2026 and the discipline of renewal

DAR ES SALAAM: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure,” Nelson Mandela 1994 FOR many people, 2025 will remain an annus horribilis. Years come and go, but some refuse to loosen their grip. They leave behind a residue of exhaustion, of grief half-processed, of political and personal disorientation.

When a year closes under the weight of relentless events, it becomes strangely difficult to recognise that a new calendar year has arrived at all. And yet it has. It is 2026. It is imperative to have selfintrospection, seek advice from people we truly trust, where necessary support, for in every dawn of a new year, if habits don’t change, you won’t have a new year, but you will just have another year as ageing crips on you.

But in 2026, we find ourselves standing again, holding onto a form of hope that is neither neat nor unanimous. It scatters. It contradicts itself. It travels unevenly across borders and lives.

But it persists. History, after all, does not wait for us to feel ready. It advances with or without our permission, asking only that we decide whether we will engage it with fear or with attention.

Hope and endurance in 2026.

Hope, when spoken too easily, becomes a performance. When earned, it becomes something else entirely a discipline, no matter how hard a challenge is. Nelson Mandela understood this distinction.

In 1994, standing before a nation he had been barred from serving for twenty-seven years, he reminded South Africans and the world that “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.” It was not a line about triumph. It was a warning about responsibility.

For those of us now entering our late thirties, shaped more by disruption than continuity, burnout is not theoretical. Disillusionment is not abstract. We have lived through crises that arrived faster than the language to describe them.

And yet Mandela’s life insists on a harder truth: that hope is not optimism and certainly not denial. It is the decision to believe that meaning can still be constructed after prolonged damage and that endurance, not anger, is what ultimately bends history.

What to expect in 2026 on the world stage

The early signals of 2026 suggest a world less interested in spectacle and more attentive to structure. By January 1st 2026, in New York City, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as New York city mayor. Zohran Mamdani’s ascent to the mayoralty marks a civic moment that is both symbolic and substantive.

He is the first Muslim mayor, the first of South Asian descent and African-born, to lead America’s largest city. His rise does not announce a perfected democracy, but it does affirm something quieter and more durable the continued, if uneven, widening of merit based access in American public life.

While the American dream seems to be fading in contemporary America, America has proved itself to be the melting pot amidst polarised politics in the US. His rise does not announce a perfected democracy, but it does affirm something quieter and more durable. The continued, if uneven, widening of merit-based access in American public life.

For many Tanzanians, particularly those shaped by the intellectual debates of the post-independence era, Mamdani’s name carries an older resonance. Zohran is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, the renowned scholar whose work on African political thought, citizenship and the postcolonial state has long circulated within East African universities and policy circles.

His ideas often debated, sometimes contested, always serious formed part of the intellectual atmosphere in which a generation of Tanzanian academics and civil servants learned to think critically about power and belonging. If you are a child born in the mid 1980s most parents particularly scholarly households, the name Mahmood Mamdani was commonly spoken by parents along side other intellectuals like Walter Rodney, Walter Sisulu and Abdul Rahman Mohamed Babu.

This lineage matters. Not as inheritance, but as context. Zohran Mamdani’s political emergence reflects not only a changing America, but the long, unfinished conversation between Africa and the world about governance, identity and justice. It is a reminder that ideas, like people, migrate and that their afterlives can be as consequential as their origins. That same city has also marked a cultural milestone.

The New Yorker, now a century old, has survived technological revolutions, political tempests and the long erosion of attention itself. Its persistence is not accidental. It reflects a public appetite not always dominant, but enduring for rigour, skepticism and intellectual patience. These developments do not signal rupture. They signal adjustment.

Tanzania, a very good idea

We have emerged from recent low points in the Tanzanian national experience, but the United Republic of Tanzania remains a very good idea. New people with new visions have entered public service. Tourism continues to rebound.

There is momentum, cautious but real. Love your country, try Chinese cuisine when you can, go to an Indian restaurant, or Japanese cuisine, trust me Asians have an exceptional way with making great variety of tasty food! If you are a gentleman, it will make you feel a sense of aphrodisiac too. It’s awesome.

Eat Matoke too, that’s boiled plantains, try some tripe soup with Ugali, Tanzania is still a very good idea. What is required now is not triumphalism, but stewardship.

We need a new spirited patriotism

President Samia Suluhu Hassan gave a remarkable address for the New year, for an expecting public. This year demands a renewed civic temperament. Not the loud patriotism of slogans, but the quieter kind rooted in conduct. How we speak to one another, how we treat visitors, how we engage investors and how we conduct ourselves online are not peripheral matters. They are reflections of national character.

We should love our country with a new spirit of patriotism. Social media has defined us, it grew larger and we allowed it to The digital century is here and artificial intelligence is no longer theoretical. Yet many of us were raised in a different ethic one where conversation required eye contact, where empathy was practiced in person, not performed online.

Today it is common to see intimacy interrupted by screens, presence diluted by distraction. In 2026, we must relearn attention. Before posting, ask: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it ethical? Read more. Exercise more. The country needs rational citizens more than constant spectators.

Life is for the living!

Life is not postponed until perfect conditions arrive. In 2026, live lawfully, responsibly, generously. Communicate with those you value. Do not let pride block reconciliation. Invest where you can. Travel domestically.

Tanzania’s beauty transcends congestion and politics. It deserves to be seen. In other words, if you want to communicate with your old friends call them, if you miss your current boss or former boss check on them, they are humans too.

And if you want to buy the new Hilux Travo 2026, also called Hilux Nova 2026 model for some markets, buy that car. And if you want to get the Nissan patrol, get that Patrol, do not let your mechanic or friends school you on the car you want, life is for the living, live your life to the fullest. If you want to get some wine, go ahead and do it, in vinos veritas, it is 2026, life is for the living.

If you can afford the Ford Ranger and the Nissan terra sports, buy them especially if you are in your mid forties or late thirties. Life is for the living; we live once and die forever. The G20 and the shape of a multipolar world.

The G20 will be hosted by the United States in 2026. To understand its significance, one must recall the previous summit in South Africa. It was defined not by drama, but by inclusive diplomatic calibration a carefully paced affirmation of multipolarity.

President Cyril Ramaphosa presided with diplomatic maturity attuned to contemporary power. The summit revealed a tripolar complexity nested within a broader multipolar order. Consensus held not exuberantly, but sufficiently. In a fractured world, that mattered.

The long arc of global power

The year 2026 marks the opening of a long arc. European ascendancy gave way to American primacy. Today, power is no longer concentrated, but distributed. China rises. India accelerates.

The Global South coordinates. The United States remains indispensable, but no longer solitary Superpower but New York is still the greatest city, let that sink in, unless you go to Beijing or Tokyo and Macao. This is not decline. It is adjustment. And adjustment rewards patience. Selecting the next top world diplomat in 2026.

This is the year a new Secretary-General will emerge. Eight decades into the UN experiment, the office remains constrained by power and defined by paradox.

As 2026 unfolds, the lesson before us is neither dramatic nor comforting, but it is durable. The future will belong less to those who announce themselves loudly than to those who build patiently country by country, institution by institution, life by life. In a world adjusting to dispersed power, coherence matters more than command and legitimacy more than spectacle.

Mandela’s warning endures because it was never about victory. It was about restraint. Power, when unexamined, corrodes. Hope, when disciplined, restores.

A new year does not guarantee progress. It offers a choice. And the measure of 2026 will not be whether the world avoided crisis, but whether it learned to live more honestly within its limits and more responsibly within its power. The writer is an advocate of the High Court of Tanzania and a columnist on international affairs.

He is an alumnus of Rashtriya Raksha University, where he studied the fundamentals of international law and security.

Email: norvum728@ gmail.com Mobile: 0747130688B