Tanzania's President-elect John Magufuli waves as he leaves after the
official election announcement ceremony in Dar es Salaam October 30,
2015. PHOTO | DANIEL HAYDUK |
AFP
By DANIEL K. KALINAKI
In Summary
- Dr Magufuli will have to reform more, not less, to keep CCM in power.
- Many who voted for Dr Magufuli did so for the man, not the party.
- Having run on an image of honesty, many will be looking at the new president to address the grand corruption that has characterised the Kikwete decade.
Having won a very competitive election with the lowest
margin by a candidate of the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), it may be
tempting for Tanzania’s president-elect, Dr John Pombe Magufuli to
stonewall on electoral and political reforms that would weaken the party
and the presidency.
Yet the fractious nature of the election, on the mainland where
main challenger Edward Lowassa has rejected the outcome and announced
himself winner, and in Zanzibar where the results were annulled after
the opposition claimed a first-ever win, are proof that Dr Magufuli will
have to reform more, not less, to keep CCM in power.
Many who voted for Dr Magufuli did so for the man, not the
party. Others, like Sulaya Kigaila, a first-time voter in the commercial
capital, Dar es Salaam, did so grudgingly.
“I really wanted change because I think CCM is tired but I ended
up voting for Dr Magufuli,” she said. “The opposition spent years
telling us Mr Lowassa was corrupt yet they took only a week to choose
him as their candidate. I did not trust them.”
Elections in Africa are often violent and stolen. More than half
of 300 elections in 47 African countries between 1990 and 2015 were
characterised as “violent,” according to researchers from the Institute
for Defence Analyses, a not-for-profit funded by the US government.
While elections across Africa have been becoming more peaceful
since the return of multiparty politics in the early 1990s, the risk of
extreme violence, as seen in Kenya in 2007/8, Cote d’Ivoire in 2010 and
Burundi more recently, is never too far off.
Tanzania has been there before, when 40 people were killed and
2,000 forced into exile in the violence that followed disputed elections
in Zanzibar in 2000.
Despite that and other sporadic episodes of violence in 2010,
electoral contests in Tanzania are, in comparison with most on the
continent, far more benign.
Sixty-three per cent of respondents to an Afrobarometer public
survey in 2014 said they want losing parties in elections to work with
the winner. Almost nine out of every 10 respondents said it was
important for people to obey the government in power, regardless of whom
they voted for.
If the pollsters are right, and barring any “black swan”
developments, this sentiment should see the current dissatisfaction with
the outcome of the result fizzle out over coming weeks and months.
Hours before the final results were announced, life was slowly going
back to normal in Dar es Salaam and elsewhere.
Dr Magufuli should use that space to initiate governance,
political and electoral reform, not sit on his laurels. The governance
reforms are more immediate and offer the quickest return on political
capital.
Anti-corruption
Having run on an image of honesty, many will be looking at the
new president to address the grand corruption that has characterised the
Kikwete decade.
Dr Magufuli would do well just to avoid scandals on the scale of
Richmond, Tegeta, Barrick Gold et cetera but he will have to do more to
get implicated officials prosecuted and support the oversight
institutions of government.
One in two Tanzanians believes corruption cannot be controlled
in the country, according to a public survey earlier this year by
Twaweza, a civil society organisation.
Dr Magufuli will have to challenge those perceptions with solid
action and use the savings from graft to fund the water, health and
education projects the country desperately needs and respondents said
would influence their voting decisions.
This efficiency must be extended to the parts of the public
sector that support a more competitive private sector. Notorious for its
red tape, Tanzania has stopped requiring health, town and land
inspections before issuing business licenses.
However, the country still lags in the bottom quartile of the
World Bank’s Doing Business surveys and it still takes nine procedures
and 26 days to set up a business. This is one area Dr Magufuli,
nicknamed ‘The Bulldozer” by the man he is set to succeed, can move
mountains.
Political reform will be harder, but no less important. Since
the Union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar produced the United Republic
of Tanzania in April 1964, every government in power has tinkered and
dithered with the Constitution between the two entities, without making
meaningful progress.
The standard procedure over the years has been to appoint a
constitutional commission and then ignore its recommendations long
enough for it to become the problem of the next government.
That is precisely what President Kikwete has done — choosing,
pragmatically, not to force through a referendum on an unpopular draft
just before a general election, and more disturbingly, to clamp down on
independent media and civil society research organisations. It would be
unwise to follow that script.
Not only did the last commission headed by Joseph Warioba, a
former prime minister and attorney general, produce a popular and
workable draft, CCM’s refusal to accept a three-tier government
structure for the Union formed the basis of the Ukawa Alliance, and the
strongest test of its hold on power since Independence.
Dr Magufuli can re-open debate on the draft and make
constitutional reform a major part of his legacy. Done smartly, he can
even delay it long enough beyond his first term, and then push it
through the inevitable resistance from within CCM during his second
term, when he doesn’t have an election to fight.
Electoral reform
If constitutional and political reform is too much of a
first-term undertaking, then Dr Magufuli can at least focus on electoral
reform with less risk and a higher return on political capital.
The current head of the National Electoral Commission, Justice
Damian Lubuva, has shown some appetite for reform, by cutting back on
the use of public servants in local government authorities, many of them
card-carrying CCM members, in organising polls. Deeper reforms are
needed, and quicker.
First, while the Ppresident can continue to appoint members of
the commission, this should be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny and
approval, and the commissioners should have more defined security of
tenure for their time in office to give them space to act with more
independence.
Secondly, the Tanzanian courts should be given the mandate to
hear and rule on disputes arising out of presidential elections, as they
currently do in parliamentary contests.
The current situation where the NEC is the organiser,
prosecutor, judge and jury in presidential elections is undemocratic,
undermines the transparency of the entire process, and is a potential
recipe for violence.
The current election imbroglio is illustrative. Mr Lowassa
has rejected the official results as doctored and announced his own
results in which he claims to have won the presidential election with 62
per cent of the vote.
This could all be sour grapping but foreign election observers
have noted that while election day voting and counting was generally
peaceful and incident-free, there was a lack of transparency during the
tallying and subsequent announcement of results.
In a free and democratic society, the courts would be invited to
independently verify Mr Lowassa’s claims, examine his evidence, and
decide whether the official results are credible.
At best — and as has happened in every Tanzanian election since
1995 — this absence of judicial oversight leaves question marks over the
credibility of the election and the true extent of the support the
winner genuinely has. At worst, it can trigger violence.
In each of the areas that require reform, Dr Magufuli will be
pushing against entrenched party interests that benefit from the grand
corruption, the unequal status quo between the mainland and Zanzibar,
and an electoral process that ensures the party retains control of both
State House and Parliament.
Dr Magufuli has considerable personal attributes, including a reputation for honesty and hard work.
Yet his victory can also be attributed to CCM’s entrenched
advantages of incumbency; divisions in the Ukawa opposition alliance
whose two leading figures, Wilbroad Slaa and Ibrahim Lipumba, walked out
in protest after Lowassa’s last-minute defection; and a
lower-than-expected turn-out, which usually favours incumbents.
The president-elect can lean on history the way a drunk uses a
lamppost — for support, rather than illumination — and continue with the
incrementalism of his predecessors, or he can take CCM out of its
comfort legacy zone and, by implementing reforms that could threaten its
grip on power, force it to become more agile and responsive.
It is the classic gravedigger problem and requires horsepower and brainpower to overcome.
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