Uzawa maana yake nini?

[Sungi]

Nimeona nirudie mjadala huu ambao ulijadiliwa kwenye forum hii Juni 5, 2006. Pengine tunakumbuka muswada uliokuwa ukijadiliwa Bungeni miaka ya nyuma ulioletwa na mzee Iddi Simba kuhusu uzawa. Simba alipigwa mawe na kuitwa majina mengi, ikiwemo, "mbaguzi wa rangi" n.k. Lakini swala zima la uzawa ni sera ambayo ipo katika nchi nyingi za kutanguliza maslahi ya wananchi wa nchi hiyo kabla ya wageni. Huwezi kupata kazi hapa nilipo kama wewe sio raia wa nchi hii au misaada yeyote ya serikali. Kinyume na nyumbani ambapo, wageni ndio wanaopewa kibaumbele kwenye ajira, uwekezaji, kulipa kodi, n.k. Si mnakumbuka kulikuwa na msamaha wa kulipa kodi wa miaka 5 kwa wawekezaji wageni, eti ili kuwavutia waje kuwekeza? Mwekezaji wa ndani, alianza kulimwa kodi mara alipoanzisha shughuli yake! Uzawa hauna uhusiano na rangi ya mtu kwa kweli bali ni swala zima la kumwezesha mtanzania kufaidi utanzania wake Tanzania. Tunasoma mineral exploration maeneo ya kwetu huko Singida, na tayari makampuni makubwa ya hapa Marekani na Canada yameanza kutangaza umiliki na faida watakayotengeneza. Je mwanakijiji anapata faida gani ya mali asili hii iliyoko nchini kwake? Bado ataendelea kula makombo, kuishi nyumba ya tembe, isiyo na maji safi wala choo, na kulima kwa kutumia jembe la mkono mpaka atakapozikwa. Pamoja na kwamba mzee Iddi Simba alishambuliwa sana kwa mtazamo wake huu, mimi naona ni wakati mwafaka wa hoja hii kuwekwa mezani tena ili kila mtanzania afaidi utanzania wake, kama wananchi wa nchi nyingine wanaofaidi matunda ya kuwa raia wa nchi hizo. Hili sio swala la chama cha siasa, bali ni la kila mtanzania anayejali nchi yake.

 

[Companero]

Mtunzi wa Kitabu cha 'Citizens and Subjects' anasema mzawa (native) na mlowezi (settler) wanakwenda pamoja. Huwezi kuwa na mmoja bila mwingine. Unapokuwa na mzawa papo hapo unakuwa na mlowezi. Na ukitaka ukitaka kusiwe na mlowezi basi hakutakuwa na mzawa. Hii ni kwa kuwa dhana ya ulowezi inatokana na dhana ya uzawa na dhana ya uzawa inatokana na ulowezi. Falsafa hii inatufundisha nini hasa?

Inatufundisha kuwa ukianza kufuatalia utagundua kuwa hakuna mzawa halisi. Sisi sote ni wahamiaji, tunachotofautiana ni muda wa kufika. Kwa mfano Mngoni alitoka Afrika Kusini kwenye miaka ya 1800. Mmasai naye alitoka huko Afrika Kasakazini. Na kwa ujumla Wabantu inadaiwa walitoka Afrika ya Kati au Afrika ya Magharibi.

Hivyo basi tunachoposwa ni kujenga nchi kwa misingi ya uraia na uzalendo. Na huu uraia unatakiwa uwe wazi kwa wote wanaoitakia mema nchi hii, waliozaliwa humu pamoja na ambao hawakuzaliwa humu ila kwa namna moja au nyingine wameamua kuwa wananchi wa nchi hii wenye uzalendo. Hawa ni pamoja na wahamiaji, waoaji na waolewaji. Mzawa ni nani basi? Mzawa ni Raia Mwema.

 

[Prof Griff]

Mtunzi wa Kitabu cha 'Citizens and Subjects' anasema mzawa (native) na mlowezi (settler) wanakwenda pamoja. Huwezi kuwa na mmoja bila mwingine. Unapokuwa na mzawa papo hapo unakuwa na mlowezi. Na ukitaka ukitaka kusiwe na mlowezi basi hakutakuwa na mzawa. Hii ni kwa kuwa dhana ya ulowezi inatokana na dhana ya uzawa na dhana ya uzawa inatokana na ulowezi. Falsafa hii inatufundisha nini hasa?

Inatufundisha kuwa ukianza kufuatalia utagundua kuwa hakuna mzawa halisi. Sisi sote ni wahamiaji, tunachotofautiana ni muda wa kufika. Kwa mfano Mngoni alitoka Afrika Kusini kwenye miaka ya 1800. Mmasai naye alitoka huko Afrika Kasakazini. Na kwa ujumla Wabantu inadaiwa walitoka Afrika ya Kati au Afrika ya Magharibi.

Hivyo basi tunachoposwa ni kujenga nchi kwa misingi ya uraia na uzalendo. Na huu uraia unatakiwa uwe wazi kwa wote wanaoitakia mema nchi hii, waliozaliwa humu pamoja na ambao hawakuzaliwa humu ila kwa namna moja au nyingine wameamua kuwa wananchi wa nchi hii wenye uzalendo. Hawa ni pamoja na wahamiaji, waoaji na waolewaji. Mzawa ni nani basi? Mzawa ni Raia Mwema.

Kwa hiyo unataka kumaanisha kuwa concept ya "uzawa" ni batili? Halafu sioni mahali umejibu swali la mtoa mada: "Uzawa ni nini?" Jibu swali kwanza tafadhali.

 

[Companero]

Kwa hiyo unataka kumaanisha kuwa concept ya "uzawa" ni batili? Halafu sioni mahali umejibu swali la mtoa mada: "Uzawa ni nini?" Jibu swali kwanza tafadhali.

Ukisoma posti yangu mpaka nukta ya mwisho utapata jibu la hilo swali.

 

[Companero]

Nimeona nirudie mjadala huu ambao ulijadiliwa kwenye forum hii Juni 5, 2006. Pengine tunakumbuka muswada uliokuwa ukijadiliwa Bungeni miaka ya nyuma ulioletwa na mzee Iddi Simba kuhusu uzawa. Simba alipigwa mawe na kuitwa majina mengi, ikiwemo, "mbaguzi wa rangi" n.k. Lakini swala zima la uzawa ni sera ambayo ipo katika nchi nyingi za kutanguliza maslahi ya wananchi wa nchi hiyo kabla ya wageni. Huwezi kupata kazi hapa nilipo kama wewe sio raia wa nchi hii au misaada yeyote ya serikali. Kinyume na nyumbani ambapo, wageni ndio wanaopewa kibaumbele kwenye ajira, uwekezaji, kulipa kodi, n.k. Si mnakumbuka kulikuwa na msamaha wa kulipa kodi wa miaka 5 kwa wawekezaji wageni, eti ili kuwavutia waje kuwekeza? Mwekezaji wa ndani, alianza kulimwa kodi mara alipoanzisha shughuli yake! Uzawa hauna uhusiano na rangi ya mtu kwa kweli bali ni swala zima la kumwezesha mtanzania kufaidi utanzania wake Tanzania. Tunasoma mineral exploration maeneo ya kwetu huko Singida, na tayari makampuni makubwa ya hapa Marekani na Canada yameanza kutangaza umiliki na faida watakayotengeneza. Je mwanakijiji anapata faida gani ya mali asili hii iliyoko nchini kwake? Bado ataendelea kula makombo, kuishi nyumba ya tembe, isiyo na maji safi wala choo, na kulima kwa kutumia jembe la mkono mpaka atakapozikwa. Pamoja na kwamba mzee Iddi Simba alishambuliwa sana kwa mtazamo wake huu, mimi naona ni wakati mwafaka wa hoja hii kuwekwa mezani tena ili kila mtanzania afaidi utanzania wake, kama wananchi wa nchi nyingine wanaofaidi matunda ya kuwa raia wa nchi hizo. Hili sio swala la chama cha siasa, bali ni la kila mtanzania anayejali nchi yake.

Mkuu suala la uzawa ni suala la kihistoria, kisiasa na kifalsafa. Halina majibu marahisi rahisi na tukilichezea tunaweza kusababisha umwagaji mkubwa wa damu kama ule wa Rwanda, DRC na Darfur. Tunatakiwa tutofautishe dhana hizi ili tuone ugumu wa kutumia 'uzawa' badala ya 'uraia' kutunga sera za mgawanyo wa madaraka na rasilimali za nchi hii yenye mchanganyiko mkubwa wa watu: mzawa/mlowezi na raia/mgeni.

Uchambuzi wangu kuhusu utata na utete wa uzawa huu hapa:

Mahmood Mamdani’s question ’When does a Settler become a Native?’ [PDF 61kb] offers an insightful starting point. Any attempt to address that question would also lead us to note that people become natives or indigenous to a place when there are other people who can be defined as not being native to that place. By virtue of coming (late-r) to settle in that place they become settlers. As Mamdani aptly put in his inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 13 May 1998, the two categories belong together therefore to do away with one we have to do away with the other, since it is the relation between them that makes one a settler and the other a native.

We ought to always bear in mind that when early Euro-American explorers, civilisers, traders and missionaries reached the shores of the African continent in varying times and spaces, they encountered inhabitants. These inhabitants varied from those who thought of themselves as having always been there to those who knew they – or their ancestors – had migrated into those areas at a certain point in time. Of particular interest here is the fact that by the time the West, or Euro-America as it now widely known in academic circles, encountered Africa again – for that was not the first time – in the age of mercantile capitalism it found societies that had varying forms of social organisations and a sense of belonging in those communities.

Whether they referred to that belongingness as ‘citizenship’ or not is not the main concern here, as important as it is. The main concern is that these communities in Africa had that sense, and thus they developed forms of governance to regulate belongingness. They also developed discourses that differentiated who belongs, who does not belong and who could or could not belong – a cursory look at a cross-section of names/ terms, such as ‘Chasaka’, ‘Umnyamahanga’ and ‘Mnyika’ from African languages attest to that for they literally meant those coming from far lands in and/or beyond the ‘bush.’

As such, as expected in any grouping or community, the idea or discourse of a ‘stranger’ and someone who want to ‘settle’ or even ‘invade’ for that matter was present in Africa prior to its encounter with Euro-America. The history of the so-called Bantu migration in Africa, though still a contentious area of study with varying accounts of it, is a classical case. So is the history of the migrations of the so-called nomadic tribes of which the Maasai is seen as its epitome. The Hamitic Myth and the Rwanda Genocide of 1994 have rendered the Tutsi migration another classical case. There is also that migration of Nguni speaking people in the wake of the Mfecane war in South Africa in the 19th Century. If there were such cases of settling within Africa prior to colonialism what then makes the settling that was ushered by Euro-American colonial modernity a very peculiar case?

A clue to an answer can be found in Mamdani’s 1998 Inaugural Lecture on When does a Settler become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa [PDF 61kb] . Another clue can be found in Frantz Fanon’s 1952 reflections in Black Skin White Masks.

Mamdani differentiate between what he calls ‘Settler Proper’ and ‘Native Settler.’ The former included the ‘whites’ who came from Euro-America. These did not have an ethnic home in Africa therefore they were not tied to any specific ethnic or tribal territory. The ‘Settler Proper’, also contends Mamdani, included Asians who came from Euro-American colonies outside Africa, and Arabs who came from both within and from outside Africa as well as the Tutsi who, though wholly from within Africa, were turned into settlers by the colonial state. According to the Mamdanian conceptual categorisation, these cases and particularly that of the Tutsi shows that in the context of Euro-American colonisation you didn’t have to be ‘white’ to be a settler or to be considered one. The latter paradoxical category is thus defined in his UCT Inaugural Lecture:

‘But the homeless people [Settler Proper] were not the only settlers. There was also a category of settlers, those away from home, Native Settlers, even if this designation should sound contradictory. From the point-of-view of this kind of state, every native outside his or her own home area was a settler of sorts, someone considered non-indigenous – precisely because that person had an ethnic home elsewhere, even if within the same country. The distinction between the indigenous and the non-indigenous had ceased to be racialised; it was ethnicised. Every ethnic area made the distinction between those who belonged and those who didn’t, between ethnic citizens and ethnic strangers.’

Imperfect as it is, this Mamdanian categorisation helps one to make sense of why within the same century the Nguni speaking people who ‘trekked’ all the way from South Africa to the area that is now within what is known as the United Republic of Tanzania settled and became (ethnic) strangers-cum-natives in the eyes of other (ethnic) natives of that area – including those they bitterly fought with – while the Afrikaner speaking people who trekked northward from the southern tip of Africa remained (racial) strangers in the eyes of (ethnic) natives of an area that is now known as the Republic of South Africa. The ‘whites’ saw themselves and were thus seen by non-whites as a racial category whilst the non-whites did not see each other as racial categories.

Thus the battle between the then settling Ngoni and the then settled Hehe for land among other things was a battle between natives and natives of Africa but the battle between Ngoni alongside the Hehe against the Germans during the Maji Maji War of Resistance (1905-1097) was a battle between natives and settlers. The same can be said about the skirmish between the then settling Ndebele and the then settled Shona in what is now known as Zimbabwe vis-à-vis the battles between the Shona alongside the Ndebele in the battles against white settlers. Other more or less similar cases include the making/remaking of the Kingdoms of Basotho, Bunyoro and Buganda vis-à-vis their opposition to white settlement/colonisation. The former’s native consciousness could not ‘nativise’ the latter. Here is where Fanon’s 1952 analytical toolkit comes in handy.

Drawing from John Paul Sartre’s analysis of Jews being overdetermined from the inside – in the context of the anti-Semitism of World War II – because they appeared as white outside and hence could only be precisely recognised as being Jewish by other whites through their actions, Fanon argued that the ‘black man/woman’ does not have a similar guise – s/he is simply recognised as soon as s/he appears. What follows below is the classical scenario that the black person encountered in contrast to a white person who happened to be a Jew:

‘All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is. One hopes, one waits. His actions, his behaviours are the final determinant. He is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed…The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down. But in my case I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not the “idea” others have of me but of my own appearance…When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour…’

It is this form of racialisation, of overdetermining the native vis-à-vis the settler from without during colonisation that led to the conflation of being settler with being white and native with being black. Thus, as Mamdani aptly puts it, the proto-type settler was, of course, the white who came to be known in Kiswahili and many other African languages as Mzungu, that is, someone who performs an act of Kuzunguka, that is, trek or wander from one place to another. Even in the case of the Tutsi, which appears to be the exception, it is the so-called ‘caucasian’ or ‘white’ features of theirs that were used to construct them as a Hamitic race that was distinct from other people of Africa such as the Hutu. Thus the Hamitic Hypothesis was a colonial attempt at overdetermining the Tutsi vis-à-vis the Hutu with respect to blackness/whiteness from without.

This differentiation between two main sets of opposite categories, that of (1) the (African) native vis-à-vis (African) settler-cum-native and the (African) native vis-à-vis (Euro-American) settler as well as that of (2) the (African) native vis-à-vis (Asiatic/Arab) settler and the (Asiatic/Arab) settler vis-à-vis (Euro-American) settler is what informed the colonial state formation and the making of citizenship within colonies in Africa. At the heart of this citizenship problematic was the notion of race, for the term African did not simply denote someone of or from a geographical space known as the continent of Africa and its islands. African was – as still is – virtually synonymous to black. It this paradox of identity that made it possible to form a tautological identity known as ‘black African’, that is, ‘black black’ or ‘African African’ in an attempt to distinguish those ‘native proper’/‘native settler’ from those ‘settler proper’ who were neither white/Euro-American nor black/African. In the spirit of the Lugardian doctrine of ‘divide and rule’ such categorisation was constructed to enable yet another construction, that of ‘citizen and subject’, in order to consolidate the colonial state in Africa as – and more than – elsewhere.

 

[Zakumi]

Compareno:


Kwahiyo ukiwa uzawa ni sawa na ulowezi, basi sio vibaya mimi kuwa na uraia wa kibongo na wa nchi nyingine, let's USA.

 

[Companero]

Compareno:

Kwahiyo ukiwa uzawa ni sawa na ulowezi, basi sio vibaya mimi kuwa na uraia wa kibongo na wa nchi nyingine, let's USA.

Acha ku-spin. Sijasema uzawa = ulowezi. Hakuna anayekuzuia kuwa naturalized.

Obama ni mzawa wa Marikani. Ni raia halisi wa Marikani. Lakini asili yake huko ni ulowezi.

Hicho ndicho namaanisha. Uzawa unepelekea ulowezi. Na ulowezi unapelekea uzawa.

 

[Zakumi]

Acha ku-spin. Sijasema uzawa = ulowezi. Hakuna anayekuzuia kuwa naturalized.

Obama ni mzawa wa Marikani. Ni raia halisi wa Marikani. Lakini asili yake huko ni ulowezi.

Hicho ndicho namaanisha. Uzawa unepelekea ulowezi. Na ulowezi unapelekea uzawa.

Sija-spin kitu. Ngoja nikupe - Qoute yako:

Mtunzi wa Kitabu cha 'Citizens and Subjects' anasema mzawa (native) na mlowezi (settler) wanakwenda pamoja. Huwezi kuwa na mmoja bila mwingine. Unapokuwa na mzawa papo hapo unakuwa na mlowezi. Na ukitaka ukitaka kusiwe na mlowezi basi hakutakuwa na mzawa. Hii ni kwa kuwa dhana ya ulowezi inatokana na dhana ya uzawa na dhana ya uzawa inatokana na ulowezi. Falsafa hii inatufundisha nini hasa?

Inatufundisha kuwa ukianza kufuatalia utagundua kuwa hakuna mzawa halisi .

Na kwa mantiki hii Tanzania kutokuwa na sheria za ku-preseve uraia wa wazawa waliochukua uraia wa nchi zingine ni kuvunja haki za binadamu.

 

[Companero]

Sija-spin kitu. Ngoja nikupe - Qoute yako:
[...] Na kwa mantiki hii Tanzania kutokuwa na sheria za ku-preseve uraia wa wazawa waliochukua uraia wa nchi zingine ni kuvunja haki za binadamu.

Lojiki yako naipata. Lakini kama nilivyosema, inabidi tuziangalie hizi dhana kinzani za mwenyeji/mgeni na mzawa/mlowezi katika muktadha mpana wa dhana ya uraia. Unapaswa kutambua maana ya raia haikidhi moja kwa moja hitaji lako la kuwa mzawa wa huku na huko au mlowezi wa hapa na pale.

Raia ana haki na wajibu. Huwezi kusema tunavunja haki za binadamu kwa kuwa hatujakuachia uwe raia asiyewajibika kwa taifa hili bali hilo. Hata Rais wako hawajibiki kwa Kenya ndio maana hana, 'na wala hataki', uraia huo.

Rejea huu uchambuzi wangu kuhusu hili sakata la 'uraia ndumilakuwili':

In his most recent official visit to the United States of America (USA), the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, met a group of Tanzanian citizens – as well as citizens of USA who have renounced their Tanzanian citizenship – residing in Los Angeles, California. One of the burning questions that they had for the President – as the buildup to the event indicated – was the question of dual citizenship. Prior to this presidential visit it was a common knowledge, as garnered from parliamentary debates and ensuing media reports such as The Citizen’s Preparations for dual citizenship law underway (15 July 2008) and The Daily News’ Bill on dual citizenship coming (15 July 2008), that the government was in the process of preparing a Bill for dual citizenship to be tabled in parliament in one of its 2009 sessions.

Thus the anticipation the Tanzanian diaspora had, despite the fact that their campaign to push for such a Bill goes back as early as 2004, was based on the hope that as the head of the government, the president could reveal how soon they should expect such a parliamentary motion. Surprisingly, flanked by the minister responsible for foreign affairs, Bernard Membe, the president told his audience in Los Angeles that the move has stalled as it has been a subject of opposition among a number of people including the highly regarded intellectuals at the university, some of whom he affirmed they know very well. He noted that the minister for foreign affairs has frequently talked in favour of it but has now stopped doing so, for every time he speaks about it they blast – as in criticise – him.

In his characteristically humouristic tone, President Kikwete grinningly said that these opponents of dual citizenship are saying that their fellows who are abroad want to ‘kula huku na huku’, which when literally translated means, they ‘want to eat here and there.’ It is obvious he was referring to certain ‘Intellectuals at the Hill’, that is, those at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) which is still highly regarded as the leading higher learning institution in Tanzania. The president promised, however, that they will keep on educating, as in sensitising the people, about it, that is, presumably about its benefits.

But who are these renowned intellectuals that the government seemingly listens to when they speak and what are their main arguments against dual citizenship? They include those who participated in an international conference on ‘Unbinding Dual Citizenship in Tanzania’ convened by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at UDSM in April 2007. In her media report of the event in The Guardian (12 April 2007), Christina Mwangosi concluded that most participants disagreed with the adoption of dual citizenship by arguing that it will endanger peace, security and livelihood of poor Tanzanians.

Moreover, they argued that it will increase pressure on land because in most cases people with access to dual citizenship may take advantage of their affluence to purchase land, thus leaving the poor landless. Another argument advanced against it was that it may also put the nation at a high security risk. According to the Centre for the Study of Forced Migration, the International Refugee Rights Initiative & the Social Science Research Council, however, some people argued that introducing it might perhaps help Tanzania to access investment from the diaspora and that there was recognition of the existence of an emerging elite with children born outside Tanzania who could also benefit.

Arguably one of those famous intellectuals who are against dual citizenship is Professor Issa Shivji. As far back as 2006, when the Law Reform Commission of Tanzania, chaired by the renowned Judge Antony Bahati, issued a report on the introduction of dual citizenship in Tanzania, he had expressed concern that the reforms were spearheaded by an elite few. According to the Sunday News (21 May 2006), Shivji said this was so because the majority of Tanzanians would not benefit from such a reform. Moreover, he contended that the reform in favour of dual citizen was/is a sign of a lack of patriotism and would lead to a loss of national identity. In tandem with these contentions he wrote an article on dual versus African citizenship in The Citizen (24 November 2007).

Therein Shivji offered a critique of one of the parliamentary debates on dual citizenship in which the response of a deputy minister concerned with citizenship implied that ‘many’ Tanzanians were/are in favour of it. After noting that previously newspapers have reported that vocal Tanzanians particularly those residing abroad had clamoured for that form of citizenship and also after observing that it seemed even those in authority were/are in favour of it, Shivji predicted that perhaps it was thus a matter of time before dual citizenship is legalised and then posed two set of interrelated questions that we need to ask. The first one is which Tanzanians want such citizenship and how many are those ‘many Tanzanians’ who want it? And the second one is what does dual citizenship imply, and who stands to benefit from it?

The answer to the first question, he contended, is clear even without taking a head count. It is – for it can only be – the members of the minute elite who constitute that ‘many Tanzanians’ implied by the said deputy minister. To Shivji, these ‘many’ Tanzanians cannot be the majority Tanzanians, for the latter live in their villages and may have never travelled outside the country and perhaps not even to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s business capital. As such, he affirms, it matters little to the large majority of Tanzanians. In a way this view was supported by Chachage in an interview with Sunday News (21 May 2006) whereby the latter was quoted as saying that dual citizenship was not a priority because there were many other pressing issues at that moment.

In the absence of such a headcount, it is important to note that according to one of the leading advocates for dual citizenship known as Abdul Wakil, the online ‘Dual Petition for Tanzanians’ was filed online at www.tanzaniacyberzone.com by Tanzanians living in America, that is, the USA. At the time Wakil announced that on 18 March 2004, as cached in The Africa Guide Forums, he noted that 450 signatures had been collected. By 17 November 2007 another leading advocate of dual citizenship and propagator of the petition, Apollo Temu, noted in Tanzania Edinburgh Community Association (TzECA) online yahoo group that at least 2,574 signatories had already endorsed the privately arranged petition. Even though the then posted petition can neither be accessed nor cached online, it is clear that the move was primarily a movement of Tanzanians abroad, the majority of whom come from middle class families in Tanzania.

I had an opportunity to visit the petition site once before it became inaccessible, and observed that I could recognise a number of the signatories who happened to belong to a class of Tanzanians who had relatively more access to civil, political and social rights which are the bedrock of citizenship as defined as ‘formal citizenship’ – these rights range from access to better social services to freedom(s) of movement as evidenced in their relatively easy access to passports and opportunities to go abroad for studies among other things.

It is Shivji’s response to the second question of his cited above that touches on the dilemma of being both a national and a citizen. After reviewing the above-discussed rationale(s) for maintaining single citizenship at the time of independence, which he affirms were centered on the question of building nationalism and national loyalty, he laments the irony that now, being over forty years after independence, the whole debate on citizenship is conducted without reference to nationalism, African identity and political loyalty to the nation-state which he sees as being connected. In regard to that connection, he also laments the irony that the issue of nationalism is not linked to the issue of pan-Africanism, which was so prominent in the nationalist debates of the 1950s and early 1960s.

By locating the debate of citizenship within the discourse of nationalism and the vision of pan-Africanism, Shivji is attempting ‘to transcend the contemporary conceptualization of citizenship, as simply formal citizenship’ [PDF 503kb] which Chachage ‘defined as membership of a nation-state and loyalty to the state and its policies as prescribed by the donor and international community, rather than an attempt to restructure the relations between the people and the state.’ In the wake of this conceptualisation, it is further observed, the vocabulary of ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ are increasingly being replaced by that of ‘citizenship.’

This bourgeoisie/elitist neo-liberal conceptualisation of belongingness overlooks the fact that to many of those who struggled for independence and their descendants, ‘formal citizenship’, as a form of belongingness, is not as readily accessible. It is relatively out of reach to the majority because the privileges that are associated with it are mainly confined – by the ‘party state’ – to the political, civic, academic and business elites who have the means and connections to access it. The following statement from the latest Tanzania Human Report issued by the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) in 2009 thus paints this state:

‘In 2008, many Tanzanians were still denied certain basic human rights, such as the right to life, the right to equal protection of the law, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.’

These many ‘Tanzanians’ – for to be Tanzanian ought to imply having full access to basic human rights which primarily defines Tanzanian citizenship – include: 35 albinos who were killed because of beliefs that their body parts could be used to make a person rich; not less than 10 people who were subjected to mob violence and killed after being suspected of committing certain crimes; and at least seven people who became victims of extra-judicial killings by the state’s law enforcement officials as reported by LHRC. On the basis of the United Republic of Tanzania’s latest Poverty and Human Development Report (PHDR) 2007 [PDF 58kb], the many Tanzanians who do not fully enjoy the privileges of ‘formal citizenship’ also include those mothers whose children die at an infant mortality rate of 68 out of 1,000 live births and those whose children die before they reach the age of 5 at an under-five mortality rate of 112 per 1,000 live births. Moreover, it include each woman who is expected to die every hour from maternal causes in Tanzania whereby the leading causes, according to PHDR 2007, are haemorrhage, sepsis, unsafe abortion, pregnancy-induced hypertension and obstructed labour.

Thus, in a way, by unmasking the way dual citizenship is also conventionally conceptualised as ‘formal citizenship’, Shivji is showing that to be a citizen does not necessarily mean to be a national and vice versa. This point about citizenship vis-à-vis nationality is elaborated further below. Here it important to take note of the fact that in the case of Africa in general and Tanzania in particular, post-colonial citizenship was a product of the struggle(s) – by the majority – for a form of inclusive belongingness that transcends the one introduced by the colonial state whereby to be a citizen was to have access to what others didn’t have access to.

In other words, Africans became African nationals, and nationalists for that matter, way before they won their right to citizenship after gaining independence. As it has been shown in my earlier essay When does a 'subject' become a 'citizen'?, in Mamdanian terms, this struggle was based on a quest for a transethnic identity, that of being ‘African’ rather than being a member of this or that tribal/ethnic groups which were, after all, denied full citizenship. Theirs was a quest for citizenship based on a universal African identity accessible to the majority vis-à-vis a quest for citizenship based on a fragmented identity that is not accessible to the majority.

One of the strongest arguments in favour of dual citizenship, however, is that Africans who are residing abroad contribute to their respective home economies through remittances. According to a World Bank’s Migration and Remmittance Factbook as cited by Claire Mercer, Ben Page and Martin Evans in 2008 in their book on Development and the African Diaspora: Place and the Politics of Home, the flow of remittances to the so-called sub-Saharan Africa in 2007 amounted to US$10.8 billion. Even though this flow is low compared to other world regions, as Mercer, Page and Martin note, it is still very significant when it is measured relative to the total inward flow to the area. They also note those who support the migrations associated with these flows claim that the benefits that Africa and other regions gain view remittances as constituting money, ideas, values and other social remittances return to these regions. They further note that, apart from those individuals who send remittances to their own family members, there are some who are using their social and welfare associations to generate collective remittances.

These remittances are then sent to earmarked development projects in their respective regions. Remittances, they affirm, can reduce foreign exchange and thus offset what economists refer to as balance of payment deficit. By the very fact that the flow involves exchange of currency this offsetting, it is thus claimed, is done without incurring interest liabilities. They also assert that this type of flow does not necessarily increase the level of imports of foreign goods or services because those families who receive the remittances often spend them on public services and other forms of consumption that often puts money into local economies. The reason that Africa receive less remittance compared to other continents is partly explained by 'the existing analysis of remittances' which, it is further asserted, ‘argues that the determining factors governing the scale and patterns of international remittance flows are fundamentally financial (relative wage levels, exchange and interest rates, investment environments, economic stability in Africa and financial capacity)’. It is these determining factors that the introduction of dual citizenship in Tanzania is expected to influence for the sake of Tanzanian ‘development’.

In the case of Tanzanians abroad, the claims cited above resonates with their situation especially in the current context whereby a number of associations – ranging from foreign branches of the ruling party to associations of Tanzanians living in a particular city or country abroad – are mushrooming. In a significant way the decision of the government of Tanzania to change all the passports of its eligible citizens in 2005 contributed to the formation of these associations and/or consolidation of those that were already in existence. At that time I was studying at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland whereby TzECA mobilised itself and invited officials from the Tanzanian Embassy in the United Kingdom (UK) to come and facilitate the process of issuing of passports.

A more or less similar level of mobilisation was observed in the Los Angeles Community which recently met with President Kikwete. Since then the former community which runs an online yahoo group with a membership of at least 92 people and currently host a website has widened its scope and it is now linked to a number of initiatives of supporting development/philanthropic work in Tanzania. Some of its members have also formed a Non-Government Organisation (NGO) in the UK. Understandably the chairperson of the TzECA, Apollo Temu, is an ardent supporter of the introduction of dual citizenship in Tanzania and, as it has been hinted above, was one of the pioneers involved in mobilising Tanzanians to sign a petition for dual citizenship. The Los Angeles Community, which also runs a yahoo group, is also attempting to widen its scope in terms of contributing to the development of Tanzania and, expectedly, its leader, Iddy Mtango, also supported the petition for dual citizenship.

The arguments for dual citizenship advanced by some members of these Tanzanian diasporic communities make are in sharp contrast to those presented by the above mentioned critics from the intellectual community at the University of Dar- es-Salaam. For instance, in a public online exchange in response to Shivji’s argument in favour African citizenship versus dual citizenship discussed above, Temu argues that patriotism in the 21st Century should never be determined by people’s postal addresses since it surely does not come from ones' postcode but, rather, from one's code of conduct in relation to his/her nation. Somewhere else he laments what he refers to as the misplaced views that people from Tanzania who live outside Tanzania are less patriotic. As if to pick a leaf from Nyerere’s above-cited assertion that the terms of the debate on citizenship in 1964 were not the same as the ones in 1961, Temu also asserts that these debates in the 1960s are not the same as the current ones in the 2000s as their contexts differs significantly.

It is these contextual shifts, normally attributed to the intensification of globalisation and transnationalism, which led two professors of migration and citizenship respectively, Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, to argue in 2000 – in their book on Citizenship and migration: Globalisation and the politics of belonging – that ‘basing citizenship on a singular and individual membership in a nation-state is no longer adequate, since the nation-state model is being severely eroded' and hence 'new approaches to citizenship are needed, which take account of collective identities and the fact that many people now belong at various levels to more than one society.’

In a similar vein, the Law Reform Commission of the United Republic of Tanzania’s letter entitled Review of Tanzania’s citizenship law and consideration of the possibility of recognising dual citizenship dated 14 June 2004 and made publicly available on its official website, asserted that due to intense globalisation and in recognition of the potential benefits that can be generated from it, the Commission recommended the introduction of a multilateral framework for cross border movement of people as a way of sharing those benefits between nations. To that end it eloquently ‘suggested measures to stimulate such process of skill circulation that could include the acceptance of dual citizenship by both host and sending countries’ [PDF] and unilaterally affirmed that clearly 'early 20th Century perceptions of state sovereignty, citizenship, nationality and inter-state relations, will have to change and adapt to the new forces of globalization’. Its accompanying Position paper on the introduction of dual citizenship in Tanzania [PDF] thus concluded about dual citizenship being a given fact of globalisation before it even conducted its said assessment – which was supposed to show if that was/is so – and presented its above-critiqued report to the government in 2006:

'The movement towards embracing dual citizenship is slowly gaining momentum as nations become aware that their national security may not necessarily be jeopardised by mere application of dual citizenship under the present circumstances of intense globalization and technological advancements which have melted territorial boundaries and merged the world into a global village. Thus, accepting dual citizenship may now be considered to be in the national interest, as it will facilitate flow of investment, transfer of technology and infusion of democratic values, while at the same time, permitting a nation to affirm its identity. It is, in any case, too late for the entrenchment of dual citizenship to be received, as it has become a fact of globalisation.’

However, all these pro-globalisation conceptualisations have a blind spot that subject them to historical amnesia: They ignore that historically and conceptually globalisation, or globalism to put it more crudely, is part and parcel of Imperialism which has and is still eroding the freedoms and rights of those in the margins of the so-called Global Village, who happen to be nationals of ‘nation-states’ who cannot access the privileges of multiple or dual citizenship let alone those of single citizenship that they are still struggling to reclaim from states whose laws and policies, including those on citizenship, are now prescribed by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and ‘development partners’ rather than the very people who struggled to decolonise those states.

In 2007 Frederick Longino, another TzECA member, went as far as publishing his affirmative views in a local Tanzanian newspaper – The Daily News. In his article there entitled What does dual citizenship (or dual nationality) mean to Tanzanians? he asserted that it is a fact that there are more benefits in terms of economic opportunities and cultural expansion than risks in allowing dual citizenship, hence he lamented that Tanzania was ever slow to wake up to the said fact. After presenting those claimed advantages, such as broadening the country’s economic base by promoting trade and investment between countries sharing citizens, the enjoyment of the privilege of voting in those countries, owning property/land and accessing government health care and education across the given countries, Longino offers a radical conceptual suggestion.

Perhaps, he cautiously suggests, the time has come as well for a new designation to reflect the shedding of what he calls the old baggage, that is, the so-called old anxieties about ‘dual nationality’. Here he is referring to what made Tanganyikans/Tanzanians be wary of that duality in the wake and immediate aftermath of Uhuru and the Union as discussed above. The historical origins of the said anxieties, which he aptly advise us to explore and examine their relevance in a changed international context, are said to be far more prosaic than what he calls the spectre of spies and saboteurs. Indeed this is a spectre that haunted Africa’s post-colonial states in the wake of assassinations and military coups that swept the continent during the then Cold, albeit hot, War between what was known as the Western Bloc led by the USA with its CIA and the Eastern Bloc led by the then USSR with its KGB. It is a spectre that still troubles a number of radical nationalists who are wary of the ‘War on terror’ and the quest for the militarisation of the continent through the USA’s Africa Command (AFRICOM). Nevertheless, the new designation Longino calls for to replace the characterisation of a person as a dual citizen is a ‘co-national.’

Apart from the above-claimed advantages, it is claimed that this so-called co-national would have greater flexibility, not only in a choice of where to live and work, but also on where to access grants, social security, education and good health services. All this, it is further claimed, s/he will access without having to incur expenses or ‘pay extra’. Moreover, it is asserted that one’s co-nationality may enhance the feeling of belonging because that co-national will have strong personal ties to more than a single country. In sum s/he will be without any immigration worries.

But does becoming a citizen necessarily and/or automatically makes one a national, out of which one can logically conclude that to be a dual citizen entails being a co-national? In order to do justice to this question, one has to analytically distinguish between the nation-state, the nation and the state. After independence, noted Basil Davidson in 1992 in his aptly titled/subtitled book The black man’s burden: Africa and the curse of the nation-state, what was inherited in Africa was in effect states and not nations or states without nations. The first task, then, of the nationalist leaders who took power, as it has been noted above, was to embark on a project of national building. In doing so, however, most of them ended up creating despotic party states. In fact the national building project turned out to be a statist developmentalist project whereby the state hijacked the civil society so as to direct if not dictate it on how it should bring about modernity in the name of modernisation. It is these states that became custodians of citizenship.

As the cases discussed above show, this statist custodianship usurped the role of remaking citizenship from the very aspiring nationals, that is, the majority of people, who, as nationalists, fought for independence so they can have the right to self-determination which included, among other things, the right to define forms of citizenship they aspired to within the realm of social struggles aimed at transforming the relation between the state and society. What they wanted to achieve through decolonisation was nothing less than the nationalisation of citizenship. Theirs was therefore an attempt to achieve a form of citizenship that amounts to nationality. Co-nationality can only be a non-starter unless post-colonial nationality/citizenship is fully achieved.

This debate on dual citizenship that bedevilled independent African states in the wake of decolonisation in the 1960s is indeed back on the agenda. The international/national context which informed that debate, as it has been shown in this article, has changed. However, the international/national power relations that coloured that context, as it has also been discussed in the article, have not significantly changed. In the case of The Tanzania Citizenship Act of 1995, as the Law Reform Commission has aptly noted, there has ‘also’ been ‘public concerns regarding the rigidity of our citizenship laws, which seem to favour foreigners, seeking to become Tanzania citizens, as against former nationals (of Diaspora) who may have been compelled to emigrate and to take up foreign nationalities for social and economic reasons, as well as the gender insensitivity of the current Citizenship Law, which does not appear to confer equal rights between male and female citizens in bequeathing citizenship to their children.’ [PDF]

It is these fundamental concerns that need to be prioritised instead of confining them to the ‘also’ that prompted the Commission to study the citizenship laws and assess the viability and acceptability of dual citizenship in Tanzania. One need to adequately address these concerns regarding our gendered and ‘classed’ single citizenship which renders the majority subjects of the state before one can think of the possibility of dual or multiple citizenships, lest the conceptualisation and operationalisation of the latter reproduce that gendering and ‘classing’.

Thus that most fundamental concern, of decolonising the colonial subjects and transforming them into post-colonial citizens, is as relevant today as – and more urgent in the 2000s than – it was in the 1960s. As Mamdani noted in 2001 in his call to move Beyond settler and native as political identities: Overcoming the political legacy of colonialism, the lamented state of collapse in Africa in Afropessimistic circles is in fact the collapse of the bifurcated colonial state which the post-colonial states have not fundamentally transformed so as to do away with its duality. It is these dualities of the settler versus the native, the urban versus the rural, the informal versus the formal, the man versus the woman, the white versus the black, the state versus the society, the privileged versus the underprivileged and so on and on that need to be urgently dealt with squarely and honestly.

All this amount to recentering the debate of citizenship on the question of self-determination of those nationals who would not have the luxury of dual citizenship let alone that of single citizenship simply because ‘their’ neo-colonial states are busy conceptualising and operationalising citizenship as a formal citizenship that is inaccessible to the majority. Why grant dual citizenship to a ‘minority’ when you can’t even fully grant single citizenship to the ‘majority’? Surely we cannot afford to allow further growth of first and second class citizenship!

 

[shabanimzungu]

ÚZAWA is being racist similar to Apartheid..period...

 

[Companero]

ÚZAWA is being racist similar to Apartheid..period...

Na matokeo yake ndio haya - yanakula hadi kwa nabii mkuu wa uzawa:

In 1992, after the introduction of multipartysm in Tanzania, one of the former independence cabinet ministers and a long serving member of TANU, Oscar Kambona, came back from exile and formed an opposition party known as the Tanzania Democratic Alliance (TADEA). However, as one scholar notes, there were rumours about whether he was authentically Tanzanian but somehow nothing was done to formally strip him of his citizenship. Nevertheless, as another scholar puts it, the quest to unmake his citizenship was too strong to the extent that “the state claimed that he was not a citizen of Tanzania but a Malawian!”This trend in the wake of multipartysm, as the former scholar notes, continued whereby following incidents occurred after the first multiparty election: (1) Following an election petition the court declared Azim Premji, then a parliamentary contestant, from Kigoma a non-citizen; (2) A former Minister, Arcado Ntagazwa’s citizenship was challenged in a similar petition; (3) The citizenship of a former minister and champion of indigenization, Iddi Simba was also challenged by such a petition ; (4) Ali Nabwa, the first secretary of the revolutionary Council of Zanzibar, was declared uncitizen; and last but not least (5) Jenerali Ulimwengu, a former district officer, had to be naturalized!

 

[Nyani Ngabu]

Acha ku-spin. Sijasema uzawa = ulowezi. Hakuna anayekuzuia kuwa naturalized.

Obama ni mzawa wa Marikani. Ni raia halisi wa Marikani. Lakini asili yake huko ni ulowezi.

Hicho ndicho namaanisha. Uzawa unepelekea ulowezi. Na ulowezi unapelekea uzawa.

Kila binadamu ni mlowezi wa sehemu fulani....

 

[Zakumi]

Lojiki yako naipata. Lakini kama nilivyosema, inabidi tuziangalie hizi dhana kinzani za mwenyeji/mgeni na mzawa/mlowezi katika muktadha mpana wa dhana ya uraia. Unapaswa kutambua maana ya raia haikidhi moja kwa moja hitaji lako la kuwa mzawa wa huku na huko au mlowezi wa hapa na pale.

Raia ana haki na wajibu. Huwezi kusema tunavunja haki za binadamu kwa kuwa hatujakuachia uwe raia asiyewajibika kwa taifa hili bali hilo. Hata Rais wako hawajibiki kwa Kenya ndio maana hana, 'na wala hataki', uraia huo.

Rejea huu uchambuzi wangu kuhusu hili sakata la 'uraia ndumilakuwili':

In his most recent official visit to the United States of America (USA), the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, met a group of Tanzanian citizens – as well as citizens of USA who have renounced their Tanzanian citizenship – residing in Los Angeles, California. One of the burning questions that they had for the President – as the buildup to the event indicated – was the question of dual citizenship. Prior to this presidential visit it was a common knowledge, as garnered from parliamentary debates and ensuing media reports such as The Citizen’s Preparations for dual citizenship law underway (15 July 2008) and The Daily News’ Bill on dual citizenship coming (15 July 2008), that the government was in the process of preparing a Bill for dual citizenship to be tabled in parliament in one of its 2009 sessions.

Thus the anticipation the Tanzanian diaspora had, despite the fact that their campaign to push for such a Bill goes back as early as 2004, was based on the hope that as the head of the government, the president could reveal how soon they should expect such a parliamentary motion. Surprisingly, flanked by the minister responsible for foreign affairs, Bernard Membe, the president told his audience in Los Angeles that the move has stalled as it has been a subject of opposition among a number of people including the highly regarded intellectuals at the university, some of whom he affirmed they know very well. He noted that the minister for foreign affairs has frequently talked in favour of it but has now stopped doing so, for every time he speaks about it they blast – as in criticise – him.

In his characteristically humouristic tone, President Kikwete grinningly said that these opponents of dual citizenship are saying that their fellows who are abroad want to ‘kula huku na huku’, which when literally translated means, they ‘want to eat here and there.’ It is obvious he was referring to certain ‘Intellectuals at the Hill’, that is, those at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) which is still highly regarded as the leading higher learning institution in Tanzania. The president promised, however, that they will keep on educating, as in sensitising the people, about it, that is, presumably about its benefits.

But who are these renowned intellectuals that the government seemingly listens to when they speak and what are their main arguments against dual citizenship? They include those who participated in an international conference on ‘Unbinding Dual Citizenship in Tanzania’ convened by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at UDSM in April 2007. In her media report of the event in The Guardian (12 April 2007), Christina Mwangosi concluded that most participants disagreed with the adoption of dual citizenship by arguing that it will endanger peace, security and livelihood of poor Tanzanians.

Moreover, they argued that it will increase pressure on land because in most cases people with access to dual citizenship may take advantage of their affluence to purchase land, thus leaving the poor landless. Another argument advanced against it was that it may also put the nation at a high security risk. According to the Centre for the Study of Forced Migration, the International Refugee Rights Initiative & the Social Science Research Council, however, some people argued that introducing it might perhaps help Tanzania to access investment from the diaspora and that there was recognition of the existence of an emerging elite with children born outside Tanzania who could also benefit.

Arguably one of those famous intellectuals who are against dual citizenship is Professor Issa Shivji. As far back as 2006, when the Law Reform Commission of Tanzania, chaired by the renowned Judge Antony Bahati, issued a report on the introduction of dual citizenship in Tanzania, he had expressed concern that the reforms were spearheaded by an elite few. According to the Sunday News (21 May 2006), Shivji said this was so because the majority of Tanzanians would not benefit from such a reform. Moreover, he contended that the reform in favour of dual citizen was/is a sign of a lack of patriotism and would lead to a loss of national identity. In tandem with these contentions he wrote an article on dual versus African citizenship in The Citizen (24 November 2007).

Therein Shivji offered a critique of one of the parliamentary debates on dual citizenship in which the response of a deputy minister concerned with citizenship implied that ‘many’ Tanzanians were/are in favour of it. After noting that previously newspapers have reported that vocal Tanzanians particularly those residing abroad had clamoured for that form of citizenship and also after observing that it seemed even those in authority were/are in favour of it, Shivji predicted that perhaps it was thus a matter of time before dual citizenship is legalised and then posed two set of interrelated questions that we need to ask. The first one is which Tanzanians want such citizenship and how many are those ‘many Tanzanians’ who want it? And the second one is what does dual citizenship imply, and who stands to benefit from it?

The answer to the first question, he contended, is clear even without taking a head count. It is – for it can only be – the members of the minute elite who constitute that ‘many Tanzanians’ implied by the said deputy minister. To Shivji, these ‘many’ Tanzanians cannot be the majority Tanzanians, for the latter live in their villages and may have never travelled outside the country and perhaps not even to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s business capital. As such, he affirms, it matters little to the large majority of Tanzanians. In a way this view was supported by Chachage in an interview with Sunday News (21 May 2006) whereby the latter was quoted as saying that dual citizenship was not a priority because there were many other pressing issues at that moment.

In the absence of such a headcount, it is important to note that according to one of the leading advocates for dual citizenship known as Abdul Wakil, the online ‘Dual Petition for Tanzanians’ was filed online at www.tanzaniacyberzone.com by Tanzanians living in America, that is, the USA. At the time Wakil announced that on 18 March 2004, as cached in The Africa Guide Forums, he noted that 450 signatures had been collected. By 17 November 2007 another leading advocate of dual citizenship and propagator of the petition, Apollo Temu, noted in Tanzania Edinburgh Community Association (TzECA) online yahoo group that at least 2,574 signatories had already endorsed the privately arranged petition. Even though the then posted petition can neither be accessed nor cached online, it is clear that the move was primarily a movement of Tanzanians abroad, the majority of whom come from middle class families in Tanzania.

I had an opportunity to visit the petition site once before it became inaccessible, and observed that I could recognise a number of the signatories who happened to belong to a class of Tanzanians who had relatively more access to civil, political and social rights which are the bedrock of citizenship as defined as ‘formal citizenship’ – these rights range from access to better social services to freedom(s) of movement as evidenced in their relatively easy access to passports and opportunities to go abroad for studies among other things.

It is Shivji’s response to the second question of his cited above that touches on the dilemma of being both a national and a citizen. After reviewing the above-discussed rationale(s) for maintaining single citizenship at the time of independence, which he affirms were centered on the question of building nationalism and national loyalty, he laments the irony that now, being over forty years after independence, the whole debate on citizenship is conducted without reference to nationalism, African identity and political loyalty to the nation-state which he sees as being connected. In regard to that connection, he also laments the irony that the issue of nationalism is not linked to the issue of pan-Africanism, which was so prominent in the nationalist debates of the 1950s and early 1960s.

By locating the debate of citizenship within the discourse of nationalism and the vision of pan-Africanism, Shivji is attempting ‘to transcend the contemporary conceptualization of citizenship, as simply formal citizenship’ [PDF 503kb] which Chachage ‘defined as membership of a nation-state and loyalty to the state and its policies as prescribed by the donor and international community, rather than an attempt to restructure the relations between the people and the state.’ In the wake of this conceptualisation, it is further observed, the vocabulary of ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ are increasingly being replaced by that of ‘citizenship.’

This bourgeoisie/elitist neo-liberal conceptualisation of belongingness overlooks the fact that to many of those who struggled for independence and their descendants, ‘formal citizenship’, as a form of belongingness, is not as readily accessible. It is relatively out of reach to the majority because the privileges that are associated with it are mainly confined – by the ‘party state’ – to the political, civic, academic and business elites who have the means and connections to access it. The following statement from the latest Tanzania Human Report issued by the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) in 2009 thus paints this state:

‘In 2008, many Tanzanians were still denied certain basic human rights, such as the right to life, the right to equal protection of the law, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.’

These many ‘Tanzanians’ – for to be Tanzanian ought to imply having full access to basic human rights which primarily defines Tanzanian citizenship – include: 35 albinos who were killed because of beliefs that their body parts could be used to make a person rich; not less than 10 people who were subjected to mob violence and killed after being suspected of committing certain crimes; and at least seven people who became victims of extra-judicial killings by the state’s law enforcement officials as reported by LHRC. On the basis of the United Republic of Tanzania’s latest Poverty and Human Development Report (PHDR) 2007 [PDF 58kb], the many Tanzanians who do not fully enjoy the privileges of ‘formal citizenship’ also include those mothers whose children die at an infant mortality rate of 68 out of 1,000 live births and those whose children die before they reach the age of 5 at an under-five mortality rate of 112 per 1,000 live births. Moreover, it include each woman who is expected to die every hour from maternal causes in Tanzania whereby the leading causes, according to PHDR 2007, are haemorrhage, sepsis, unsafe abortion, pregnancy-induced hypertension and obstructed labour.

Thus, in a way, by unmasking the way dual citizenship is also conventionally conceptualised as ‘formal citizenship’, Shivji is showing that to be a citizen does not necessarily mean to be a national and vice versa. This point about citizenship vis-à-vis nationality is elaborated further below. Here it important to take note of the fact that in the case of Africa in general and Tanzania in particular, post-colonial citizenship was a product of the struggle(s) – by the majority – for a form of inclusive belongingness that transcends the one introduced by the colonial state whereby to be a citizen was to have access to what others didn’t have access to.

In other words, Africans became African nationals, and nationalists for that matter, way before they won their right to citizenship after gaining independence. As it has been shown in my earlier essay When does a 'subject' become a 'citizen'?, in Mamdanian terms, this struggle was based on a quest for a transethnic identity, that of being ‘African’ rather than being a member of this or that tribal/ethnic groups which were, after all, denied full citizenship. Theirs was a quest for citizenship based on a universal African identity accessible to the majority vis-à-vis a quest for citizenship based on a fragmented identity that is not accessible to the majority.

One of the strongest arguments in favour of dual citizenship, however, is that Africans who are residing abroad contribute to their respective home economies through remittances. According to a World Bank’s Migration and Remmittance Factbook as cited by Claire Mercer, Ben Page and Martin Evans in 2008 in their book on Development and the African Diaspora: Place and the Politics of Home, the flow of remittances to the so-called sub-Saharan Africa in 2007 amounted to US$10.8 billion. Even though this flow is low compared to other world regions, as Mercer, Page and Martin note, it is still very significant when it is measured relative to the total inward flow to the area. They also note those who support the migrations associated with these flows claim that the benefits that Africa and other regions gain view remittances as constituting money, ideas, values and other social remittances return to these regions. They further note that, apart from those individuals who send remittances to their own family members, there are some who are using their social and welfare associations to generate collective remittances.

These remittances are then sent to earmarked development projects in their respective regions. Remittances, they affirm, can reduce foreign exchange and thus offset what economists refer to as balance of payment deficit. By the very fact that the flow involves exchange of currency this offsetting, it is thus claimed, is done without incurring interest liabilities. They also assert that this type of flow does not necessarily increase the level of imports of foreign goods or services because those families who receive the remittances often spend them on public services and other forms of consumption that often puts money into local economies. The reason that Africa receive less remittance compared to other continents is partly explained by 'the existing analysis of remittances' which, it is further asserted, ‘argues that the determining factors governing the scale and patterns of international remittance flows are fundamentally financial (relative wage levels, exchange and interest rates, investment environments, economic stability in Africa and financial capacity)’. It is these determining factors that the introduction of dual citizenship in Tanzania is expected to influence for the sake of Tanzanian ‘development’.

In the case of Tanzanians abroad, the claims cited above resonates with their situation especially in the current context whereby a number of associations – ranging from foreign branches of the ruling party to associations of Tanzanians living in a particular city or country abroad – are mushrooming. In a significant way the decision of the government of Tanzania to change all the passports of its eligible citizens in 2005 contributed to the formation of these associations and/or consolidation of those that were already in existence. At that time I was studying at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland whereby TzECA mobilised itself and invited officials from the Tanzanian Embassy in the United Kingdom (UK) to come and facilitate the process of issuing of passports.

A more or less similar level of mobilisation was observed in the Los Angeles Community which recently met with President Kikwete. Since then the former community which runs an online yahoo group with a membership of at least 92 people and currently host a website has widened its scope and it is now linked to a number of initiatives of supporting development/philanthropic work in Tanzania. Some of its members have also formed a Non-Government Organisation (NGO) in the UK. Understandably the chairperson of the TzECA, Apollo Temu, is an ardent supporter of the introduction of dual citizenship in Tanzania and, as it has been hinted above, was one of the pioneers involved in mobilising Tanzanians to sign a petition for dual citizenship. The Los Angeles Community, which also runs a yahoo group, is also attempting to widen its scope in terms of contributing to the development of Tanzania and, expectedly, its leader, Iddy Mtango, also supported the petition for dual citizenship.

The arguments for dual citizenship advanced by some members of these Tanzanian diasporic communities make are in sharp contrast to those presented by the above mentioned critics from the intellectual community at the University of Dar- es-Salaam. For instance, in a public online exchange in response to Shivji’s argument in favour African citizenship versus dual citizenship discussed above, Temu argues that patriotism in the 21st Century should never be determined by people’s postal addresses since it surely does not come from ones' postcode but, rather, from one's code of conduct in relation to his/her nation. Somewhere else he laments what he refers to as the misplaced views that people from Tanzania who live outside Tanzania are less patriotic. As if to pick a leaf from Nyerere’s above-cited assertion that the terms of the debate on citizenship in 1964 were not the same as the ones in 1961, Temu also asserts that these debates in the 1960s are not the same as the current ones in the 2000s as their contexts differs significantly.

It is these contextual shifts, normally attributed to the intensification of globalisation and transnationalism, which led two professors of migration and citizenship respectively, Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, to argue in 2000 – in their book on Citizenship and migration: Globalisation and the politics of belonging – that ‘basing citizenship on a singular and individual membership in a nation-state is no longer adequate, since the nation-state model is being severely eroded' and hence 'new approaches to citizenship are needed, which take account of collective identities and the fact that many people now belong at various levels to more than one society.’

In a similar vein, the Law Reform Commission of the United Republic of Tanzania’s letter entitled Review of Tanzania’s citizenship law and consideration of the possibility of recognising dual citizenship dated 14 June 2004 and made publicly available on its official website, asserted that due to intense globalisation and in recognition of the potential benefits that can be generated from it, the Commission recommended the introduction of a multilateral framework for cross border movement of people as a way of sharing those benefits between nations. To that end it eloquently ‘suggested measures to stimulate such process of skill circulation that could include the acceptance of dual citizenship by both host and sending countries’ [PDF] and unilaterally affirmed that clearly 'early 20th Century perceptions of state sovereignty, citizenship, nationality and inter-state relations, will have to change and adapt to the new forces of globalization’. Its accompanying Position paper on the introduction of dual citizenship in Tanzania [PDF] thus concluded about dual citizenship being a given fact of globalisation before it even conducted its said assessment – which was supposed to show if that was/is so – and presented its above-critiqued report to the government in 2006:

'The movement towards embracing dual citizenship is slowly gaining momentum as nations become aware that their national security may not necessarily be jeopardised by mere application of dual citizenship under the present circumstances of intense globalization and technological advancements which have melted territorial boundaries and merged the world into a global village. Thus, accepting dual citizenship may now be considered to be in the national interest, as it will facilitate flow of investment, transfer of technology and infusion of democratic values, while at the same time, permitting a nation to affirm its identity. It is, in any case, too late for the entrenchment of dual citizenship to be received, as it has become a fact of globalisation.’

However, all these pro-globalisation conceptualisations have a blind spot that subject them to historical amnesia: They ignore that historically and conceptually globalisation, or globalism to put it more crudely, is part and parcel of Imperialism which has and is still eroding the freedoms and rights of those in the margins of the so-called Global Village, who happen to be nationals of ‘nation-states’ who cannot access the privileges of multiple or dual citizenship let alone those of single citizenship that they are still struggling to reclaim from states whose laws and policies, including those on citizenship, are now prescribed by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and ‘development partners’ rather than the very people who struggled to decolonise those states.

In 2007 Frederick Longino, another TzECA member, went as far as publishing his affirmative views in a local Tanzanian newspaper – The Daily News. In his article there entitled What does dual citizenship (or dual nationality) mean to Tanzanians? he asserted that it is a fact that there are more benefits in terms of economic opportunities and cultural expansion than risks in allowing dual citizenship, hence he lamented that Tanzania was ever slow to wake up to the said fact. After presenting those claimed advantages, such as broadening the country’s economic base by promoting trade and investment between countries sharing citizens, the enjoyment of the privilege of voting in those countries, owning property/land and accessing government health care and education across the given countries, Longino offers a radical conceptual suggestion.

Perhaps, he cautiously suggests, the time has come as well for a new designation to reflect the shedding of what he calls the old baggage, that is, the so-called old anxieties about ‘dual nationality’. Here he is referring to what made Tanganyikans/Tanzanians be wary of that duality in the wake and immediate aftermath of Uhuru and the Union as discussed above. The historical origins of the said anxieties, which he aptly advise us to explore and examine their relevance in a changed international context, are said to be far more prosaic than what he calls the spectre of spies and saboteurs. Indeed this is a spectre that haunted Africa’s post-colonial states in the wake of assassinations and military coups that swept the continent during the then Cold, albeit hot, War between what was known as the Western Bloc led by the USA with its CIA and the Eastern Bloc led by the then USSR with its KGB. It is a spectre that still troubles a number of radical nationalists who are wary of the ‘War on terror’ and the quest for the militarisation of the continent through the USA’s Africa Command (AFRICOM). Nevertheless, the new designation Longino calls for to replace the characterisation of a person as a dual citizen is a ‘co-national.’

Apart from the above-claimed advantages, it is claimed that this so-called co-national would have greater flexibility, not only in a choice of where to live and work, but also on where to access grants, social security, education and good health services. All this, it is further claimed, s/he will access without having to incur expenses or ‘pay extra’. Moreover, it is asserted that one’s co-nationality may enhance the feeling of belonging because that co-national will have strong personal ties to more than a single country. In sum s/he will be without any immigration worries.

But does becoming a citizen necessarily and/or automatically makes one a national, out of which one can logically conclude that to be a dual citizen entails being a co-national? In order to do justice to this question, one has to analytically distinguish between the nation-state, the nation and the state. After independence, noted Basil Davidson in 1992 in his aptly titled/subtitled book The black man’s burden: Africa and the curse of the nation-state, what was inherited in Africa was in effect states and not nations or states without nations. The first task, then, of the nationalist leaders who took power, as it has been noted above, was to embark on a project of national building. In doing so, however, most of them ended up creating despotic party states. In fact the national building project turned out to be a statist developmentalist project whereby the state hijacked the civil society so as to direct if not dictate it on how it should bring about modernity in the name of modernisation. It is these states that became custodians of citizenship.

As the cases discussed above show, this statist custodianship usurped the role of remaking citizenship from the very aspiring nationals, that is, the majority of people, who, as nationalists, fought for independence so they can have the right to self-determination which included, among other things, the right to define forms of citizenship they aspired to within the realm of social struggles aimed at transforming the relation between the state and society. What they wanted to achieve through decolonisation was nothing less than the nationalisation of citizenship. Theirs was therefore an attempt to achieve a form of citizenship that amounts to nationality. Co-nationality can only be a non-starter unless post-colonial nationality/citizenship is fully achieved.

This debate on dual citizenship that bedevilled independent African states in the wake of decolonisation in the 1960s is indeed back on the agenda. The international/national context which informed that debate, as it has been shown in this article, has changed. However, the international/national power relations that coloured that context, as it has also been discussed in the article, have not significantly changed. In the case of The Tanzania Citizenship Act of 1995, as the Law Reform Commission has aptly noted, there has ‘also’ been ‘public concerns regarding the rigidity of our citizenship laws, which seem to favour foreigners, seeking to become Tanzania citizens, as against former nationals (of Diaspora) who may have been compelled to emigrate and to take up foreign nationalities for social and economic reasons, as well as the gender insensitivity of the current Citizenship Law, which does not appear to confer equal rights between male and female citizens in bequeathing citizenship to their children.’ [PDF]

It is these fundamental concerns that need to be prioritised instead of confining them to the ‘also’ that prompted the Commission to study the citizenship laws and assess the viability and acceptability of dual citizenship in Tanzania. One need to adequately address these concerns regarding our gendered and ‘classed’ single citizenship which renders the majority subjects of the state before one can think of the possibility of dual or multiple citizenships, lest the conceptualisation and operationalisation of the latter reproduce that gendering and ‘classing’.

Thus that most fundamental concern, of decolonising the colonial subjects and transforming them into post-colonial citizens, is as relevant today as – and more urgent in the 2000s than – it was in the 1960s. As Mamdani noted in 2001 in his call to move Beyond settler and native as political identities: Overcoming the political legacy of colonialism, the lamented state of collapse in Africa in Afropessimistic circles is in fact the collapse of the bifurcated colonial state which the post-colonial states have not fundamentally transformed so as to do away with its duality. It is these dualities of the settler versus the native, the urban versus the rural, the informal versus the formal, the man versus the woman, the white versus the black, the state versus the society, the privileged versus the underprivileged and so on and on that need to be urgently dealt with squarely and honestly.

All this amount to recentering the debate of citizenship on the question of self-determination of those nationals who would not have the luxury of dual citizenship let alone that of single citizenship simply because ‘their’ neo-colonial states are busy conceptualising and operationalising citizenship as a formal citizenship that is inaccessible to the majority. Why grant dual citizenship to a ‘minority’ when you can’t even fully grant single citizenship to the ‘majority’? Surely we cannot afford to allow further growth of first and second class citizenship!

Nimeisoma posti yako na article. Kitu kimoja mnachochanganya ni kuwa vague. Nyingi za hoja zinazotolewa ni kuwa waliopo nje ni watu wenye well-to-do families huko Tanzania. Hii sio kweli. Tupo wabeba mabox ambao hatuna connection yoyote na hatuelewi tulifikaje huku.

Vilevile mpo vague kwa kushindwa ku-define majukumu ya raia. Ni majukumu gani yanayomfanya mtanzania kuwa mtanzania.

Ukiweza kuyafafanua majukumu ya raia wa Tanzania, basi unaweza kusema kuwa hayo majukumu ni vigumu kuyafikia ukiwa na uraia wa nchi mbili.

Nimeishi Marekani kama mkazi wa kudumu na nilikuwa na haki zote za uraia wa Tanzania. Nimechukuwa uraia wa Marekani, haki zote za uraia wa TZ japokuwa imaginary zimepotea. Lakini majukumu kwa Tanzania niliyoyafanya kama mkazi wa kudumu yanaendelea nikiwa kama raia.

Vilevile kusema kuwa uraia wa nchi mbili ni kunawafaidisha middle and upper class ni kutumia rethoric language tu bila kuwa na misingi yoyote kwa sababu mbili. Kwanza watanzania bado tuna extended families. Hivyo hakuna mtanzania aliye nje ambaye hana ndugu masikini wa kuwasaidia. Pili kama hoja ni za watu well-to-do basi kwa namna moja au nyingine, masikini hatasaidiwa iwapo hao watu watakuwa au kutokuwa na uraia wa nchi mbili.

 

[Companero]

Zakumi hujui kuwa majukumu ya uraia yameibainishwa katika Katiba ya Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania ya Mwaka 1977 Kama ilivyorekebishwa Mwaka 2005? Unayo? Umeisoma?

Utake usitake ukweli ni kuwa asilimia kubwa ya mlio huko mnatoka kwenye tabaka la kati na la juu. Mkifika huko ndipo baadhi yenu au wengi wenu mnageuka tabaka la wabeba maboksi. Ni kweli mnasaidia ndugu zenu huku - hilo sijalipinga kwenye hiyo makala.

Sasa unaziita hizo haki za uraia wa Tanzania unazozitaka na kudai tumekunyima kuwa ni dhahania tu! Acha kuwa mnafiki ! Sema ukweli tu - unataka 'kula huko na huku'!

 

[Prof Griff]

Ukisoma posti yangu mpaka nukta ya mwisho utapata jibu la hilo swali.

Nimekuuliza maana halisi ya dhana ya "uzawa", siyo kutuelezea uhusiano unaodai kuwapo kati ya dhana za uzawa na ulowezi kama ulivyofanya kwenye posting yako.

 

[Companero]

Nimekuuliza maana halisi ya dhana ya "uzawa", siyo kutuelezea uhusiano unaodai kuwapo kati ya dhana za uzawa na ulowezi kama ulivyofanya kwenye posting yako.

Hujaisoma ukaielewa. Sentensi ya mwisho kwenye hiyo posting inasema hivi: Mzawa ni Rai Mwema. Kwa maana nyingine, inasema uzawa ni uraia.

Ila kama unataka sana jibu fupi na rahisi basi ngoja nikupatie. Maana halisi ya dhana ya uzawa ni hii: Uzawa ni uhusiano wa mtu na eneo lake la asili.

 

[Prof Griff]

Hujaisoma ukaielewa. Sentensi ya mwisho kwenye hiyo posting inasema hivi: Mzawa ni Rai Mwema. Kwa maana nyingine, inasema uzawa ni uraia.

Ila kama unataka sana jibu fupi na rahisi basi ngoja nikupatie. Maana halisi ya dhana ya uzawa ni hii: Uzawa ni uhusiano wa mtu na eneo lake la asili.

Kwa hiyo raia ambao "siyo wema" kama wafungwa gerezani (Anyway, sijui una maanisha nini kwa neno "wema") hawawezi kuwa wazawa?

Vinginevyo, ni uhusiano wa aina gani huo au kwa maneno mengine ni vigezo vipi vinatumika kuunda uhusiano wa "uzawa" kati ya mtu na eneo lake la asili?

Na maana hizi mbili ulizotoa za dhana ya "uzawa":

1. "Mzawa ni Raia Mwema" dhana ya "uzawa", na
2. "Uzawa ni uhusiano wa mtu na eneo lake la asili"

zinakubaliana kivipi?

 

[William J. Malecela]

- Sera ya uzawa ni sera njema sana na haikuwa na tatizo lolote, isipokuwa tatizo lilikuwa mleta hiyo sera yaani Idd Simba ambaye hakua na nia njema, aliileta baada ya kuona anakaribia kukosa ulaji, akafikiri anaweza kuitumia kuwatisha watawala ili wampe mlo tena, lakini wakampiga chini.

- Sera haikuwa na tatizo, ila mleta sera ndiye aliyekua na tatizo na kuishia kuifanya hata sera kuwa mufilisi.

Respect.

Field Marshall Es!

 

[Zakumi]

Zakumi hujui kuwa majukumu ya uraia yameibainishwa katika Katiba ya Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania ya Mwaka 1977 Kama ilivyorekebishwa Mwaka 2005? Unayo? Umeisoma?

Utake usitake ukweli ni kuwa asilimia kubwa ya mlio huko mnatoka kwenye tabaka la kati na la juu. Mkifika huko ndipo baadhi yenu au wengi wenu mnageuka tabaka la wabeba maboksi. Ni kweli mnasaidia ndugu zenu huku - hilo sijalipinga kwenye hiyo makala.

Sasa unaziita hizo haki za uraia wa Tanzania unazozitaka na kudai tumekunyima kuwa ni dhahania tu! Acha kuwa mnafiki ! Sema ukweli tu - unataka 'kula huko na huku'!

Commandate:

Bado unaboronga. Hujaeleza haki za raia wa Tanzania ambazo mzaliwa wa Tanzania mwenye uraia wa nchi nyingine atashindwa kuzitekeleza.

Hakuna kitu muhimu kama kutumia jeshi. Kuna waMarekani wengi tu wanaotumikia jeshi la Israel. Kuna waMarekani wengi wanaotumikia jeshi la Georgia.

Vilevile hiyo usemi wa kula huko na huku ni WIVU tu wa kufikiria kuwa mzawa aliye nje atawazidi spidi walio ndani.

Uraia wangu wa Marekani haukuniongezea kitu chochote zaidi ya kile nilichopata nikiwa mkazi wa kudumu. Kama mkazi wa kudumu anakula huku na huku, atashindwa nini kula huku na akichukua uraia?

Kwa taarifa yako Uganda wapitisha. Nitachukua uraia wa Uganda na baadaye kuutumia Tanzania kwa sababu Tanzania ni mwanachama wa EA

http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/13/681657

 

[Zakumi]

- Sera ya uzawa ni sera njema sana na haikuwa na tatizo lolote, isipokuwa tatizo lilikuwa mleta hiyo sera yaani Idd Simba ambaye hakua na nia njema, aliileta baada ya kuona anakaribia kukosa ulaji, akafikiri anaweza kuitumia kuwatisha watawala ili wampe mlo tena, lakini wakampiga chini.

- Sera haikuwa na tatizo, ila mleta sera ndiye aliyekua na tatizo na kuishia kuifanya hata sera kuwa mufilisi.

Respect.

Field Marshall Es!

Huyu Simba anafanana na wakina Companero, Shivji na wengine katika circle ya academy kwa kukataa dual citizenship.