Op-ed

The Boy by the Radio: Zitto Kabwe at Fifty

I memorised MPs’ voices before I could afford shoes. Fifty years on, I’m still listening.

Zitto Kabwe

September 24, 2026

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The first thing I remember owning was not a thing at all. It was a sound.

In my grandfather’s house in Kigoma, a small radio set we called Radio Mkulima brought the country into our room. It carried news from Dar es Salaam, debates from Dodoma and football commentary from stadiums I had never seen. My grandfather listened for the news; I listened to the people making it.

I memorised the names of Members of Parliament and their constituencies. I learned to recognise a politician’s voice before the announcer identified its owner.

I was a boy who walked to school barefoot. When shoes finally came, we called them Asante Salim. Yet somewhere in that small, dark room, listening to a radio powered by batteries we could not always afford, I had already chosen a life.

I did not yet know what that choice would demand, or what it might give back.

Fifty years later, I am still finding out.

When I was seven, Prime Minister Edward Sokoine died in a road accident. The adults on our street argued about who would replace him.

Doors left open

I interrupted them — children were not supposed to interrupt adults — and declared that it would be Salim. Weeks later, Salim Ahmed Salim became prime minister. My mother never quite forgave me for being right in front of her guests.

Years later, as a first-year university student waiting for a plane at Bole Airport in Addis Ababa, I found some coins and walked into a telephone booth. I had no appointment, no letter of introduction and no important person to invoke.

I asked to speak to Salim, who was then serving as secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity. To my astonishment, he came to the telephone.

That call taught me something I have carried ever since. Office and leadership are not the same thing. A high office can protect its holder from ordinary people, but a great leader leaves a door through which an ordinary person can still walk.

I have tried to keep such a door open in my own public life. I have not always succeeded.

Parliament made me and nearly unmade me. I entered it young and impatient, with more conviction than tact.

There, I learned that a country’s natural resources belong to its people, not to whichever minister or company signs a contract. I learned the lesson the hard way: I was suspended from the House for four months after raising questions about a mining agreement signed in a London hotel.

I also learned that political change rarely arrives with the drama later attached to it. Sometimes it begins with a single photocopied page carried across a corridor. If the evidence is sound and the argument survives ridicule, that page may travel through committees, public debate and resistance until, years later, its principle appears in the law of the land.

Parliament taught me to respect the slow, unglamorous work that lies between outrage and reform.

During the EPA scandal, when a special audit found that Sh133 billion had been paid through the Bank of Tanzania’s External Payments Arrears account on fraudulent or unsupported documentation, officials kept smiling, and the economic figures remained reassuring. That episode taught me that a nation’s most important construction project is not always a road, a railway or a dam.

It is an institution strong enough to say no: no to a minister, no to a powerful businessperson, no to the demands of the moment. Concrete can transform a country. Institutions determine whether that transformation belongs to the public or to a few well-connected people.

A mentor who had survived almost every kind of political battle once gave me a warning I have never forgotten: graveyards are full of heroes. He was not asking me to become timid. He was reminding me that the purpose of a struggle is not to die admired.

It is to remain alive, to keep organising and, if fortune permits, to see some part of the change for which one fought.

Politics also taught me that belonging can end without explanation. I was expelled from the party I had joined at sixteen, the party that had been my school, my workplace and, in many respects, my family.

Even now, I cannot claim to understand everything that happened between us. I went to court to remain. I lost.

Then we built a new party from almost nothing. We were dismissed as temporary, mocked as a convenient instrument of the ruling party and advised to accept the limits placed upon us.

Some of the people on whom I had most relied were the first to leave. For a time, all that was visible was loss. Beneath the surface, however, roots were taking hold.

A friend had reminded me of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat. A seed appears to disappear before it germinates.

I returned to that image on the day I lost my parliamentary seat. Many people saw an ending. I chose to see the beginning of a different season.

Politics gives no guarantee that such faith will be rewarded, but without it no movement could survive its first defeat.

Staying alive

Some lessons came far from microphones and parliamentary chambers. In Kahama, a warning reached me at three in the morning. I walked through a house with two doors, slipped out through the back, climbed onto a motorcycle and crossed a border that my passport never recorded.

I then spent a month in Maputo, sheltered by a president who had himself been born in a Tanzanian liberation camp.

On another night, I refused to leave Parliament because police officers were waiting at the gate. I remained inside until midnight, when the Speaker sent her own car to take me out.

People still joke that I turned into grass to escape arrest. I did not turn into anything. I learned that courage is not the same as making yourself easy to capture.

A politician’s safety can depend on knowing when to be visible and when to disappear, and on having friends who understand the difference.

Then there were the dead.

My friend Deo Filikunjombe telephoned me six days before he died in a helicopter crash. He wanted to oversee government but never seemed interested in becoming a minister.

During one of my hardest political battles, he quietly arranged protection for me and asked my sister to come and cook my food. Public life is full of people who announce their loyalty. Deo practised his without announcement.

There was also my teacher, Maalim Seif Sharif Hamad. At his graveside, I called him my hero, my father and my leader.

His death brought personal grief, but it also posed an institutional test. Could a young party mourn its defining leader, make painful decisions and continue sailing?

A movement that cannot survive its founder is an entourage. A party that can absorb grief, manage a transition and keep its purpose may be becoming an institution.

I have been fortunate in friendship. Some friends now lead their countries.

On my wall is a photograph of three young men at an airport; one of them, Hakainde Hichilema, would become president of Zambia on his sixth attempt. That story has always mattered to me.

Electoral politics can make one defeat feel final. Five losses can make persistence look unreasonable. Yet history often changes its verdict only after the person involved has refused to accept everybody else’s.

An elder whom I used to visit in Kuala Lumpur each year once gave me counsel of a different kind: put your country at the centre; do not destroy it for expediency or ambition; serve it.

I keep those words close to the grain of wheat and the graveyard full of heroes. Together they offer a demanding political ethic: endure defeat, survive the struggle and never confuse your own ambition with the fate of the nation.

What politics means

At fifty, I can see more clearly what the boy beside Radio Mkulima could not. The voices coming through that set were speaking about power, but power eventually came down to ordinary things: shoes, soap, school fees, medicine, a fair price for a farmer’s crop and whether a barefoot child might one day own something of their own.

Beneath the speeches, the convoys and the quarrels, that was what politics meant. It is still what politics means.

The radio also taught me to listen before I had any right to speak. Politics later rewarded the opposite habit.

It tempts each of us to believe that our own voice is the nation’s voice and that our survival is the survival of the cause. Half a century has cured me of some illusions, though certainly not all of them.

People leave. Parties change. Friendships are tested.

Victories fade. Even the loudest voice eventually falls silent.

Institutions must remain.

Everything I have fought for, and much of what I have lost, returns to that sentence. Institutions must be stronger than their founders, stronger than those who temporarily occupy high office and strong enough to protect citizens who will never know the names of the people inside them.

This is easy to say in an anniversary reflection. It is much harder to live across a political lifetime.

Fifty years on, the barefoot boy is still listening. He is less certain than he once was, but more hopeful than cynicism would permit.

He knows now that a life in politics cannot be measured only by offices held, elections won or punishments survived. It must also be measured by the doors one leaves open, the people one helps to stand and the institutions that remain when one is gone.

Zitto Kabwe is a former Member of Parliament for Kigoma North and Kigoma Urban, and a former leader of ACT Wazalendo. This essay is drawn from his forthcoming booklet, 50 at 50: Stories from My First Half Century. He’s available at Zitto_Kabwe@outlook.com. 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.