POLITICAL PLATFORM: The survival option in the current political climate

In this current political climate, the two choices open to most of us is survive or resist. Let’s start with the survival option.

To survive mainly means to keep quiet, keep your head down, and keep under the radar. You see this from civil servants, businessmen, and incumbents of all sorts. Some are lucky enough to be able to look for postgraduate degrees outside the country in hopes of buying time away. Others have to make do with less ambitious release valves, such as anonymously commenting on social media or preying on those with even less power.

The survival option is being used by groups of people who would have an otherwise very strong political voice. Civil servants and businessmen come to mind again, and the latter in particular. There are many recent examples of small and medium sized businesses being destroyed by the double barrel of a weakening economy and a tough (read extortive) tax collection drive. Leaders of small traders in Kariakoo for example have been hounded out of the area by the state and no one is brave enough to fill in the space. There is no organising, no collective voice, no agitation. And yet, passivity is still considered the survival strategy by these business people.

Civil servants have traditionally been pro-ruling party. In the right positions, civil servants could reap the fruits of an inefficient, chaotic and deeply corrupt public bureaucracy. There were those who lived off the backs of workshop and per diem culture, but they did not tend to be the average teacher in this country, the average extension worker, the average nurse.

Unnecessarily suffer

These are the civil servants who will continue to unnecessarily suffer under the current economic and public policy situation, when deteriorating tax revenues and incoherent policymaking will affect their entitlements and and the worsening economic situation will hamper their alternative sources of incomes that many of them actually rely on to survive.

These two groups have the structures to advocate and agitate for their rights, from trade unions to business associations. And yet they are some of the most silent. Why? Because the structures have rarely been used to organise against the government.

Vehicle for political support

The structures have in the past been more useful as vehicles for political support, whether in the form of mobilising votes or funding, and for coordinating the relationship between a patronage-based state and its network. Rarely have these groups used their power and influence to systematically and openly challenge the state.

Habits die hard. Exploitative or puppet institutions will remain exploitative and subservient until they are radically transformed, either internally through visionary and courageous leadership or externally through adequate pressures and incentives. With little history post-independence of collective action and mass mobilisation (our post independence government made good work dismantling and undermining any institution that could do so), can those interest groups and representative associations with potentially powerful voices overcome the current climate of fear and uncertainty and deliver for their members?

Will they be able to redefine their survival away from compliance with the system and towards challenging the system?

Non-option

Increasingly, the survival option needs to be seen as a non-option. Or rather, it needs to be recognised that for potentially powerful groups, survival will mean wrestling for power and not relinquishing it to a one-man show by keeping quiet and keeping heads down. Survival means ensuring that the gains made over previous decades are not eroded.

Survival does not mean lying to ourselves that we will be able to bounce back in eight years’ time even as our situation continues to deteriorate.

Survival means the collective recognition that we are still a young and poor country, and any mishandling of our nation’s economic, political and social institutions will have widespread and perverse consequences that will leave no one safe.

The writer is MP (Kigoma Urban) and leader of opposition ACT-Wazalendo