How Suluhu failed motherhood test, regional integration dream

Tanzania’s Mama Samia Suluhu has just written a murky chapter in her history. The trope of motherhood understands that maternity brings forth life. It nourishes and nurtures it.

Mummy is the ultimate metaphor for family, and for tender loving care. Accordingly, it is almost impossible to associate maternal energy with violence – verbal, physical, or howsoever else ferocity may disguise itself.   

Mama Samia has styled herself for the past four years as an amiable matriarchal figure in East Africa. When she visited Kenya in 2023, Kenyans were swooned over with her presence. They bathed her in admiration and praise, rivalled only by their dotage on President Obama, in 2015. Her suave self-effacing manner made her easy to idealise and idolise. Such is the special place she has occupied in the Kenyan nation.    

Perhaps that is the tragedy with idealising individuals. When they digress from the images we have built of them, the disillusionment is gargantuan. That has been the experience this week. The façade of meek graciousness fell off, to reveal the real person behind the mask. She spoke with the aplomb of an icy cold individual, who sees people in images of “wild creatures” to be crushed.  

Once long ago, Karen Dinesen, a Danish colonist who occupied a four-thousand-acre coffee farm near Nairobi, characterised native Africans together with wild animals. While she professed great love for the animals and people of Africa, she could not tell the two apart. 

In her 1937 autobiography, titled Out of Africa, the Danish baroness who adopted the pen name of Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen), said, “When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all its elements.” She said what she learned about Africa’s wild animals was useful in her dealings with natives.

A century later, one of Africa’s foremost matriarchs derisively slurs African citizens as “viumbe”, which is to say “creatures, as distinct from human beings.” She will pulverise any “kiumbe” (singular for “viumbe”), who will attempt to take their “lack of civilisation” to Tanzania. In Kiswahili, who will attempt “kutovuka” in Tanzania.   

Trial observation

Mama Suluhu’s government barred Chief Justice Emeritus, Dr Willy Mutunga, and Kenya’s ex-Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister, Martha Karua, from entering Tanzania, this week. They were in Dar es Salaam to observe the trial of Opposition leader, Tundu Lissu, of CHADEMA Party.

Lissu is charged with treason for protesting the preparatory processes for this October’s elections in Tanzania. His party has been banned from participating in the elections, because of the protest. Lissu faces the death sentence, if found guilty. Death sentence is itself anachronistic. The free world has abolished this primordial relic.

The fact that a court could condemn a person to death for expression of democratic opinion invites global interest. Hence the trooping to Tanzania of leading legal minds, civic activists, and pressure groups. Mutunga and Karua were lucky to be only denied entry. Some others were not.

Boniface Mwangi of Kenya and Agatha Atuhaire of Uganda were admitted to be tortured. They were arrested and led to chambers of agony. After days of official brutality, they were dumped like bad rubbish in border spaces. Which civilised regime does this? Was this Mama Samia’s meaning of dealing with wild creatures? There are a number of problems.

First, what is the worth of the East African passport, if it cannot allow citizens free movement? Second, what crime did they commit – both the tortured and the deported? If they were crime suspects, was the logical thing not to arraign them?    

Mama Suluhu is mistaken. So, too, is Kenya’s foreign affairs CS, Musalia Mudavadi. East Africans are not foreigners in Tanzania. They cannot be. We, East Africans, are citizens of all the member states of the East African Community. Arusha in Tanzania is our headquarters. We travel throughout the world on a globally recognised common passport. We sing a common East African Anthem. And we fly the East African flag. We even have a court. These instruments must count for something.

Mama Suluhu, you are still our mother. But you have failed us. Where is your warm milk of motherhood? No, we are not creatures. We are powerful God’s bits of wood, in His image. The Community is our home. And to Kenya’s foreign affairs CS, you too have failed us. You should have just kept quiet, and left Principal Secretary, Abraham Sing’oei to speak. He seems to understand better. 

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke