Magufuli becomes all-powerful, but will it make him more or less predictable?

 

By Jenerali Ulimwengu

President John Pombe Magufuli has just taken over the reins of the ruling CCM party.

It is a practice that was put in place by the party’s founding father, Julius Nyerere, back in 1990 and which has seemed to function like clockwork ever since.

Mwalimu said back then that it is proper for the person who has won the presidency also to take over the mantle of party leadership.

This was one of those things that Nyerere was able to get away with, however illogical or inconsistent with his own past practice. For one thing, the party is supposed to oversee the government and provide political direction to state bureaucrats, who may or may not be versed in the politics that the masses want.

For another, Nyerere himself had shown great mastery of the system in which the state machinery was under one person and the party under another, when he was party chair for five years while Ali Hassan Mwinyi was president, between 1985 and 1990.

But at that juncture,e he saw it best to combine the two functions, arguing implicitly that it was useful to avoid possible conflict between the two.

Well, we all know Nyerere got most of what he wanted, and the practice has now become traditional. After his election as president, Benjamin Mkapa took the chair from Mwinyi, and Jakaya Kikwete from Mkapa.

By the time it got to Magufuli, there was some measure of conventional wisdom, and there were no surprises. Except one, the one about Magufuli getting 100 per cent of the votes cast by the delegates.

What was definitely not surprising was the parade of former defectors from CCM getting on the rostrum to say their mea culpas for having foolishly left to join the opposition and now, having seen the light that Magufuli personified, wished to beg forgiveness.

Pathetic figures, yes, but the ritual of supplication before the conqueror has become a periodic happening. These people actually called themselves “prodigal sons,” no doubt expecting the father to slaughter the fat ram.

We were also treated to the spectacle of enfeebled politicians, representing nominal parties that have lost all credibility with the public, heaping praise on the president and promising to work with him in his new role as chairman of the ruling party. (The more mainstream political parties, the ones forming the alliance for a new constitution, Ukawa, stayed away).

So what should we expect the new party chairman to bring to the table? He promised to fight corruption, lethargy, laxity and hypocrisy.

This is a tall order, seeing as the party is so mired in all those ills that to eradicate them would mean to pull down the very pillars on which it stands.

I do not suppose for a moment that his efforts at cleaning up the party will succeed better than his attempts to straighten out the civil service, on which matter the jury is still out. We may not be able to judge the matter for a long time to come.

It will be interesting to watch how he goes about his job as party chief. His eight months in government have given a public persona of a man who shoots from the hip, ready and willing to make impromptu decisions and issue abrupt instructions, a cavalier style that may not stand him in good stead when dealing with party matters, in which a more consultative approach is required.

He may still impose his way of doing things on this amorphous organisation that long ago shed its pretence to having an ideology or philosophy and has become to all intents and purposes a meeting place for the distribution of state offices and largesse.

It is easy to beat the party apparatchiks into line when they know their livelihoods will be determined by how loyal they are deemed to be by the one person who controls both the party and the state machineries.

We are likely to witness a more vigorous Magufuli, wielding greater powers, and unfettered by Kikwete and his people from the old regime.

It is not easy to say whether that will work to the advantage of the country as so much power is concentrated in the hands of one man, when that one man has already displayed an extraordinary penchant t for being unpredictable.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: ulimwengu@jenerali.com