Politics

When potentates come visiting, the lesser mortals rejoice and suffer in equal measure.

Unable to believe in their good fortune to have the great man among them, the hosts bend over backwards to make him feel really welcome, wanted and treasured.

The serfs, peasants or proletarians will be made to remove all the (visible) filth, scrub the streets, paint over their humble abodes, plant full-grown trees, beautify their children and hide those they cannot make beautiful, beggars and street urchins.

The great man is coming, and we should not show the worst aspect of ourselves.

We are beggars, true, but we still have our dignity. He must not go back with the impression that we are so badly off that there is nothing he can do about it. You see, even the life-saving intravenous drip needs a functioning body for it to work, a pulse, a vein.

All this entails bother and hassle, disruptions and interruptions.

All of a sudden, hordes of strange characters show up, take up whole hotels or sections thereof; tear off whole kitchens and erect their own; rip up carpets to install their wires; shut off beautiful vistas to discourage snipers and jam your telephone networks.

In this unequal equation (sic) of what some people still call co-operation, we bend over backwards so much we risk falling on our medulla. Why, for instance, in the case of Barack Obama’s visit, did he not ride with our president to town?

We are used to seeing visiting chiefs, in the company of our own, in the back of an open vehicle, waving to ecstatic fans. Even Fidel Castro did it, he who the Americans would have loved to snipe at, and it is not as if the Cubans want Obama at this juncture.

Then, the ultimate snub, the hosts arranged what they called a press conference for the visitor and his host. It turned out that only the media considered “safe,” were invited, not the kind that would spoil the party by asking “embarrassing” questions.

In the end only the travelling Americans had real questions to ask, with the handpicked Tanzanians limited to asking whether Obama was happy, and then, whether Kikwete was happy too.

One thing Obama will go back with is that Tanzania has generous and hospitable people and no journalists, which is good for the US.

That is pretty much what President Jakaya Kikwete’s predecessor achieved, when he went through a non-interview with Riz Khan, then of CNN, at the end of which he declared himself extremely satisfied with the “good” questions he had been asked.

A far cry, suggested the big man, from the Tanzanian journalists who did not even know the type of questions they should ask. Riz, who could not for the love of him tell Tanzania from Adam, beamed rather sheepishly.

Of course, there was no reason for Riz to bother overmuch about the human rights abuses that were being committed by Benjamin Mkapa’s government even as they talked; nor about the looting of the country’s resources and assets and so many other locally reported transgressions.