Should dignity of public offices override that of individual citizens?

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, a public office is an office created by the constitution or a legislative act, having a definite tenure and involving power to carry out some governmental functions.

A popular explanation goes, ‘A public office is a public trust.’ It is important to refer back to these key explanations so as to avoid conflicting into the word to word understanding. The highlight in all this is the importance of prioritising the true common good of the public.

As positions of power, these offices have traditionally, across the world, been revered as trustworthy and well-meaning helping hands of the society and as such endowed dignity.

The people who exercise these functions too, by the virtue of their self-sacrifice (an idealistic understanding) to become leaders and functionaries of public offices, are endowed as well with the same dignity and respect that follows from their duties performed for the good of the society.

As such, we can sum in all this, that the most important is the good being done and the protection and support given to those being led.

The crises begin when there is a reversal of priorities such that holders of public offices become nobles and load it over on people by imposing their ideas as superior, by misuse of power for personal gain and by covering up evils in the society with the same power vested on them on trust by the general public.

All said and done, protection of the dignity of human persons should be the minimum of public service delivery, such that, even at the failure of all systems, be it economic, social, etc. the dignity and value of all persons ought to remain in its proper place.

That is to say, the basic rights of each person as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the country’s constitution, in our case, the constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania should on no grounds be breached by assistance or negligence of the public office duties, as both extremes have negative consequences.

Every public office is meant to be self-probing in the course of ensuring fairness in distribution of public resources and services, legal justice and violations of rights of persons, as well as protection of all the citizens regardless of their cultural identity, tribes, political opinions, numbers or levels of education and empowerment.

With public offices at the service of the citizens a lot of accountability and servant leadership is expected. This means listening to what the people say and feeling with them their actual realities.

There is no successful leadership without empathy, especially when we use social harmony as a yardstick to measure success of leadership.

The success of leadership is not in the glory of the leader and how much coercive command he or she has over the people; this is an evidence rather of exaggeration of power and authority.

A few questions we can raise here on local situations: First, do Tanzanians complain about the attitude and poor accountability of leaders? The answer is Yes! Secondly, are the cries of Tanzanians given a listening ear by the leaders? The answer here needs more critical and objective thinking.

While Tanzanians may fear challenging publicly various approaches of leadership, such as reshuffling of same people in key offices in the government regardless of their expertise and academic grounding, or unclear taxation policies which supposedly discourage business and productivity, many Tanzanians are saddened and nauseated by these issues.

If it reaches a point that it is like a tug of war between those in public offices and the general public over numerous unanswered questions, there is definitely something fundamentally wrong somewhere.

One thing we can surely do to help the situation is to encourage young people to engage in genuine politics, while pushing from the higher offices to provide assurance of protection of persons regardless of their political opinion.

We can do objective politics without threats, disappearances of persons, violence, or denial of services; which means the security bodies need to be involved even more in ensuring these, as they are a stain on their coat.

When we have objective politics people can be held accountable for what they do and answerable for their wrongs. Many public office holders have caused multitudes of people a lot of pain and distress but they are still in public offices, or they are moved to different offices.

It’s like moving coins from the left pocket to the back pocket of the same trousers. We need more accountability of public office holders and assurance of protection of the people and their dignity by the government.