In conversations across the country today, one hears a familiar question whispered in frustration and hope. What will it take for citizens to come together to demand a better future? People desire a future where rights are respected, justice prevails, and systems work for the people rather than against them.
They want a society where opportunities are not reserved for the fortunate few. My answer may sound uncomfortable, but it will take shared pain becoming visible as shared pain. In this article, I simply share my reflections drawn from casual conversations and opportunistic observations gathered whilst travelling across the country in recent months.
I have interacted with different groups of people, including bored food traders in small rural markets and busy bodaboda riders waiting for passengers at bustling street corners. I have spoken with hungry artisanal miners in dusty settlements and weary nurses and teachers struggling to deliver services. I have also met confused village and ward executive officers navigating bureaucratic expectations.
I cannot forget the chatty porters on Mount Kilimanjaro whose quiet endurance sustains one of the most celebrated industries. I also recall conversations with serious-looking traffic police officers that usually begin with them accusing me of speeding. Each conversation reveals only a fragment of a much larger reality.
When placed together, those fragments begin to form a larger picture that suggests something important. Suffering is already widespread and deep, yet it is also quiet, fragmented, and often deeply isolated. Travel across the country, and you encounter these quiet struggles almost everywhere.
Quiet struggles everywhere
In Lushoto, a resident reluctantly sells a small tree plantation to a land speculator from Dar es Salaam at a throwaway price. She does this after discovering that the promised returns from commercial tree planting have disappeared into uncertainty. In Mwanza, a young entrepreneur quietly gives up hopes of growing his small business.
He surrenders after months of navigating opaque bureaucratic procedures that drain both time and savings. In Kigoma, a farmer eventually gives up on accessing a government subsidy scheme. The endless administrative loops seem designed more to exhaust than to assist.
In rural Morogoro, a junior nurse struggles to buy basic medical supplies out of pocket so that patients do not go untreated during a shift. In Kibaha, sad-faced young men and women in their early twenties line up at factory gates before dawn every morning. They wait in the hope of securing a shift.
Only a few are picked, whilst the majority turn back home empty-handed, hungry, frustrated, and increasingly angry. None of these stories is dramatic on its own, and they rarely make headlines. When they do, they are easily forgotten, but they repeat themselves across districts, regions, and professions.
Each of these individuals feels the weight of a system that does not quite work. Yet each experiences the struggle as a personal misfortune rather than a collective condition. The tree plantation owner assumes she simply misjudged the market.
Internalising structural failures
The entrepreneur concludes that perhaps he was not resilient enough, whilst the smallholder farmer suspects local corruption. The nurse tells herself that this is simply the reality of working in public service. The youth in Kibaha wonder whether they should wake up earlier than dawn or look for opportunities elsewhere.
Interestingly, our conversations reveal that they all remain hopeful that their tomorrow will be better, if only they could do something differently at a personal level. Why do they interpret their struggles this way, blame themselves, and remain hopeful? Part of the answer lies in the powerful narrative they constantly hear.
Day after day, through radio, television, and official speeches, citizens are reminded that the country is doing really well. In many ways, it is, as export earnings have almost doubled between 2020 and 2025, rising from about US$5.9 billion to roughly US$11.9 billion. GDP growth remains steadily higher than in many comparable countries.
Major infrastructure projects are visible across the landscape, including the Standard Gauge Railway stretching across the country. Newly expanded airports and highways connecting regions are also prominent features. Shiny glass-window businesses emerging in many neighbourhoods and skyscrapers rising into the skyline of Dar es Salaam add another texture to this development narrative.
These achievements are real and visible, but inequality is also real and visible. For many citizens, the connection between these national indicators and their everyday realities remains unclear. When people hear that the economy is growing, their own circumstances remain unchanged, a quiet psychological shift happens.
Shared pain unites
They begin to blame themselves, thinking perhaps they worked less hard or made the wrong decisions. Perhaps others simply understood the system better, and in this way, struggles that are structural begin to feel personal. Their suffering is real, but it remains isolated, and that isolation is not accidental.
Throughout history, states facing public discontent have understood that the greatest threat to an unjust system is not individual frustration. The true threat is the shared awareness of that frustration. When people recognise that their struggles are not unique but systemic, solidarity begins to form.
The uprising in Tunisia in 2011, widely seen as the spark of the Arab Spring, was triggered by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi. It spread because millions recognised their own frustration in his act. Similarly, many young voters in parts of Europe are not turning to populist leaders out of admiration.
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They are turning to them out of disillusionment with unmet economic promises, rising inequality, and a perceived failure of liberal democracy to deliver broadly shared prosperity. Recent Generation Z protests across multiple countries further illustrate how shared grievances can evolve into collective awareness and coordinated action.
Political sociologist Charles Tilly argued that collective movements emerge not merely from grievances but from people recognising that those grievances are shared.
It is that recognition, that moment of connection, that transforms scattered complaints into collective action. For this reason, the circulation of information becomes politically significant. Who gets to tell stories about injustice, and who gets to connect the dots between isolated struggles?
Breaking the silence
The shrinking space for civic expression and mobilisation is evident in restrictions on media freedom and growing pressure on public intellectuals. The weakening of civil society organisations, intimidation of activists, and interference in otherwise normal political parties’ work is not accidental. These measures serve a structural function by slowing the circulation of shared pain.
When citizens cannot gather, organise, publish, debate, or mobilise freely, their struggles are deliberately kept apart like voices sealed in separate rooms. The system works best when the teacher in Songea never hears the farmer in Kigoma. It thrives when the entrepreneur in Mwanza believes his bureaucratic nightmare is uniquely his.
The system relies on silence and distance, ensuring that the porter on Mount Kilimanjaro never sees himself in the unemployed youth waiting at factory gates in Kibaha. In this quiet architecture of isolation, frustration is individualised, doubt is internalised, and a shared reality is kept just out of reach. Connection is the one thing the system cannot afford.
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In such an environment, the system survives not because it works, but because people suffer separately. Yet isolation has limits; it is, at best, a temporary tactic. Across the world, technological change has repeatedly disrupted efforts to keep citizens apart.
Digital platforms, imperfect as they are, have created spaces where people can speak, compare experiences, and recognise patterns. A trader shares a story about unfair taxation, and another, hundreds of miles away, replies with the same experience. A graduate voices frustration about unemployment, and dozens echo it.
Adapting to control
A video exposing bureaucratic absurdity circulates, and suddenly, thousands see something familiar in it. These moments of connection matter, and they are becoming harder and costlier for the system to contain. Governments often respond in predictable ways, sometimes offering scapegoats by publicly reprimanding minor officials in an attempt to absorb public anger.
At other times, they manufacture distractions to redirect public attention or attempt to restrict internet access and tighten controls on digital spaces. Yet citizens innovatively adapt by shifting platforms, speaking in coded language, sharing screenshots, deploying humour, and relying on informal networks. As the state refines its tools of control, citizens are learning creatively and persistently how to evade them.
Here lies another danger worth acknowledging: when critical voices are weakened, and spaces for constructive dialogue are intentionally narrowed, society gradually loses peaceful avenues for negotiating grievances.
If citizens cannot debate, organise, protest, publish, or engage institutions meaningfully, then the ability for civilised dialogue erodes. The channels for non-violent negotiation shrink, and the language of negotiation itself begins to change.
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History shows that when peaceful mechanisms for expressing grievances disappear, societies often drift toward more disruptive, sometimes violent, forms of confrontation.
This is not an endorsement of such outcomes, but simply a recognition of how political pressure behaves when it has nowhere legitimate to go. At the same time, the elites who might normally mediate between citizens and the state often find themselves constrained.
Many are captured, co-opted, disappeared, or tightly controlled, limiting their ability to channel grievances upward or broker dialogue. Yet even elites are not immune to systemic dysfunction, and over time, they too begin to feel its consequences. This may compel them to join the course.
The tipping point
Another crucial shift may also come from within the broken system itself. So long as civil servants remain insulated from the deeper consequences of systemic dysfunction, they may continue administering the very structures that produce citizen frustration. But governments do not operate in a vacuum.
When economic pressures intensify, revenues decline, international legitimacy weakens, and fiscal constraints tighten, the strain eventually reaches the machinery of government.
Civil servants start to feel the pinch as allowances shrink, benefits delay, promotions stall, and institutional uncertainty grows. Suddenly, the civil servant who once enforced a broken process begins to experience its consequences personally.
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When hundreds or thousands of civil servants begin to feel that pinch, the boundary between those in government and the people starts to blur.
At first, the reaction among citizens may not be sympathetic, and many will mock the suffering of officials, business elites, and politicians who had long enabled the system. Social media jokes will circulate, and sarcastic comments will flourish, but beneath the mockery lies something more consequential.
Eventually, shared pain has a way of rearranging alliances. The teacher, the trader, the farmer, the nurse, and now the mid-level public official and business elites begin to see that their frustrations are rooted in the same structural failures. What once appeared to be separate struggles begins to look like a single systemic problem.
The future will not be shaped by isolated frustrations. It will be shaped by what happens when those frustrations finally meet, recognise each other, and organise around a shared demand for change. The country may be nearing a quiet but decisive tipping point.
Struggles are no longer isolated; they are widespread, deep, and increasingly visible to one another. Yet avenues for expression are narrowing, elites are constrained, and the state continues to treat symptoms whilst avoiding root causes. In this vacuum, citizens are not retreating; they are adapting, connecting, and pushing back in subtle but persistent ways.
The risk is clear: when legitimate grievances cannot find peaceful, credible channels, pressure does not disappear; it transforms. What follows may not be orderly or predictable. The real question is whether recognition of the shared pain will open space for reform or whether coerced silence will harden into something far more difficult to contain.
Baruani Mshale is the Director of Learning and Strategy at Twaweza East Africa. He can be reached at baruani.mshale@gmail.com or on X as @BMshale. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
