Deadline?

Remember what I said? Time has not yet come for Tanzania to formalize. We were told, “if your phone number is not registered by the 30th of June, 2010 it will be blocked.” But I knew that that was another teasing announcement. We haven’t come to that era yet. You can’t formalize one sector and leave others in shambles (read: haphazard, awkward). If we had national IDs, this whole exercise would have been either very simple or unnecessary. On the 30th of June? Nothing happened. Unregistered numbers were still reachable. Then we heard the minister for Communication, “two more weeks before the barring”. I called my friend and told him, “it is another meaningless political game being played here and you can forget about number barring — it is not gonna happen.” After those two weeks and still you can buy a phone line in the streets and make calls without registering it. This is Tanzania: where things are either formally informal or informally formal.