One of the local Swahili dailies, Tanzania Daima, last week carried a very ‘interesting’ story which formed its front page lead story.
It said President Jakaya Kikwete was reluctant to fire and replace his Prime Minister, Mizengo Pinda.
I’m saying the story is ‘interesting’ because the paper failed to explain why the prime minister should be fired in the first place, especially after the four ministers had already been relieved of their duties by the president.
If you say the Prime Minister should be fired, then you should also be able to go further by saying that the president must also go. And you will discover that your argument is nothing, but baseless. This is precisely one of the problems we are facing from some of our media outlets in this country!
They parrot what they don’t know, and this is extremely serious! The Chinese leader, Chairman Mao Tse Tung once said, “no research no right to speak!”
Having already fired four ministers, what our media need to do now is to bring pressure to bear on the government to fire all the permanent secretaries in the four ministries, the chief of defence forces, the director general of the Tanzania Intelligence and Security Services, the inspector general of police and of course, the head of the game wardens.
I’m saying this because how can further investigations on the matter be conducted when the permanent secretaries, directors and heads of state apparatus are still in place?
After our media outlets had carried, in big banners, the stories announcing the firing by the president of the four ministers a few days ago, what else have they carried on the same subject since then?
Nothing! Absolutely nothing! They are no longer interested in a story that requires more action both in terms of coverage by the media and action from the government!
They have now moved on to other irrelevant issues; issues that have nothing to do with the development of this nation.
During the debate in the august House over the report on problems arising from the implementation of Operation Tokomeza submitted by the parliamentary probe committee, the fifth minister equally accused of failing the nation was named as honourable George Mkuchika.
The man was named because his docket is responsible, for among others, the TISS.
Interestingly, and for unknown reasons, our media outlets have remained mum over Mr Mkuchika’s fate!
Why is this man continuing to cling on to his docket when the institution he heads failed to alert the government on what was going on in the course of implementation of Operation Tokomeza?
Why has the media remained silent over the role of the heads of state apparatus whose institutions were directly involved in the operation which shocked the nation?
Instead of keeping the iron hot on the issue and thereby forcing the government to take further steps on those alleged to be behind this national shame, the media have decided to do what they know best, cover events, as they shoot up like pop corn!
Yet the four ministers’ story is a running story that ought to be running until now if we really had media outlets worth their name!
Another area our media outlets have remained silent is the planned formation of a judiciary commission to investigate, in detail, what transpired in the course of implementation of Operation Tokomeza.
The general public is presently unaware of what is going on as far as the implementation of such a commission is concerned!
And the general public is unaware because the media is silent, it has also decided to wait for the government’s next move after which your will hear all kind of experts commenting on the move, and mostly, they will be the same guys from the University of Dar es Salaam.
It is this kind of knee-jerk reaction as opposed to proaction, on the part of our media outlets that a section of Tanzanians have come to believe that no matter how big or shocking a thing or information is, it will always die a natural death since Tanzanians are usually forgetful.
Indeed, if we were not forgetful, we would not have had the MV Bukoba accident twice in the Indian Ocean! How could we have avoided such accidents when we forgot what had led to the first accident?
How could we have avoided the other two accidents when we did not learn anything from the first accident? What happened during the implementation of Operation Tokomeza will happen again because we have learnt nothing from it.
Media outlets which are supposed to drive the lesson home by digging deeper into the scandal have decided that they have had enough about the issue, they have closed the book, hence letting the government off the hook. What our media outlets are now waiting for, and with bated breath, is the unveiling, by the president, of the new cabinet!
And that, you can be sure, will mark the end of the story… May the Almighty God save Tanzanian media!