When I engage with members of the leadership class back home in Tanzania, one question keeps surfacing with striking consistency:
“Why are people in the diaspora so angry?”
The premise behind that question is deeply flawed. The Tanzanian diaspora is not angry. It is disappointed, wounded, and yearning—yearning for a country that works, a country that protects its people, and a country that rewards honesty instead of punishing it.
What many leaders fail—or refuse—to understand is that the diaspora’s frustration is shaped by lived experience. Living abroad exposes you to systems that, while far from perfect, are largely functional. You witness governments that can be criticised without fear. Institutions that, more often than not, do their jobs. Courts whose decisions matter. Leaders who can be voted out. You see, daily, what becomes possible when accountability is not a slogan but a practice.
So when Tanzanians in the diaspora speak loudly, passionately, sometimes even painfully, it is not because they hate home. It is because they have seen what home could be.
There are moments abroad when I encounter overt racism—people who look down on Africans with thinly veiled contempt. In those moments, I often mutter to myself, “I don’t blame you, buddy.” Not because racism is ever justified—it is not—but because our own leadership has handed such people ammunition. The greatest damage to our dignity has not been inflicted by foreigners. It has been inflicted by those entrusted to lead us.
I do not blame Tanzania’s global image on outsiders.
I blame it on corruption.
On exploitative resource contracts.
On embezzlement of public funds.
On abductions and intimidation.
On stolen elections.
On kidnappings and extrajudicial killings.
These are not abstract political talking points. They are lived realities with real consequences: lost opportunities, broken families, silenced voices, wasted talent, and a future that is endlessly postponed.
If my homeland offered even a fraction of the fairness, opportunity, and security that I can access abroad, there would be no reason—none—to live thousands of kilometres away from the land that shaped me. Most people in the diaspora would return in a heartbeat. Home is not something you replace; it is something you are forced away from.
So no, the diaspora is not mad.
The diaspora is demanding better—not just for itself, but for those who never had the chance to leave. For those who endure the system every day without a foreign passport, without options, without escape.
That demand does not come from hatred.
It comes from love.
And perhaps the most honest, painful truth of all is this: no one criticises a country this fiercely unless they still believe it can be better—and unless they still call it home.
