Zainab’s may be a tall story, but we need to assess ourselves


What you need to know:

  • Happening at a time when President Samia Suluhu was in the US launching The Royal Tour documentary aimed at attracting tourists to Tanzania, the timing and scale of Zainab’s revelations could not have been worse.
  • One cannot shake off that strange feeling that the “revelations” were aimed at sabotaging the President’s valiant efforts.

Last weekend Tanzania was hit with a perfect media storm, thanks to Zainab Oladehinde, a 24-year-old Nigerian woman, who has alleged that she was sexually assaulted while staying at Warere Beach Hotel in Zanzibar in April 2021.

The social media-savvy Zainab documented everything that she allegedly went through in pictures, videos and audio recordings, providing the Twitterati with a tantalising story to feed their voyeuristic minds with. The many tweets that Zainab shared have garnered millions of engagements, making her a social media sensation.

Happening at a time when President Samia Suluhu was in the US launching The Royal Tour documentary aimed at attracting tourists to Tanzania, the timing and scale of Zainab’s revelations could not have been worse. One cannot shake off that strange feeling that the “revelations” were aimed at sabotaging the President’s valiant efforts.

A lazy idea.

Nonetheless, in the midst of the irrational “Boycott Zanzibar” storm, some of us couldn’t help but to act as apologists for this land. Yes, there are many things that don’t work here, but one incident doesn’t make Zanzibar more dangerous than Nairobi, Lagos, or Johannesburg, where many of the holier-than-thou critics live.

That said, the veracity of Zainab’s story aside, Tanzanians can identify with many things in her story.

First, the gender-based violence issue. In a world where one third of all women face GBV in their lifetimes, GBV is a global rather than a Tanzanian phenomenon. Nonetheless, when we review the situation in Tanzania, this is still an issue worth our attention.

A few years ago, I had an engagement that required me to review the work of dozens of NGOs across the nation. While I was uplifted by the many outstanding stories I heard, the GBV issue was brought up over and over as one of the biggest challenges that women face, and it was not confined to rape only.

Thus, it is important to allow this incident to chastise us since even one GBV case is one too many. We must do all that we can to protect women, especially by handling reported GBV cases competently.

Second, the dilapidated hotel systems. Hotels where phones, internet, TVs, ACs, remote controls, or power cables don’t work? We have all seen that, haven’t we? How about hotels where odd fellows loiter around and where staff go AWOL mysteriously? Not unusual either. Thanks to Zainab, we have a rude reminder that mediocrity can have serious consequences in this world. We must learn to be more customer-oriented.

Third, the general demeanour of our police officers and the environments in which they work.

A visit to a police station in Tanzania usually feels like a trip to a distant past, where you will find ramshackle buildings, ridiculously small, devoid of light and colour. The air is usually stuffy, sometimes mixed with a stench of human excrement because of the holding cells around. It is unfortunate to be held in such cells, and to work in such an environment. Let’s show some respect to the noble police profession.

Then there are the officers themselves. Casual, unwelcoming, not professional. To one image, people in Twitter ask, “Is this a police officer? He doesn’t look like one, nay, he doesn’t look like anyone who should be facing customers anywhere in the world.” Yet these are Tanzania’s finest, as the Americans would put it. Something must give.

There is a way we do life in Tanzania where we take everything easy and casual. Ours is a laissez faire life where things go at their own pace – no sense of urgency, and no responsibility. To us, law and justice are quite alien – they don’t make a bedrock of our worldview. As a result, there are no standards for what our life ought to be. You can go to elite institutions such as universities and find stinking toilets!

The problem is, as a society, we have one foot in the modern world and the other in the traditional world. We carry smartphones, drive big cars and build contemporary houses, and we claim to be modern. But that is just the hardware – the software isn’t working, So, you have courts without justice, schools without education, and hospitals without medicine. This is why you can have brilliant BRT infrastructure, but the service stinks so much that people still prefer daladalas!

Faulty software.

In 1968, a team of Singaporeans visited Kenya to learn since Kenya was a more developed country than Singapore. Today, Singapore, a tiny island state roughly the size of Ukerewe Islands in Lake Victoria, has attracted almost 40,000 international organisations During that time, its GDP has increased 250 times!

The world goes to Singapore because both the hardware and the software work.

The Zainab incident is a reminder that if we wish to competitively engage the outside world as President Hassan is attempting to achieve, we must raise our game. Given the resources we have, Tanzania should sell itself. But the leadership has to make a conscious decision to pull this nation from the 19th century where it is stuck into the 21st century.

Otherwise, we should brace ourselves for more international embarrassments. The Zainabs of this world have no scruples about exposing our dirty linens to the world.