Introduction

Purpose of our meeting

  • Find a common ground among us in order to speak with one voice and representing the whole society.
  • To speak especially in favour of the voiceless majority of our nation
  • To help building up a social conscience
  • To seek professional collaboration and seek technical scrutiny to support our stand on certain issues.

To remember

Many of our questions we have in Tanzania are in fact questions which have an international dimension. That is why worldwide Religious leaders must advocate the need for a world ethos, because these questions ask for international collaboration:

Questions like:

  • Poverty
  • Income differences between rich and poor
  • Climate change
  • Pandemics
  • Financial structures favoring the rich.

1. Main Subject: Responsibility of Religious leaders in Tanzania

The following are suggestions for a reflection in order to reach a common ground.

a. We need a Moral Revival Movement for our Tanzanian Society.

For this we need a common view on the moral principles which must be the foundation for this moral revival movement.

We all agree that God is our creator and that He had a purpose and plan for His work of creation – to make this human world a place where people can live in peace and harmony and combat evil and misery which causes unhappiness.

In this work of God’s creation, religious leaders are called to collaborate with God and encourage people to follow this guidance.

From this we can draw the following basic principles to guide our effort:

  • The dignity of the human person – Utu wa Mtu. Each one’s dignity must be respected and our policies and decisions must express our willingness to respect each one.
  • Work for the common good – so that each one may find fulfilment and happiness and receive the basic needs for a dignified human life.
  • Follow the principle of subsidiarity in the organization of public affairs – that is encourage and enable people to do what they are able to do with their own means and efforts. Public authority must create the conditions to make this possible and encourage people to participate in these efforts.
  • Practice the spirit of solidarity – to be ready to think of others and their needs and avoid selfishness.
  • Take care of God’s creation and of the problems of climate change and its dangerous consequences.

In order to be able to follow these principles all members of the society must practice certain Social – moral values:

  • To be truthful and honest
  • To respect the freedom of everyone
  • To practice justice, individual and Social justice
  • To love one another – a love which influences our Social interaction for the good of all.

b. What is now the reality we face in Tanzania?

  • The reality is: The majority of our people remain poor. There is progress in our economy and social situation, but this progress is enjoyed by a section only of our people. The majority does not benefit very much from our economic progress.

Hence religious leaders must become more clearly the voice of this silent majority. They must also motivate their congregations and communities to take their own development into their own hands and not to wait for others to bring development.

It also means that religious leaders must stimulate policy makers to facilitate these local efforts to succeed by providing supporting instrumental policies.

  • Religious leaders should encourage an openness and readiness to learn from our history and our past efforts= what were the successful things we realized so as to strengthen them- what were our weaknesses and what mistakes did we make, so as to improve things, did we have hidden agendas or cultural obstacles which we did not dare to discuss, why are people so often paralyzed and waiting for others to bring them development – a culture of inaction, and dependency which causes stagnation and lack of progress.
  • Religious leaders should not be afraid to point out some of the bad behaviors we see in our society. Some people in our services and institutions abuse their positions for their own advantages, some people using violent means and suppress different views or do not respect basic human rights, some people refusing to give people their legitimate demands.

Such negative behavior is not only morally wrong, but it also creates a public and social climate where evil goes unpunished and uncontrolled and this breaks the cohesive spirit in society and creates a general climate of non – collaboration with others and causes a general apathy of not caring for others.

  • We speak a lot about corruption and the need to combat corruption. But that is not enough. We need to go more deeply into this question and seek the causes of this behavior in the very nature and attitudes of our human society.

And it is in this field that religious leaders have a special responsibility.

The root cause for this deviant behavior is to be found in the fact that God created human beings with a free will – hence with the possibility of choosing good or evil. This tendency of being able to do evil are part of human nature. Hence if we are to combat evil and corruption we must start from there – it calls for formation of the will to choose the good and not evil.

Formation is needed of the individual person, of our communities, families and the society at large.

Who must take charge of this formation?

It is not the political leaders on the ruling government that can be formators of morality, neither the police or law and order institutions, the court – those can protect, curtail abuses, encourage social behaviors. But to form, to influence the inner motivation of people is in fact entrusted to other people in Society – the families, the local communities and neighborhoods, the local government, the educational institutions, the religious institutions.

They are the ones that form and instill the moral values which can be taken up by a person or community as a mode of conduct which creates self – discipline and acceptable social behaviors.

It is only when we can create a social moral climate for doing good, that we will succeed in eradicating corruption and even tackle the problem of poverty at the root by a growing concern for the common good.

This issue requires far more effort from our religious leaders than is actually forthcoming.

Religious leaders should be more active and promotors of this social – moral formation.

They should be the ones to lead such a movement and insist on policies that promote good family policies which enable families to be places of moral formation, places where social services can be guaranteed to relieve the strains of family life as we experience now. Religious leaders should be in the forefront of encouraging local communities to be supportive of local moral behaviors.

The issue of the policy of the Secularity of the State and its relationship with Religion and religious institutions is in need of serious reflection. How can we not arrive at a common vision of accepting God as our creator, and express that by agreeing to a common moral foundation and common moral principles and values – acceptable to all religious institutions – as our foundation for moral social behavior.

If such a common foundation is officially accepted, and expressed in a structured way through the formators of ethical conduct, we should be able to let religion as a world view be acceptable to all specific religious institutions, of Christians and Muslims and other religions – and hence be acceptable in the official structures of governing. Hence the plurality of religious institutions need not be an obstacle to have a common religious foundation and we need not continue to stress that there is secularity of the State.

2. Suggestions to formulate a Common Agreement as Religious leaders.

In this section I want to present some proposals for things we can do in common and influence our society for the future and for healthy nation building and development.

a. In our booklet – CPT – Vision for 2050 we proposed an alternative approach to development – namely a bottom – up approach to enable people to develop themselves with their own resources. We are now in the process of writing a second part to our proposal, namely what are the practical implications and what are the strategies needed to succeed in giving people this greater capacity.

We hope to present this second part in an academic study towards the end of February 2025. It would, at the same time influence the preparation for the national elections in October.

Maybe we could involve more religious leaders in this exercise if you agree. We come back to this in item d) of this section.

b. We call for greater decentralization in the work of moral formation of our people. This formation must not be the work of the political leaders, but the responsibility of the families, neighborhoods, educational and administrative services. They should organize disciplinary control and have decision making power but independent from government, police, courts.

Religious leaders should play an active role in the formation of such ethical services to society and professions.

c. How to build a new political will that wants to build a better future?

Political will we define as:

– The will of the people to effectively demand how they want the country to be run and what priorities it wants to be realized for the future of their country.

As we mentioned above we believe that God created the world and human society out of love and that His dream and vision is to see the world and human society to live as a family in harmony and peace and diminish evil and misery and poverty.

This is the political will we want to build for Tanzania.

This is not the work of political parties, but the work of the whole society. It is the will of the people that must be accepted by the political leaders as the work they are called to implement.

Religious leaders should take an active part in leading this reflection towards building the national political will. They could take up the work again of the Warioba Commission for a new Constitution and bring it forward as a new starting point and bring it forward for public debate and brought to fruition via an elected Senate type of institution which is not tied to political authorities or government structures.

d. Need for a serious review of local capacity building. At the level of our villages (12,000 of them) and at the level of our urban poverty sectors, we need to build a more efficient administration – which should be of a non – political nature, a professional civil service type, which would give our villages a capacity to take initiatives and be able to organize them and how to link them up to a higher level of administration and services. Local level initiatives are most of the time frustrated by the lack of linking it to a market where goods can be sold, or when district services cannot be obtained because they fail to go out to the villages. Bottom – up approach requires bottom up – capacity.

Fr. Vic Missiaen, MAfr