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Book Review "In the Name of the President : Memoirs of a Jailed Journalist".
By Katundu Kassim.
The German philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) said that all great events of history happen twice. This was in a “so to speak” way, but it was noteworthy enough for Karl Marx to quip that
the first time is a tragedy, the second a farce.
If that is indeed the case,
Eric Kabendera, the Tanzanian investigative journalist, in his first book,
In the Name of the President: Memoirs of a Jailed Journalist, attempts to draw a direct line between, on one end, the tragedy of the Julius Nyerere era’s police state thinly veiled under intellectualism, Ujamaa and nationalism, and on another end, the dangerous, farcical and autocratic rule of the John Magufuli days, which Kabendera claims to have claimed more than 3,000 lives.
This is a harrowing read told in personal recollection style, supported by – sadly, in the absence of formally declassified documents– biographies, newspapers and journal reports, interviews, off-the-record leaks from reliable sources in government, personal experience from
Kabendera’s incarceration and even social media posts.
Kabendera has done a great service of documenting many events in a readable narrative through crisp prose. He strikes a balance between giving enough detail to substantiate his narrative and not too much to bog down the story with technical nitty-gritty in an overly academic way. The result feels like proper sourcing, and some deep dives are sacrificed for readability and brevity.
In an interview with Germany-based Zanzibari journalist
Mohammed Ghassani, aired at
Gumzo la Ghassani, Kabendera mentioned that what he wrote is just about a quarter of what he knows and that he had to cut a lot out of the book because his lawyers were concerned about a high standard of proof and evidence that could absolve him of culpability in a court of law.
Sordid details
The book flashes back and forth between the Magufuli years and the roots of Tanzania’s governance problems in the Nyerere years, right after Tanganyika’s independence in 1961. The parts covering Kabendera’s brutal abduction and incarceration and the narration of the squalid conditions in Tanzanian jails alone are worth the price.
It is as if Kabendera is showing us what needs to be written fully by exposing the tip of the iceberg. The uncovering of Magufuli’s controversial personal history is worth another book in itself, perhaps a Magufuli book in the vein of Timothy Molony’s
Nyerere: The Early Years.
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Indeed, Kabendera could have easily produced four or five books from this one. The sordid details of the Magufuli regime’s rampant killing squads, whether Paul Makonda allegedly leading targets against opposition leaders such as Tundu Lissu, and Zitto Kabwe escaping a political rally to cross into Burundi after a tip from high places.
Or alleged killing squads in Rufiji targeting so-called terrorists in summary execution style reminiscent of the killing fields of Cambodia and Idi Amin’s Uganda, all the way to the
disappearance of the investigative journalist Azory Gwanda. All is laid bare in the book, with an insider connecting the dots and following the money –in the real sense of the words, not just figuratively, for the uninitiated.
To be sure, there are a lot of controversial claims warranting more scrutiny and better evidence. From Magufuli turning up at his Vice President’s place in pyjamas in what was apparently a less than kosher advance to the untimely demise of Magufuli’s daughter Juliana due to HIV/AIDS infection, an infection whose blame Magufuli’s wife placed squarely on her husband, whom she reportedly called evil, in a way that left a lot to be desired and leaving many to ask, how was Magufuli responsible?
A large part of the book can feel like rehashing the old and familiar history of Tanzania, from the independence of Tanganyika and the Nyerere days to the Uhujumu Uchumi, or economic sabotage, days of Prime Minister Sokoine and subsequent Alli Hassan Mwinyi, Benjamin Mkapa and Jakaya Kikwete administration’s wheeling and dealing.
The
IPTL scandal is covered in great detail, with an insider’s account that tells Patrick Rutabanzibwa’s story of resilient anti-corruption stance in detail. This story in itself deserves another complete book. People familiar with this part may wonder why this was relevant.
It seems there is an attempt to use the book—especially the English version out now; the Swahili translation is due out soon—to introduce many non-Tanzanians to Tanzania. At 330 pages of the main text, Kabendera does a good job of painting with a broad brush the main issues of this history to build his narrative and diagnosis without boring the reader with a history-heavy treatise.
Lessons
Lessons from the book are plenty. There are obvious governance lessons. We are all too human and need collaborative leadership to institute guardrails for corrective measures against autocracy. Inclusivity affords us the use of many talents; together, we are bigger than the sum of our parts.
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Autocracy is inherently self-sabotaging in the long run. However, we also get to see how unprepared our leadership is and how personal patronage trumps professional checks. How rotten the Tanzanian vetting system is, even at the presidential level, how specifically one ex-president overruled a whole system of vetting procedures and recommendations, and how this subsequently caused calamitous consequences in the form of a Magufuli presidency.
How an antisocial wife-beating madman, by Kabendera’s account, did charm a president’s heart and win the CCM presidential nomination when even his family reportedly thought he was not fit for the presidency. How a selfish desire for CCM leader’s self-preservation almost caused the assassination of an ex-president by a then-sitting president.
How an overzealous minister and, subsequently, the president caused the country to pay a lot of money in compensation to victims of his various campaigns for so-called justice and vanity projects like the unaudited purchase of fancy aeroplanes directly from State House.
The Mafia-style shakedowns, whether the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) led illegal plea bargaining or the use of overblown tax quotes to intimidate businesspeople into what can only be called ransoms, the kidnappings of journalists and business people such as
Mohammed “Mo” Dewji, the killing of activist
Ben Saanane allegedly by Magufuli’s own hand, it is all there.
Most of all, what do we all need to do to prevent corrupt politicians from repeating their grave games of brinkmanship in the future? How do we control an imperial presidency? Kabendera touches on all of this.
Family values are a feature of the lessons. We often look at and analyse the results without giving much thought to the causative agents. Here, we see how John Magufuli’s antisocial behaviour may have roots in his family’s belief that he was not really Joseph Magufuli’s biological child.
On Eric Kabendera’s side, his mother, through her staunch determination and passion for education, justice, and maternal protection, is a hero who shaped Eric’s worldview from an early age. This shows in the book. Instilling Eric with the love of reading and writing very early, partly due to her teaching career, Eric’s mother prepared him to be the fearless journalist he is today.
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Here, we see how parental responsibility shapes a young man’s growth into a confident and principled member of society who refuses to give in to powerful people in the most challenging and dire encounters.
Some shortcomings
Kabendera is brilliant, but not without his faults. He writes that politician and activist
Bibi Titi Mohammed, born in 1926, founded the Tanganyika African Association (TAA), which was formed in 1929. At about three years old in 1929, Bibi Titi’s status as a TAA founder needed an explanation or a correction.
In some instances, Kabendera gives sources where they are easily available and almost not needed, at least to those familiar with Tanzania. Where sources are really needed, we are left to take his word and investigate further ourselves to verify.
The given sources are understandable; the book is for the global audience and Tanzanians. However, more sourcing would have made this good book even better. He misses obvious and easily verifiable details, such as the year Edward Sokoine died, mentioning it twice as 1983 instead of 1984.
This, along with several misspellings of prominent Tanzanian names – Mzavas instead of Mnzavas, Chidua instead of Chiduo – exposes the fact that the proofreading, especially on the Tanzanian side, was a bit rushed.
Absalom Kibanda, a prominent journalist based in Tanzania, who helped with some interviews used as sources and proofread, apologised on the social audio app Clubhouse that he did not do the book justice in his proofreading as he was pressed for time.
Zitto Kabwe, a leading opposition figure in the country, corrected the timeline on a story regarding his storming the Director of Intelligence Services office in Oysterbay, giving a more accurate context and timeline than the one Kabendera gave.
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These may sound like small details in the face of the larger narrative. Still, critics could use these facts to undermine the book’s credibility, which I think would be unfair. The book’s larger narrative can remain valid even as Kabendera is not absolved from mistakes due to his rushing to the printers.
Per Kibanda, the second edition will address these matters. One Tanzanian academic, elated at the very fact that the book was printed at all, remarked that anyone who has published a book will know that no book can be printed without an error. He sounded like he was speaking of this non-sequitur fallacy in the context of the immanent critique of Kabendera from personal experience when publishing his own book.
Going back to Georg W.F. Hegel, who popularised the idea of the Hegelian dialectic, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, Kabendera has given us his thesis. A lot of what he wrote is known. Some controversial details need verification and further evidence.
Publishing difficulties
I sympathise with those who dare to write in Tanzania. This past December, I finished reading two books: Steve Coll’s
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq and Stuart A. Reid’s
The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination.
The books were made possible by heavy declassification. In fact, Steve Coll had to
sue The Pentagon to get them to release a cache of 145 files and transcripts related to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, some never published before. I hope to live and see Tanzanians doing something similar for transparency.
The data-driven empiricist in me would like to see a book better sourced than the one Eric Kabendera gave us without people getting killed for that to happen. The pragmatic and realist in me recognises the challenges in Tanzania, where even the
Salim Ahmed Salim archives had issues getting documents because nearly everything is overclassified and practically never declassified.
Even as I would want to critique Kabendera constructively—this is one of the lessons he shares in the book, of course; he gets a dose of his own medicine—I would do so without making the perfect the enemy of the good—not in a Tanzania that needs to write so many stories to get the full picture.
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As I was pondering with a friend whether we have some version of a “Freedom of Information Act” to improve sourcing and how effective it is, my friend sarcastically quipped if we have a version of freedom at all!
Through the struggles of individuals like Eric Kabendera and many others, their fearless spirit even in the face of seemingly insurmountable David vs. Goliath odds, and their telling and re-telling of our stories with not only humility and introspection but also finesse and verve, we shall overcome the ignominy of autocratic tendencies and build a more harmonious, democratic Tanzania.
If you must read one book about Magufuli published so far, this is it. If you haven’t, I urge you to get a copy and continue the intellectual stock-taking work to learn from past mistakes and help build a better Tanzania.
Katundu Kassim is a political and technology analyst based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He can be reached at katundukassim1@gmail.com. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.