Those who grew up in the 70s
remember the Mahoka program the then Radio Tanzania used to air. This program
was a comedy showing how madness can turn impossible possible hypothetically.
Like it or not, this program, despite being a sort of practical hocus-pocus,
was hilarious without necessarily damaging our national code and culture.
Mahoka died many years ago though the Mahoka national lives on. Currently, Tanzania is facing a threat of
becoming a cultural litterbin wherein any cultural debris can be dumped in the
name of entertainment. President John Magufuli has already been alarmed. He
recently told artists to put their house in order after noting that some are
blindly wandering off from national culture in the name of entertainment.
Thanks
to Magufuli drive, many stakeholders were put on notice. Nonetheless, the speed
in which cultural decay is dealt with is not satisfactory compared to what must
have been done a long time ago. Thanks to carelessness and myopia devoid of
ethos and cultural consciousness, some of our media are needless feeding us garbage
in the name of making a quick buck. We now have the so-called Udaku or tabloids
whose propensity is to feed garbage to our people. There are many more tabloids
in Tanzania than any country in the region.
I am lucky to have visited all neighbouring countries minus Mozambique.
These countries have a few; and others completely don’t have such obnoxious and
poisonous media. Are we a mahoka country that can invest in culturally
poisonous and pornographic stuff for its peril? It is no longer disconcerting
to see X-rated photos on our newsstands for everybody to see including our
innocent and uncontaminated children. Ironically, while the authorities have
turned a blind eye to this cultural suicide, much government’s attention has
been directed to purging and shunning serious media simply because they don’t
share the bed with it. This is wrong; and
the civilised world is laughing at us for this self-inflicted collective and
cultural suicide.
Another
area that needs government scrutiny is religious chicanery wherein many conmen
and women, quacks and money makers are making a killing by duping our ignorant
and unsuspecting people that they can perform miracles to the effect of
changing; and thereby solve their problems so as to improve their lives. We
recently evidenced one impostor known as Apostle Tito confidently and openly
preaching all absurdities without any fear. Thank lord; the authorities nipped
him in the bud before his poison spreading so as to motivate other gunk imitators.
We’ve reached a point at which anybody can go to bed a sinner and wake up a
religious leader. As if this isn’t enough, under this collective imbecilisation
if I may borrow from the late professor Seth Chachage, nobody is perturbed as
this sacrilege morphs itself even bigger. We now have stinking rich cons whose
wealth was only made by plundering our people in the name of God.
Further,
we now have druids of all sorts advertising their criminality in putrid media.
They assert that they can, as it is for bogus religious charlatans, Judases and
Iscariots, cure any and every disease and expel spell. They enlarge sex organs, expel spells, and
create wealth and do other impossible things such as helping somebody to
perform well in examination, win a court case and voila the host of innumerable
nonsensical stuff. Again, what
motivates such legalised criminalities? There are a couple of reasons
including:
First,
the failure by our authorities to regulate and scrutinise them is to blame.
Secondly,
another reason is the fact that in our country, currently anybody can go to bed
a pauper and wake up miraculously a tycoon without necessarily showing how one
made this hush-hush dosh. So, too, this systemic slackness has motivated
thievery and thuggery in our country so as to evidence the surge of crime rates.
As a country, we now are infamously known for killing innocent people with
albinism not to mention elderly people, especially females; which speak to
gender violence.
Thirdly,
the fact that our people are good buffs of such garbage adds up to the surge of
such harmful media.
Now
we know what and where the problem is. Then what should be done? The
authorities should invest in and resuscitate our lost cultural sensitivities
and values. A nation without culture is nothing but a collection of freaks
whose country can be easily corrupted and destroyed by cultural imperialism,
hooliganism and lunacy and the like simply because it has allowed itself to be
taken for a ride either because of its myopia or greed among others. Time for
the government to pounce on udaku media has arrived. It is upon the government
to wake up from the slumber it has been in since Mwalimu Nyerere left office.
Source: Citizen, Feb., 21, 2018.
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