Tanzania Journalists Accrediting Board is a Tanzanian government initiative that superficially aims to protect the rights of journalists and the industry overall. However, behind the ruses of strengthening journalistic professionalism, promoting accountability, protecting journalists’ rights, and ensuring they have an avenue to resolve their issues through fair and professional means insidiously lurks an ironclad determination to assault upon journalistic independence. This article interrogates what lies behind the accreditation curtain.
On 3rd March 2025, the so-called Tanzania Media Accreditation Board launched to bring sanity to the media industry. My problem has always been who controls it is not the journalists themselves but the CCM government, which has a chequered history of undermining and curtailing media freedoms and association in Tanzania. This journalist’s accreditation effort began in 2016 but was shelved because the journalists had aspired to conflict with the government designations. The two sides could hardly see who should control it face to face. Now, the government has decided to impose her will against the genuine aspirations of the journalism sector!
The government’s alacrity to control the media satisfies an unquenchable quest to shape and subdue what is shared with the general public. If it is the journalists’ accreditation board, it is fair to assume that only journalists will be the ones electing those they trust to lead their common aspirations. However, when the government picks the board of journalist’s accreditation, that body ceases to belong to the journalists and, for all purposes and intents, is reduced to a tool for government control and manipulation.
Journalism, unlike any profession, is widely recognized as the fourth state because it is designed to bring accountability to the government. Therefore, it is not up to the government to determine the nature and direction of the board that manages talents purposed to shed light on what the government is doing. What happens is that there is an inherent conflict of interest when the government meddles in what journalists do. The government ought to be the last player on earth to form the journalist’s accreditation board.
Some of these conflicts of interest are too covert to hide and overlook. We have a government that is notorious for hounding journalists who refuse to kowtow at government positions. Such journalists are either taken to court or just disappear for good. JamiiForums, an online media whistle-blower, was criminally indicted for a refusal to reveal the identity of a whistle-blower who had squeaked about wanton corruption in the government. As one US civil rights activist pointed out, what kind of government would be peeved for acts of exposing the looting of public funds? Such a government that shuns accountability has abdicated any legitimacy to govern.
Azory Gwanda vanished in the hands of authorities for digging up extrajudicial killings in Lindi Kibiti. Today, nobody in the authorities is willing to tell us what really happened. Clouds Media was harassed by the Dar-es-Salaam R.C. for its uncompromising broadcast content. Saed Kubenea, a former Ubungo MP and a journalist and a co-owner of Mwanahalisi Media House has been reduced into the punching bag of the government for his vitriolic criticism against the regime. He has either been frequently suspended or arrested and taken to courts for standing to what he believes. Basically, kubenea still remains a prisoner of conscience albeit he is out there.
Saed Kubenea and Ndimara Tegambwage were attacked with machetes and acid spray, leading to monthslong hospitalization of the former after his eyesight deteriorated. The duo were zeroing in on the scandal of electrical generator procurement by Richmond and her successor company, Dowans. The chief executive of Mwananchi newspapers was attacked at midnight as he was heading home from work. The real reason was his commenting stance against the government.
Ngurumo is another darling of the independent press who was forced to flee the nation for fear of his life. Ngurumo’s dynamic reporting at times amounted to speculative journalistic opinions that had provoked the wrath of the authorities, who had become too intolerant of contrarian views. From the safety of European soil, Ngurumo keeps up doing what he should have been doing in his own motherland. There has been no effort from the government to reconcile with him and let him feel safe enough to continue his line of provocative thought from his home soil.
The CCM government has for a long time earmarked the control of the media as part of its strategy to win the battle of brainwashing the minds and hearts of the electorate. It narrates why CCM owns a number of media outlets through direct or proxy ownership. Through that
The critical analysis of government activities is very restrained. Almost all media houses are serenading encomiums of Dr. Samia Suluhu Hassan’s herculean feats, whether real or imaginary. She has in many ways become the goddess of the established media houses in Tanzania!
If you have been listening to Tanzania’s established media outlets, President Samia Suluhu Hassan is their God. She is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. She is the only one executing all the public projects, and every political pundit the media chooses to beam is extolling, supplicating and genuflecting before her. All Tanzanians are mere spectators devoid of any role as they watch their indefatigable Amazonian president deliver singlehandedly development to them! Without her, as far as the established media in Tanzania is concerned, the nation will cease to exist!
Rarely do the established media connect the dots between development and the taxes the presumed lazy Tanzanians cough up on a daily basis. All public money is the president’s, and even the parliament has no role to play despite the approval and ratification of budgets on a yearly basis. Culminating from all this, the president is the only one we should pray for her safety and prosperity because our own very much depend on hers! Thereafter, we delude ourselves that the real God will have mercy on us after we have worshipped a creature more than the Creator!
All government-established media have been condemned into CCM campaign machine tools. They pile encomiums to CCM without critical assessment. TBC, Channel Ten, Star TV, Cloud Media and many others have become tools of propaganda and agents of misinformation. The government, these days, is egging upon media houses to air TBC’s main
news, and before long, most of TBC propaganda will soon be mandatory to be aired by all media houses for free, notwithstanding emasculating the bottom line of those financially struggling private media houses. It is designated to be a slow, natural death. Many employees in private media houses will have to look for new sources of income much later, given that their employers have been instrumentally sabotaged by their own government and are keen on self-political survival.
Even in X, there is no place to hide for Tanzania’s CCM government critics, as one Sativa17 brutally found out. Sativa17 was abducted in Dar-es-Salaam and taken to Oyster Bay police station before being shipped to Arusha and later Katavi National Park, where his abductors shot him in the back of the neck, hoping he would eventually die. They left him there in a forlorn hope the hyenas would feast on him, eradicating any evidence of his whereabouts. He survived the ordeal to tell it all, and in all the places he was taken during the abduction, he was tortured and deprived of food and water because of his acerbic opinions against the government. Today, there is no police report of the arrests of those who kidnapped, tortured and attempted to kill him.
All media outlets now under the control of CCM have abdicated their role as the fourth estate where accountability, free speech and independent thought are the hallmarks of performance and achievement. Even the guests picked to share their views are carefully sieved to ensure they support outrageous lies and misleading content propagated by the news outlets now in CCM stranglehold. Criticism of the government has been dwindling as CCM would love to govern without accounting to the general public for her excesses.
The government initiative to accredit journalists is an all-time war to deregister all journalists who do not support brainwashing and misinformation. There is definitely an attempt to embrace outrageous lies as a modus operandi.
After chronicling the government’s efforts to control and quash media freedoms and association, the next step is to apply journalistic accreditation as the last tool to intimidate and end the careers of journalistic dissidents. This can be drawn from what President Samia Suluhu Hassan once said. Here is her quotation: “…siku hizi vimezuka vijarida vipya….” It is not out of place to consider the Tanzania Daily Digest. You are perusing this article, which could soon be on the chopping block for elimination or capitulation to abandon critical thought for regurgitation of government controversial positions.
Clearly, the president’s mind was predicated on how to align online media outlets into conformity with the government’s favourite positions in print and digital reporting. For the journalistic accreditation board to have any meaning of safeguarding the interests of the journalism industry, it should be formed by journalists themselves, with the government playing no role. But when the government picks the members of the board, then we should expect this journalistic accreditation effort not to advance the interests of the journalists but of the government’s brewed in “uwakilishi haramu.”
Read more analysis by Rutashubanyuma Nestory
