I don't think it's a shame, and shouldn't be a pain: organizing a bid is a lot of work, but is almost purely on-wiki, and can be done by one or two super-motivated individuals.  That is very different from being able to actually plan and host the event itself, which requires months of work and more team members.

Anyhow, we should all be happy for our Tanzanian colleagues for having found the initiative and energy to do this.  It's not a competition. :)

Like I said in my more formal letter, you must not look upon the expiration of the provisional recognition as a blow or as a failure -- it was merely a deadline expiring, for a formal process that doesn't actually matter as much as it used to, because we now have these new affiliation models, which would have been more suitable in the first place, had they existed at the time.

So I join the others in saying: let's focus on figuring out what are the things this group wants to do, then on the subset of them that this group can do, and go from there.  

Cheer up, folks! :)

   A.