INDICATIONS are that there is no bigger debate in Africa currently as that relating to the need for improving consultation mechanisms.

Hardly do youths anywhere look satisfied with consultation mechanisms even where the post-independence constitutions have been repeatedly or extensively revised.

It is aptly said that the taste of the pudding is in the eating, so it is indeed in how such mechanisms respond to similar crises that one can gauge their suitability to particular social, economic or other conditions.

This is basically because identifying whether the problem or challenge is the consultation mechanism itself or it lies elsewhere. That is what has come to pass with the recent fuel price hikes all over the region, as to who was able to withstand the shock and maintain social harmony.

This is one way of gauging the relevance of institutions to a particular country and making informed evaluations of the suitability or otherwise of those institutions, particularly when one figures out how price hikes ignore unrest in one country and harmony prevails is another.

Evidently, no two countries are identical in how they live – and, indeed, relative to the level of desperation of various social groups and how fuel prices hikes ignite this or that expression of protest.

That is linked with mechanisms of political consultation where such outbreaks provide occasions for new constituency building efforts around particular causes remotely related to other demands such that a substantive alliance can be hatched for a wide electoral platform.

It is during such situations that one begins to grasp the rationale for preferring a particular system to another.

The side of the border with strikes and social unrest after fuel price rise prides itself with the freedom to call a strike and halt public transport, as an astute expression of liberty.

The side of the border that maintained harmony is astounded at this expression of liberty, seeing in that situation a deficit of consultation or properly gauging load the public could take in relation to fuel prices.

But as the increases are comparable and living conditions are on the whole similar, strikes seem to be encouraged by political speculators.

That is why it is relevant in Tanzania’s education reforms not just to make efforts to teach affinity with national political organisations but also to make young people aware that there is no straightforward formula for what is a more appropriate set of consultative arrangements.

Those working better could also have drawbacks while those accommodating systemic convulsions from time to time earn praise but aren’t evidently the most suitable for predictable, stable social environment. It is an endless debate on the half-full cup of liberty and a half-empty cup of stability, etc.

As wealth in Africa grows, it becomes increasingly opportune to seek wider distribution of the wealth with the creation of wider representation avenues.

Trouble could be that these avenues soon become major burdens for taxpayers in like manner as applied to the creation of pan-territorial agencies for particular sphere of economy initially looking convenient but later becoming a burden.