Letter to Lissu: please, don’t go back home

Dear Tundu,

I am happy to note that you are improving after some betes noires wanted to kill you. I am writing this open letter not to teach you the right thing to do. Although our media, and possibly people, seem to have forgotten you, I still remember you though with pangs and twangs due to what befell you. This is because, it seems, the attempt on your life has been treated as a normal criminal act while it actually is more than that. You once said: “This was a political assassination which isn’t new in our country”.

To me, condoning any form of injustice is as good as committing it. It is indescribable cowardice, mainly when this textbook cowardice is collective and systemic. The full-on attack on you seems to have been condoned or ignored for the peril of others to follow. Since the attempt on your life was made, four people have already lost their lives in mysterious circumstances.

Today, I want to advise you not to go back to Tanzania after recovering.

For, if you do, those who wanted you dead and those they used will ruthlessly assassinate you as long as the motive[s] behind the horrid attempt on your life is still raw and real so to speak. After you are done, they’ll purr and congratulate themselves. Their attempt on your life wasn’t a mere goof off or just an accident.

Thank Lord you survived. However, it is naturally a few and far between for a normal mortal to survive the hail of bullets like the one you survived.

Those who wanted you dead are still at large and watching from the sidelines. We live and die once. The life God bequeathed you must not be squandered or underestimated.

These ruffians mean business, dirty and serious business. Aren’t they really people or beasts that are supposed to be in hellfire burning for their sins? Unknown people are now a force within another. They recently killed Daniel John and Godfrey Luena, members of the Chadema not to mention Aquiline Akwilina who’s allegedly killed by a stray bullet. Looking at and into such macabre assassinations and the status of the victims, Tundu, believe me or not; hate or love me my brother; they’ll finish you off.

If the trio is the fish of normal sizes, then you’re a whale not a shark. If the victims were a danger to those who killed them, then you’re a disaster to these ruthless cowards.

Believe you me. Chinese proverb has it that “a wise man makes his own decisions; an ignorant man follows public opinion.” It is very sad when one follows the opinion of the public that seems to have ignored him not to mention its willingness to become the part and parcel of crimes against others.

I know; many would want you to go back home in one piece to continue with what you love most, politics.

You once avowed that you’d go back home and continue with the struggle. This is noble. However, your life is the noblest comparably.

Mr Mhango is a Tanzanian author based in Canada