Tanzania dealing with - at least - 3 national challenges in 2012

It is always interesting when Tanzanian authorities launch a campaign with the intent of making its citizens perform certain actions before a certain deadline.

Getting the correct piece of information from A to B, in time, and without creating an avalanche of questions because the original information given didn't make sense, is still a massive challenge in Tanzania.

Tanzania is - as far as I know for now - up for at least three huge national challenges in this regard during 2012: The Constitutional Review, the Census 2012 and the National Identification Card. The blogger, Elsie Eyakuze, comments on all of it for the East African here.

She also comments explicitly on the identity cards, i.e. saying: 'We’re also going to become increasingly rigid and racist about notions of citizenship; any non-Bantu, anyone with a funny accent or a poor grasp of Kiswahili will be targeted. It’s going to give our creeping xenophobia manure on which to flourish.'

Take the inserted screen dump (above) from the website of the Ministry of Home Affairs aiming at explaning about the National Identity Cards, which is struggling to find the right words to explain what this is all about. One choice of words did cause lots of debate among my friends last week in Dar es Salaam  - 'regal residents'. What is it? The fact that we all know the common mix up with it comes to 'l' and 'r' it still made us wonder if this was some sort of trick: 'Regal is better than legal?'

What also became topic for debate was the choice of the variety of people lined up in the website banner: Are they fully representative of all the variations of watanzania today?

Elsie surely didn't make this up. In my experience I keep coming across Tanzanians who - to lesser and higher degress - are defining themselves i.e. according to Bantu-genes, skin-colours, home villages, accents, to what car you drive, where you practice your faith, what neighbourhood you take your nyama choma, to where you go to sleep at night.

Though, officially we don't.

Considering Tanzania's weak points when it comes to distribution of clear public information to the masses, its colorful relationship with political correctness, not to forget that the country has an official discourse, but an even stronger unoffical and less easily understood (for the outsider) discourse - these three national challenges and how they are being tackled - will certainly define the future of Tanzania's health as a nation comprising so many different characters each not necessarily wishing for the same.