I spotted a remarkable tweet apparently from CCM Secretary for Ideology and Publicity, Nape Nnauye, earlier today:
Usivunje mtungi ili kumuua panya, inamisha taratibu mtoe panya ua, na utabaki na mtungi wako salama! CCM tumeshainamisha mtungi,twamsubiri!
— Nape Nnauye (@napemnnauye) June 1, 2015
Google Translate is rarely much good with Swahili, but this effort has a biblical flavour that makes it oddly beautiful in its failure:
“Thou shalt not pitcher to kill rats, mice bowed pay court procedures, and will remain secure and your pitcher! CCM have shainamisha pitcher, twamsubiri!”
Let me have a go instead:
“Don’t break the pot in order to kill the rat, turn it over slowly to get the rat out, then kill it, and you will be left with your pot intact! As CCM we have already turned the pot over, we await the rat!”
There was another tweet previously as well, a few days ago:
"Kumkata kichwa kobe kunataka timing!! "
— Nape Nnauye (@napemnnauye) May 24, 2015
“To cut off the head of a tortoise requires timing!!”
In Nape’s influential position within the party secretariat and as a member of all the party’s various committees, councils and congress that will select the CCM presidential candidate, these are big words.
But do these tweets refer to Edward Lowassa? After his reportedly huge rally in Arusha on Saturday to launch his campaign, Lowassa is clearly trying to make himself impossible to exclude from the process, but Nape is widely believed to oppose the selection of Lowassa as the party’s candidate.
On the other hand, I saw another scarcely credible reported attack on Lowassa in various online media this morning. This claimed to be by the Minister for East African Cooperation, Harrison Mwakyembe, whose report on the Richmond energy scandal in 2009 forced Lowassa to resign as Prime Minister.
I’m not going to quote or translate for you what Mwakyembe is reported to have said over the weekend, because it is not remotely believable that he really said it. But that’s exactly the point: somebody is trying to put words into the mouth of one long-standing opponent of Lowassa.
Perhaps this tweet from an account claiming to be Nape Nnauye is another example of the same. The account (@napemnnauye) is in his name, but it is not “verified“, it is only a few weeks old, and has only posted 20 tweets. It looks suspicious, to say the least.
I may be wrong, but to me, it looks very much like someone (or some people) is putting false words into the mouths of both Nape and Mwakyembe.
Who that is, and why they’re doing it, is unclear. But what is clear is that the political games have kicked off.
UPDATE: June 2nd, 2015
Another tweet:
Makongoro kakaangu, inamisha mtungi taratibu tafadhali! Kashaanza kuchungulia, lakini tutumie timing huyu panya mjanja kidogo!
— Nape Nnauye (@napemnnauye) June 2, 2015
“Makongoro my brother, turn the pot slowly please! The rat has started to peek out, but we should use timing, this rat is street-wise!”