Whose goat was it? Why is the owner disowning it? Who’s telling the truth?

 

By Jenerali Ulimwengu

In Summary

• Suddenly we have a Father Christmas dishing out money. Is this love and affection? Or is it services past and future someone is paying for?

The soap that has come to be known as the Tegeta Escrow Account Scandal carries all the hallmarks of the Tanzanian governance quandary, at least as we have known it over the past few years; there is nothing clear, and there is no knowing who is telling the truth and who is lying.

About clarity – or the lack thereof – you only have to go back to the beginning of the scandal when a couple of newspaper articles suggested there was something afoot and the whole government rallied to trash the allegations and castigate the few legislators who had dared to take up the matter.

Then there is the introduction of a mysterious individual who is said to have organised the whole thing and who is made to look like he can move mountains by stroking his moustache. There is of course nothing wrong with his being a national “of Asian origin”, but that changes when it is suggested that he is actually a citizen of a neighbouring country.

The man’s profile is further sharpened by the allusion to another scandal which rocked said neighbouring country and which said national or non-national of Asian origin with the citizenship of that self-same neighbouring country, or maybe not, was at the centre of. That’s not very clear, but we can live with it, can’t we?

But other matters become harder to live with. Like, for instance, the argument as to whether the monies involved in the alleged scam – and these were humongous, at least for me – were public or private, and the government is at pains to state that it has no right to the dosh. A preponderant number of legislators, the media and the public smell a rat, and the pressure on the government to come clean on the matter mounts.

Lack of clarity, did I say? I should be talking of zero clarity and a hundred per cent opacity.

For instance, how is it that scores of people are recorded as having received billions of shillings in operations that indicate a feast of cash, if such a thing were possible? Politicians, state officials, MPs, clerics, nobodies had seemingly profited from an uncanny and unprecedented largesse, from someone.

The issue here is, what was all that in aid of? Suddenly we have the profile of a Father Christmas come too soon.

Just dishing out money, with no consideration? Is this love and affection? Or is it services past and future someone is securing and/or paying for? What is the story? People wanted to know, and they still do.

Deals were surely done and transactions got transacted, and that’s the natural thing. But why is there so much money going around for no apparent reason? The imagery that emerges is that of a congregation of jackals hovering over a dead goat and each jackal taking the piece that the sharpness of its teeth affords it.

Whose goat was that? And why is the presumed owner of the goat saying it’s not his?

For the time being even President Jakaya Kikwete seems to think this goat is not his, but if he thinks he can persuade Tanzanians to accept this, he has his work cut out. His people know that his government is corrupt to the core, and there has been nothing in the latest episodes over Tegeta to change that perception. And in politics, perception is reality, full stop.

So, the sacking of one minister – in a public statement, the president actually stated that he had ‘asked her’ to step aside to ‘allow us’ to appoint someone in her place. This is weird language likely to bolster the conviction among many that he lacks resolve and thrives on innuendo because he wants to stay in the good books of pretty much everyone, even when he is actually their boss.

The public is thirsting for more resolute action, and Kikwete, by doing a wishy-washy job of it, is hurting his party in next year’s elections. Tegeta may turn out to be a stick with which the electorate could hit his party as they have shown in the just ended civic polls.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam.