Feb 15, 2009 C

At the beginning of this month I was at a PEPFAR conference in Dodoma, the capital. Our hotel was right next to the parliament building, a modernist monstrosity designed by some Chinese architect, and several MPs would come to the bar afterwards to hang out. Successful Africans, without exception, are incredibly arrogant. If an African is a university graduate he will tell you; if he has an email address he will tell you and if can do something unusual, like karate, he will let you know. At this hotel I met an architect who happened to have his drawings with him; he insisted I look at them, opened them up and commented on how much mathematics he had to learn in order to create such pictures. Of course, the MPs at VETA (our hotel) were the worst. Five minutes after we met one ex-minister, he had told us four times he had traveled to New York and Washington DC. These men aren’t bad people, they treated us and our Tanzanian friends well, but they love to talk about themselves.
The inflated self-image of these politicians’ contrasts with the views of educated Tanzanians; anyone who reads newspapers see their leaders as glorified crooks. I got a text message from one of my colleagues : “I can see you I’m here talking with a politician who usually uses his good words to cheat people .” This particular politician happened to be a particularly fat, snotty and ill-mannered, but my colleague put up with him and got a free soda.
One of the first things one notices, sitting in Dodoma next to the seat of the government, is the huge gap between what the government says and the situation on the ground. Government directives are not followed and nobody cares; government money is stolen and the thief walks around in broad daylight; government workers do nothing and nobody can make them work.