With so much cheating and hate do we need elections in future?

Tanzanians queue to vote in Dar es Salaam on October 28, 2020. PHOTO | AFP

Summary

• It is fairly well known how partial and compromised our electoral institutions and processes are, even in countries where the commissions are set up in a more or less transparent manner.

• Tanzania is unique in this whole region in that whereas many countries in the region have seen the necessity to put in place independent electoral commissions, the Tanzanian one is appointed by the Executive, although in the legal documents it is dubbed ‘Independent Electoral Commission’, as some kind of talisman. 

By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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Both the United republic of Tanzania and the United States of America have found themselves in

electoral gripes that have, to varying degrees, seriously called into question the processes that are supposed to ensure unfettered elections that allow the will of the people to emerge triumphant regardless of who loses or wins.

The two elections, held on October 28 and November 3 respectively, are of course organised along very different lines, took place under very different political atmospheres but may have behind them antecedents that draw them close, if you look at them carefully.

We know that in many other African countries it is almost visceral for those who lose to cry foul at every election, it has even been suggested by those accustomed to ‘winning’ that for an election to be free and fair the opposition has to win. That would necessarily mean that it is not possible for the incumbent to win if elections are held properly and every contestant is given an equal chance.

However unfair as this may sound, it is fairly well known how partial and compromised our electoral institutions and processes are, even in countries where the commissions are set up in a more or less transparent manner.

Africa is home to probably the most fraudulent election recorded in history when in 1927 Liberia, Charles D B. King of the True Whig Party was re-elected by close to 250,000 votes in an electorate that was not more than 15,000.

Though that Liberian case obviously takes the cake, there can be no serious argument against the observation that most African elections are seriously flawed, and the ones just concluded in Tanzania are by no means exceptional.

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Tanzania is unique in this whole region in that whereas many countries in the region have seen the necessity to put in place independent electoral commissions, the Tanzanian one is appointed by the Executive, although in the legal documents it is dubbed ‘Independent Electoral Commission’, as some kind of talisman. 

Also, once the presidential vote has been declared, there is no recourse to the courts if one does not accept the result, although one is free to challenge parliamentary and civic elections. As a result, for instance, we will never have the opportunity to scrutinise the votes that gave Magufuli such a landslide victory, which relegates any discussion over the matter to the realm of rumour and conjecture.

It is certainly one of the points that are likely to remain with us in any debate in the future, which will necessarily involve the central controversies about a new constitutional dispensation which will take care of all the major points the political classes are at each other’s throats about.

But maybe we need more than a new constitutional review process; maybe what we need is reconstitution, the reassembling of Tanzanians with a view to examining how we are assembled in our nation-building project, and whether we are on the same path where Julius Kambarage Nyerere left us. For, I regret to say, we have abandoned that path, gone into the wilderness and may be hard put to know how to come back to it.

I have always complained about the election-time mental disease that seems to afflict many of our people to the extent that we all lose sense of ourselves and say and do the most outrageous things that we would otherwise never think of saying or doing. Some of these examples I have given on this page in my past pieces. 

The American tribes, whose bellicose confrontation has been heightened by the very nature of Donald Trump, have pushed their country onto the edge of civil strife, but that may be only because of all the guns that Americans cling on as a birth right. Still, it is true that a flashpoint could set off a number of firefights that could snowball into a major conflagration. 

As for us, we are not shielded from that eventuality, either, and I always want to tell fellow Tanzanians that we have no compact with God so that He will always come to our rescue when we do what others have been punished for doing. Tanzania is more divided today than I have known it to be since this country started out on a journey to do a nation. That project has been stalled, and the national fabric that we had managed to sew together has frayed so badly to the extent that a mere poke may see it come unstuck.

The tone of some WhatsApp groups during this last election reminded me of some of the languages used in the killings in Sierra Leone or the sectarian violence in the Central African Republic. 

Someone was talking about someone who was shot several times three years ago, and said: “This time we will not need to waste bullets; we will simply use a poisoned syringe”. No reprimand was forthcoming from this man’s party chiefs, nor from the electoral authorities.

It is the kind of attitude that allows droplets of venom to drip into the bloodstream of the population and lodge there until one day we realise that there is more poison than blood. 

So, if our so-called elections are just multiple occasions to engage in countrywide fraud and spill more poison into our blood circulation, do we really need them? 
 
Jenerali Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: jenerali@gmail.com