The High Court in Dar es Salaam has rejected preliminary objections to a matter questioning the Minister for Regional Administration and Local Government’s power to oversee its elections. The Court has paved the way for the litigation to be heard and determined on its merits, which is a huge victory for the plaintiffs.
However, the Court was unconvinced that it was in the public interest to issue temporary conservatory orders that would have prevented the ministry from continuing to manage elections.
This article reviews the bone of contention being contested in the courts without siding with either side, lest I be accused of judicial interference.
The gist of the legal assault against the Minister for Regional Administration and Local Government and the Attorney General is the subsidiary laws that empower the minister to supervise local government elections simply because they are or are not constitutional aliens.
Our constitution empowers the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to manage our elections and does not subordinate it to the minister for local government. The High Court is tasked with determining whether the minister’s powers to appoint election supervisors do not violate our constitution.
This case is fundamentally different from the one about DEDs’ impartiality, which, despite being approved by the High Court, was quashed and set aside by the Appeals Court for lack of evidence.
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However, the African Court of Human Rights and People’s Rights restored the monumental High Court ruling. The legislature coined words to reinstate the same law by replacing the terminology of DEDs with senior civil servants.
In this case, litigants are not accusing the minister, and those he will appoint to run the elections are biased. Instead, they specifically ask the Court to appraise the election laws and decide on constitutionality aspects.
Suppose the Court finds the election laws were unconstitutional. In that case, the local government elections will also be illegal, condemning the whole exercise expected to cost billions of Tanzanian shillings in a quandary.
The government will rush to the Court of Appeal for relief, whose outcome remains speculative not worth considering. One of the arguments assiduously pursued by the opposition and election rightists is the lopsided nature of the election laws, which favour the ruling party, CCM.
Similarly, the ruling party has been bragging that, through election laws, as predicated, it will rule Tanzania forever and evermore! The then minister for information boasted that Tanzanian elections have nothing to do with the voters but in every way with who declares the results, and the ruling party picks those who will carry its can.
He was relieved of his duties no sooner had he released the cobra from its hideout. Even the then-vice president mumbled similar views in the 2020 elections.
Recently, one District Commissioner reminded the electorate that CCM appointees elect CCM leaders on behalf of the voters. He, too, was summarily dismissed.
At the High Court, experience points to the local government elections laws finding the going tough to sustain, but the matter will be appealed, where constitutional cases tend to slow down and end up being thrown out for whatever reason.
As I have indicated earlier, even the Appeals Court will run out of ideas and steam to maintain the status quo ante since the issues in question demand no evidential component to manoeuvre. The questions before the Court are purely legal, requiring legal adjudication.
Tanzanian elections laws determine the quality of leadership the country can have. If the electorate is rendered impotent to choose leaders, then the quality aspect suffers immeasurably.
This is widely seen in the way the government manages the economy. When leaders are incompetent, the only justification for maintaining their dockets is to embrace fake loyalty and hypocrisy.
Most of their utterances are to praise the appointer and appropriate false accolades to whatever development is notable while shielding her from any poor performance. Of interest, the way cronyism works in Tanzania often yields comical results.
You may hear CCM MP extolling the then-sitting president, Dr. John Pombe Magufuli, while still in power, urging that for all the development he has engineered, he deserved to be a life president.
To support his thesis, he cited China where there is no life president there. The same MP reversed loyalty gears a few years later, and since his birth, he has never seen a president who has showered the nation with so much money!
This time, he is politically realigning himself with the current president for personal survival. The question that must gash the psyche of many erudite people is: Did Magufuli carry out all those development projects without the inundation of money that now the current president is seen in his eyes to have poured more money than any other past president, including Magufuli, whom he had severally and profusely exalted?
Equally important, what is the value of money or what those trillions have done to uplift our poor lot? When you have regional administrators being hounded in courts for embezzlement of billions a day in and day out, do we have anything worth of celebratory congratulations?
Is money an end in itself or a means to an end? When those questions cannot be answered in full, you snapshot a flashback of the last parliament where a coterie of CCM MPs coined a campaign slogan: “…APENDE ASIPENDE…”
The vociferous MPs were demanding constitutional reforms that would have benefited an individual, to extend presidential term limits! Their argument was: “…amefanya mambo makubwa..”
They never divulged what had been done to justify constitutional retouches except to hurl slurs at those who pinned them down for explanations …”kama huoni wewe ni kichaa upelekwe Milembe ukatibiwe.”
All this is possible when the electorate has been disempowered from carrying out their constitutional mandate of electing worthy leaders the electorate can trust. As election laws continue to disempower the electorate, political violence weaponizes those who feel threatened with resetting the button.
All the political violence we are witnessing is because our election laws have been upended to empower a gang of very few to pick leaders on our behalf. Those who stand up to challenge them through a variety of means are hunted down like rats, captured, tortured and killed.
Whoever hates political thuggery will support election reforms that will bring to a screeching halt the horrific violations of human rights.
Without a shred of doubt, most CCM politicians are disgusted every time they hear political kidnappings and murders taking place. Still, the same politicians are intransigent to engineer electoral justice that will curb political violence.
So this litigation, as one of my former classmates testified before me that this electoral litigation is a step in a right direction, I couldn’t have agreed much more.
Fix the electoral injustices to restore sanity in our public administration. But if you refuse to reset the button, do the wrong thing, condone the mayhem and be a witness of why Sudan is bleeding inside out. We should not head in that direction, but we should exploit it to draw seminal lessons and behave accordingly.
