By Boniface Mwabukusi
Amne Suedi’s recent column in this paper, on whether Tanzania’s advocates can survive the mega-project era, raises a fair question about local content in legal services and then answers it unfairly. Her diagnosis is that bar leadership has, since 2017, poured its energy into confrontation with government over constitutional and political questions, and that this has come at the cost of enforcing the local-content rules that would put briefs and fees in Tanzanian lawyers’ hands.
A bar association, she argues, cannot be both government’s sharpest critic and its most persuasive partner in getting those rules enforced. Something has had to give, and for eleven years, she says, it has been the advocates themselves.
I read this with respect for the economic case she makes about legal services and local content. I read it with alarm for the constitutional case she leaves out. She has, in my view, misunderstood the entire issue.
She writes as though the Rule of Law is a separate line item from lawyers’ economic wellbeing, something the Society can trade off against local content enforcement as a matter of strategy. It is not separate. A bar that cannot speak against the erosion of the courts, against arbitrary arrest, against the hollowing out of constitutional guarantees, will not survive long enough to negotiate anyone’s fee schedule.
