of the curtailing of freedom of expression through the intimidation and even perpetration of injury to limb directed at political opposition figures as well as journalists and political commentators.
The implementation of the Constitutional Review Act that the President has just signed into law is bound to lead to situations of intense political contestation between those who passionately believe the law should never have been passed as it is without major amendments and the current authorities. It is likely that the CCM internal elections scheduled for this year as well as the bitter rivalries and tense competitive politics these will occasion will spillover into an attempt to muzzle freedom of expression in general.
It is also possible that one or other of the big sectarian power blocks within the ruling party will adopt the promotion of narrow Tanganyikan nationalism as a rallying political platform.
The constitutional review debate may itself be caught up in these Anti-Pan Africanist and narrow nationalistic rhetorical posturing both on the Zanzibar islands and on the Tanzanian Mainland and this may thus contribute to the weakening of the moral united front to fight grand corruption across all party affiliations.
The year 2012 will see the intensification of the noble fight for Tanzania’s second liberation by Tanzanians who see the big picture of Western hegemony that expresses itself in the unfair exploitation of Tanzania’s rich natural resources for the benefit of external corporate interests. As pointed out earlier, 2012 require that a good number of Tanzanians adopt as their New Year pledge that they will be willing to stand up and be counted as “autonomous moral agents who can make independent moral judgments and take responsibility for their actions”.
Dr Lwaitama is a senior lecturer, Philosophy Programme, University of Dar es Salaam
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