{UAH} The fine art of seeing what’s under your nose - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

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The fine art of seeing what's under your nose - Comment

It is strange that sometimes we have to travel far in order to discover what was right under our noses back home, but we couldn't see it.

Last week, at a dinner in Johannesburg, the conversation drifted to East Africa — and to Tanzania in particular. "How is the constitutional reform going?" I was asked.

I said my information was that purists in the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi were against the proposed quasi-federal structure in which the mainland, Tanganyika, would have its president; a more autonomous Zanzibar too would have its presidents; then there would be a big kahuna up there, who would be president of both.

The folks I was dining with told me their information was that the proposal was likely to carry the day. Among the reasons, they said, is that the evangelical churches on the mainland are pushing hard for it.

Why? Because they are upset that a Muslim can be president of Tanzania, of which the mainland is the biggest part, but that a Christian has never been and will probably never be president of Zanzibar.

If the new constitution passes as is proposed, I was told, it is likely there would never be another Muslim president of the Tanzanian Union.

In other words, the sectarian kind of politics that officially has been "invisible" in Tanzania so far would become the norm. We knew that attacks on churches in Zanzibar of recent years by militant Muslim youth had strained community relations, but from outside Tanzania most of us had missed the fact they had radicalised and alienated Christians to that extent. Perhaps we were too close to see.

In South Africa, I was intrigued to learn just how far the meddlesome hand of Libya's slain former dictator Muammar Gaddafi reached there.

In 2008, the cerebral but flaky then-president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki was ousted in a party coup led by now President Jacob Zuma — who was his deputy. At a convention of the ruling African National Congress, Zuma wrested the party — and therefore the country's presidency — from Mbeki in a vote face-off.

At that time, Mbeki and other African leaders like Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni were pushing back against Muammar Gaddafi's aggressive drive to form a "United States of Africa." They preferred a more cautious approach, which focuses on building regional blocs like the East African Community first.

Gaddafi, my sources alleged, decided to pay Mbeki back. He therefore "showered" Zuma's campaign in the leadership battle with money, allowing him to outspend Mbeki by far.

I have no independent confirmation of this, although I discovered later that it is a version of events that is widely believed in South Africa. If it is true, then it is possible that Gaddafi also helped defeat Obasanjo's attempt to fiddle the constitution and allow him to run for a third time in 2007.

His relations with Museveni also soured, compounded in Uganda's case by the fact that Gaddafi was trying to become a benefactor of Uganda's kings and queens, and supplant Museveni's patronage.

Thinking of these two stories, I couldn't help but wonder what else about our own East Africa, and Africa at large, we don't know. I suspect a lot.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter: @cobbo3

The fine art of seeing what's under your nose - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/The-fine-art-of-seeing-what-is-under-your-nose/-/434750/2075420/-/1o76omz/-/index.html