The world is changing fast but CCM is still hibernating in analogue technology but wishes to lead us into a digital world? Is it possible?
Digital world is now being acknowledged as indispensable to pull out millions of the poor from the shackles of poverty.
This article looks at the last four years to determine whether CCM has any plan to digitize our economy and usher in a new era of prosperity.
When president Samia Suluhu Hassan came to power there was excitement and an air of euphoria that we were heading in a new direction.
Opinion polls indicated we were the happiest people in the world, or so. Two weeks earlier to that poll, we were considered to be in the basement of the most miserable people in the world.
It was a change of guard that was sufficient for us to have different attitudes, expectations and aspirations.
The future looked blithely, but was it?
This was strange because the president’s predecessor John Pombe Magufuli had tried to convince us that all we needed was super infrastructure and we had done well.
So he invested on infrastructure in a hope of winning our hearts and minds. He never got tired to remind us what our needs were:
“….wanachotaka watanzania ni waweze kumudu gharama za maisha tuu, na wala siyo demokrasia….”
Interesting, the new vice chairperson of CCM Steven Wasirra has been reiterating the same motif of lately, “…..watanzania hawawezi kula demokrasia kwani hicho nacho ni chakula?”
What he conveniently forgets is that CCM too is not food for us to eat at par with democracy.
Democracy is a fountain of development that ultimately puts food on the table in a manner that takes into consideration the basic needs of everybody not just a few at the top.
What many Tanzanians had hoped for was to end the trampling of our human rights. At the beginning president Samia Suluhu Hassan delivered on that frontier but she made one fatal mistake.
She trusted the same Magufuli minions to deliver good governance and the rule of law. It didn’t work that way.
Notable, some of her rhetoric made things tough for her. She refused to distinguish herself with Magufuli.
She repeatedly reminded us that the two of them were the same implying we shouldn’t expect too much from her.
As she kept recycling the same Magufuli men and women our murky past came back to haunt us. We seem to be running in cycles.
We were placed in a conveyor belt where the past kept intruding and manifested into our reality.
Disappearances came back to assault us, and those who had served their sentences or cleared the fines were still being kidnapped and their whereabouts unknown.
All of sudden our misplaced expectations and hopes took a flight to an unknown destination.
Our happiness benchmark has yet to be taken but we must have backslidden to where we were before president Samia came to power.
The government became increasingly inward looking with self serving assuming disproportionate terms.
Spouses of national leaders became civil servants by default deserving terminal benefits without being salaried. It was unconstitutional move.
It was a discrimination of the highest order. Non national leaders’ spouses were never considered for similar treatment and appeasement.
What we were beginning to witness Tanzania has morphed into an Orwellian Farm where some men were more equal than others.
Quietly, MPs and ambassadors got their raise while the rest received anything but incomparable to the leaps and bounds the so called national leaders had taken.
The widening gulf of incomes was sussed out. The budget for leaders to cover their other luxurious tastes grew too in the same period. It was self-serving with no dedication to develop a strategy for freedom from handouts, extortionate loans and economic empowerment of our own.
What was conspicuously lacking was the budget that caters for the common mwananchi.
The impression I was gathering CCM valued leaders more than the led. This is only possible when the common mwananchi has lost say in how the nation is governed.
This is where we are the electorate have lost power to choose the leaders they want to govern them.
In such situations, leaders once they have neutralised the power of the electorate have become slaves of their own bureaucrats.
It is the bureaucrats who are now calling the shots with the politicians now kept under the leash.
CCM is no longer running the country but it is the bureaucrats who are running the show.
They are the ones who draft laws in a manner they want, announce election results they prefer and have the capacity to harm those who question their decisions.
This explains why president Samia Suluhu Hassan has no first eleven in her team. She is juggling conflicting interests in her tent that keep getting bigger and belligerent.
 We are a country where appointment of ambassadors do not necessarily need to have countries to work in.
They can be appointed ambassadors and stay in their comfort homes while monthly picking their wages.
They really do not need to work to earn a living! This amounts to loyalty buying, and abuse of public office.
An obsession with infrastructure the bigger the better fails to appreciate the quality and costs of those monumental projects.
As a result projects have costed too much while quality has suffered significantly. Nobody notices this excludes not the CAG annual reports.
At the current pace of infrastructural construction we may take a century before we can complete them or be tied down to repairs and scapegoat ourselves on that.
Then there is a debt burden to constrict us perpetually. With interest rates on debt skyrocketing one needs to wonder whether we are mot mortgaging our own future and of the next generation.
Why our lenders eager to place us in their pockets unless it pays to do so.
Those bureaucrats who claim the debt burden is bearable must have questionable loyalty and allegiance.
At best, they must be belly worshipper or worse than that. The debtor is always a surety of the creditor.
This fact never change shape akin to a nose even under the sculptor’s immaculate hands.
The lack of job creation is perhaps CCM’s most undoing. In the last four years, the number of the youth joining the labour market has outpaced job creation by miles.
Some jobs created in the Middle East amounted to the reincarnation of slave trade. As CCM is gearing to retain power it has no agenda for Tanzania.
It is seeking five more years to placate herself with more eating but stands in no position to change our dependency to foreign aid and costly loans.
If you assay CCM apex you can clearly see where the problem is:
An analogue generation attempting to drive a digital plane.
Obviously, they can’t.
While we are in the 21st Century driven by the Information Age, our leaders still operate as if we aren’t.
We have the CCM national vice chairperson who has adopted a strategy based on slurs, telling and mocking Chadema in a reckless disregard of the challenges of a modern state.
He is running a campaign as if he is in the elections of 1995 where name calling were an in-thing. He is oblivious as a nation we have moved from that era now are focused on economic and development agendas.
Since his election to the second command within CCM, Steven Wasirra has not made a case why CCM deserves another term to govern.
He has been making a tent based on entitlements without accountability and belittling Chadema. Terminologies that CCM invoked in 1995.
Like calling NCCR-MAGEUZI to NCCR MAGAUNI. He has recoined the same parlance to CHADEMA ni CHAMA CHA DEMOKRASIA NA MATUSI…Is this a reason why CCM is presenting herself for five more years of insults and disrespecting the opposition and the elector at large?
Don’t we deserve serious leaders during serious times?
Nobody in CCM top ranks is saying anything about what they will do to the digital economy that has a potential to uplift millions of the younger generation out of the miseries of poverty.
What surprised me most is when I heard CCM was making a case against Asian wamachinga while their role is pivotal to shift some small scale traders out of the nooses of poverty. It is a subject I will broach next time around.
My advice to all political parties focus on the digital economy and stop trolling each other.
As Wasira falsely claimed that nobody can eat democracy, indeed, nobody can eat insults and mocking – makes more sense to remind all and sundries.
Read more about 63 Years On: Is CCM Still Serving Tanzania’s Independence Ideals?
