The retired Vice President and Prime Minister of Tanzania, Judge Joseph Sinde Warioba, has shared his views on the just-concluded local government elections.
His views have sparked a national debate over the nation’s general direction. This article summarises those viewpoints and analyzes their efficacy in the current political standoff in Tanzania.
Warioba’s views have unquestionably cemented his legacy as a shining beacon of good governance and the rule of law.
He has correctly defined a problem, identified its symptoms, albeit not the root causes (I am very disappointed), and offered some irretrievably flawed solutions to the intractable political and constitutional problems Tanzania is persevering today.
Mzee Warioba gets top marks for igniting a national debate over the predicament of our political debacle.
He will be mercifully forgiven for offering a misguided analysis of a problem, misdiagnosing the root causes, and confusing them with the symptoms while gorging us with toxic recipes as the hope for the future!
In the preamble, he auditioned himself by marketing and pivoting himself as a problem fixer based upon his long, tenuous public service!
I thought that portion, he mildly ruined his meaningful discourse to the nation.
His contributions defied the government’s public admission that the 2024 local government election was a de-javu of the 2019 election fiasco.
The whole election of 2024 was scripted along the lines of the electoral fraud of 2019.
Even the 2025 general elections are expected to repeat the 2020 election malfeasance because the same TAMISEMI will be the election manager, and NEC is condemned as a wilfully cheering spectator!
Mr Warioba began by carefully laying the ground for himself, pleading to have a say in arresting what is wrong with our democracy. He reminded us how he was picked to help apprehend the Zanzibar election impasse.
However, we know Zanzibar was taken through three “miafaka” that did not address the root causes of the election problems.
The elections of 2000 and 2015 were supposed to correct past Zanzibar election frauds but failed miserably.
In the 2015 election, the Chairperson of the Zanzibar Election Commission (ZEC ), Jecha Salim Jecha, single-handedly revoked the presidential elections after it was established that CUF presidential candidate Seif Hamad had defeated the CCM presidential candidate.
In Zanzibar, people were jubilant that their voices had been soundly heard, only to be disappointed by that illegal revocation.
CUF refused to lodge an election complaint questioning the ZEC chairperson’s power to rescind election results because it did not trust the judiciary. CUF also refused to participate in the cancelled elections again, citing its lack of faith in ZEC.
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So, the three “miafaka” in which Mzee Warioba played a role did not solve Zanzibar’s intransigent problems.
The then-president, Magufuli, congratulated the ZEC chairperson for nullifying the election. As far as Magufuli was concerned, the ZEC chairperson did well!
Mzee Warioba seems to be angling for a say in resolving constitutional problems that are besetting us today.
However, his controversial role in the last constitutional process raises questions about whether playing the same defective album without removing the stylus will not repeatedly repeat the same old tune.
To be fair to Mzee Warioba, I will limit myself to what the constitutional commission he shepherded recommended on the election-related reforms.
The Warioba Commission recommended the formation of “Kamati ya Uteuzi” as an NEC recruitment and disciplinary committee as part of constitutional reforms.
I have no problem creating another hierarchical chain of command, but the devil is always in the details.
The Warioba Commission did not view elitism as a problem; as a result, they sought and trusted it to fix itself!
The commission recommended that chief justices and their deputies, House Speakers and deputies from both sides of the union, the AG. and others form the “Kamati ya Uteuzi”!
During his current contributions, he criticized the executive, inviting top brass in the judiciary and the Augusta Houses.
He was irked by what was happening or deemed to impress observers. Both the judiciary and the parliament were being co-opted as departments of the executive, violating the pillars of the doctrine of separation of powers.
Ironically, his constitutional Commission did just that when they proposed corrupting NEC with the judiciary and parliament luminaries.
The judiciary and the parliament are interested parties in our elections and cannot be considered impartial in acting as our umpires in managing elections.
The judiciary is the final arbiter in election disputes, so it cannot eat its cake and claim to have it still.
The judiciary is either the referee or the manager of our elections, but it cannot assume both contradictory roles.
Speakers and their deputies of Augusta Houses belong to political parties, so they are vested in seeing their political party affiliations seize power to manage elections and upend electoral outcomes to benefit them.
Hence, the Speakers and their deputies cannot occupy the election manager and candidate positions in one air gasp. One of the two has to give in.
The parliament’s speakers and deputies, including the chief justices and their deputies, have no business managing our elections.
The AG is the president’s legal advisor and shouldn’t be part of the management of our elections.
Sadly, this is now part of Mzee Warioba’s chequered legacy: biting while soothing the inflicted wound with regular light blows of air, akin to what a rat does to my smelly feet while I am soundly asleep in my creaky bed.
Mzee Warioba correctly cautioned that blending security forces with politics sets us up p for chaos and a bad precedent.
We should fully subscribe to these wise words. Most civilian politicians do not know that the power of the ballot box is restraining the military from usurping power.
Once civilian politicians disregard the power of the ballot box, little do they know they are opening the door to military interventions.
The military obeys politicians if they know the electorate is behind them, but once they know the ballot box is not respected, civilian politicians are vulnerable to military putsch.
Close home in Uganda, few know why General Idi Amin toppled his president, Milton Obote.
Analysts had said that before President Obote left for the Commonwealth meeting in Singapore in January 1971, they had directed Idi Amin to account for dubious military expenditures.
President Obote wanted a full report on his return. Seeing that he was caught with his fingers in the cookie jar, General Idi Amin searched for a way out and saw that a coup d’etat was the only way out.
He went on to overthrow his boss and declare himself life president of Uganda.
The analysts missed the jubilation in the Kampala streets.
General Idi Amin knew his boss, President Obote, never won elections, so his coup d’etat would be popular throughout Uganda.
He was right! Once civilian politicians are not insulated from the power of the ballot box, they become errand servants of men and women in uniform.
Civilian politicians tend to bribe the military to keep it in check, but little do politicians know that nobody can appease human cravings forever.
The military knows where those accoutrements are coming from; there are more if only the military ousts the unelected civilian politicians.
After being devoid of being elected, are the politicians not unpopular?
Remember, during his tenure, former president Magufuli forgave the military one trillion Tanzanian shillings, citing his desire not to see men and women suffer stress.
He did not care about the stress of the unemployed youths who could not pay even a single cent of the higher education loans they had borrowed!
The one trillion loan was to build the personal houses of the military officials.
This is an example of civilian politicians caving into the military when the power of the ballot box is thrown in the dustbin.
Civilian politicians fear the military because they lack the legitimacy to govern.
Once they know civilian politicians are in their pockets, it is a matter of time before hotheads in uniforms seek and find justification to overthrow the unelected civilian politicians, citing restoration of democracy as their sole motive.
The electorate will come out in huge numbers to celebrate a promise of restoration of the power of the ballot box by a military junta that has no intention of ceding power.
There is a hypothesis that says, “Once the military tastes power and corruption, it’s difficult to force it to return to the barracks.” This is a fact.
Mzee Warioba must be corrected for urging that JWTZ is a professional army that should not be lured into politics.
This is not true at all. JWTZ has been a major political player since the days of the mono party of TANU/ASP/CCM. Were not the military having special seats in the parliament during one-party rule?
Are not members of JWTZ holding D.Cs, RCs, ambassadorial roles, and chairpersons of Boards of directors in mega parastatals? Did not both former president Jakaya Kikwete and Abdulrahman Kinana cut their teeth in the military before entering politics?
Do we not see many former military officers who have become politicians? Do they not vie for elective offices after retiring from the army?
Was JWTZ not involved in quashing the Zanzibar election dispute fiasco and also in Tunduma following the bungled elections of 2015 and 2020?
Was the top JWTZ general not intimate about the power struggle after President Magufuli’s demise and how the military resolved that power tussle?
JWTZ is highly politicized, as we saw in the 2010 general elections when its chief of staff harangued the nation to accept the election results, or the military would interfere to quell the political unrest.
I don’t know what else it is if all that is not political interference.
Mzee Warioba forewarned that what happened in the 2019 local government elections was expected to recur in 2024 and 2025 because the same players from TAMISEMI were pulling the NEC strings.
He is right, but peeking at his constitutional recommendations in the commission he had headed, NEC was left intact as a hushed sidekick of TAMISEMI. NEC was there to snuff out cash while leaving the intricacies of election management to TAMISEMI.
Mzee Warioba should have apologised to Tanzanians for bequeathing us a very bad constitutional order. This has inspired CCM to regurgitate some of the retrogressive constitutional principles in the election laws.
Mzee Warioba still believes those who have messed up our constitutional order should be entrusted to fix it! I didn’t think he would muzzle new and fresh ideas on how to fix our rot by proposing the same old, tired hands.
Mzee Warioba is a case in hand. During President Mkapa’s reign, he was entrusted with spearheading a war on corruption through a presidential commission that he had led.
Instead of assaying the systems of governance, Mzee Warioba, who headed the anti-corruption commission, targeted individuals like former minister of works Nalaila Kiula and others.
He was more concerned with the symptoms of a problem than the root causes. He treated the symptoms; no wonder corruption is part and parcel of our lives today.
It is so intractable that it narrates why stuffing ballot boxes with illegal votes or disqualifying opposition candidates on non-constitutional grounds looks like an achievement!
Those electoral frauds confirm beyond reasonable doubt how pervasive corruption has become part and parcel of our daily lives.
Mzee Warioba should be faulted for looking at CCM elders as an ultimate solution because they are not.
Leadership is founded on example but not atoning on the squandered past.
If a leader had condoned electoral fraud during his tenure, who would trust him to fix it after he is conveniently out of the power loop?
The scripture is instructive here. In Luke 16:12, God asked an important question pertinent to the matter at hand.
He asks, who will trust us with ours if we are not trustworthy in other people’s things?
Not a single CCM past leader can illuminate the current political impasse we are in because they created the problem and sumptuously benefited from it.
Therefore, they lack the moral and ethical authority to solve it. They also lack pecuniary interest to upset whatever goodies they enjoy.
Mzee Warioba will be remembered mostly for provoking a national debate about our constitutional and political problems but will also be upbraided for retrieving dinosaurs to restore our crooked collective future.
Past leaders, like former CCM deputy chairperson Abdulrahman Omari Kinana, tasked with mediating over the same political problems with the opposition, did not make worthwhile headway.
According to Chadema chairperson Freeman Mbowe, CCM abandoned the exercise in a huff after seeing the sacrifices needed to resolve the political impasse. Even the strategy towards the three “miafaka” in Zanzibar was dead on arrival because the beneficiaries of the system were entrusted to solve them.
They had no incentive to resolve myriad problems that could even compound their luxurious lifestyles.
Solutions in this country cannot depend on those who ruined our statehood. We need to think outside the box and bring in new, fresh think tanks that are not burdened by our murky past.
