Dar es Salaam, Jan. 21 -- WHEN news surfaced that Tanzania had signed a $1.08 million, two-year contract with a Washington consulting firm led by a former Republican congressman, the reaction followed a script that has become almost automatic. Headlines hardened within hours.

Social media, particularly among Tanzanians in the diaspora, treated the disclosure less as information than as evidence. To critics already suspicious of the government, the contract was not a publicrelations move at all; it was a confession. There was an emotional logic to that response.

Tanzanian politics over the past few years have not been abstract. Elections were not distant rituals but deeply felt moments that strained trust and widened generational divides...