EDITORIAL: Official must act restraint
What for all practical purposes amounts to a tiff between National Assembly Speaker Job Ndugai and Stephen Masele is as uncalled for as it is ill-advised and embarrassing.
Mr Masele is a member of the Tanzania’s National Assembly as well as a member of the Pan-African Parliament (PAP), the legislative body of the African Union (AU) which is based in Midrand, South Africa.
The Tanzanian is also PAP’s first vice president-cum-deputy speaker, elected to that honourable position by PAP members.
Apparently, there has been a degree of misunderstanding on assorted issues of public interest between Mr Masele and the PAP president-cum-speaker, the Cameroonian Roger Nkodo Dang.
Rightly or wrongly, this tempted Mr Dang to persuade Mr Ndugai to recall Mr Masele back home. Mr Dang seems to have succeeded in that, as Mr Ndugai did indeed recall Mr Masele as requested – claiming that the Tanzanian had been “acting in a manner amounting to contempt of the Union National Assembly... and putting the two pillars of State, the Legislature and the Executive, on a collision course...”
Without going into the grisly details here, we nonetheless counsel the relevant authorities against washing dirty linen in public – and, also, to always act in prudent restraint.
