Steven Wasira has been appointed as CCM national vice chairperson, replacing Abdulrahman Kinana who had months long vacated the post under peer pressure.
On surface this appointment aims to paper over cracks that have emerged leading to the 2025 general elections, and are likely to widen with jostling for power and influence takes centre stage as an upshot of 2030 succession politics.
Beneath the fanfare of all is well as recently witnessed in Dodoma of the inevitability and invincibility of CCM, I am beginning to read a different picture as factions of all sorts are growing uneasy and impatient.
I do this with the current economic vision espoused under president Samia Suluhu Hassan since 2021.
The CCM youth feels being used, dumped and without any soft landing to permit them to save their disillusioned faces.
Most juicy appointments pat the back of graying men and women.
The youth are left in the cold!
There is a sense of frustration and hopelessness in other factions that feel CCM has been transformed into a vanguard political party that embraces political dynasties, nepotism and neo-colonial economic liberalism.
Most of these factions feel the future is bleak and do not see a way out when economic opportunities are doled out to foreign investors leaving locals picking the crumbs that fall in the high tables of the aliens and their local supporting cast masquerading as people’s democratic representatives.
What is wedging CCM most is the lopsided allocation of plum jobs more than anything else.
Some of these factions are holdouts of the previous administrations as far as the Mkapa regime. Having been in the government before attaches a penchant for entitlements.
They expect to keep up their jobs but when they are snubbed, that leaves them with a sour taste in their mouths.
They will not support an appointer who is not rewarding them for their loyalty.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan has been juggling Kikwete and Magufuli sidekicks to support her presidency.
No sooner she was sworn in she reappointed almost all of her predecessor’s members of cabinet but with one caveat: support me or you will be dumped. In her own words, this is what she said:
“….macho yangu malegevu lakini yanaona. Nikikuona unainua mabega na kuanza kujipitisha pitisha huko basi nitajua hizi ni pressure za 2025. Itabidi nikuweke pembeni kwanza ili ukajinadi vizuri…..”
Clearly, she is in no moody to groom a rival or her successor. Even addressing women groups at Ubungo Plaza, she had intoned this:
“…..Mwenyezi Mungu akikupa nafasi lazima uipokee na uishikilie kwa mikono yote miwili…..”
During her speech at the Chadema women meeting in Moshi, she reiterated a similar message: This is her hour and nobody is gonna take it from her.
After she had a meeting with senior security officials im Dar-es-Salaam following the assassination of Chadema top brass, Ali Mohammed Kibao, she lamented about the Chadema secretive meeting in Arusha, Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge, where Chadema was allegedly plotting mass demos to drive CCM out of power.
She retorted: “….hii serikali ya kuondolewa kienyeji sasa itakuwa serikali ya masamaki? Hii siyo serikali ya masamaki….” I have struggled to understand the meaning of “fishes” referred to here but I suspect to be something very enervating or capitulating.
For obvious reasons, she is not someone to throw a towel under any circumstance.
When she was in her visits in the Lake zone there was a lukewarm reception particularly in Sukuma land where her predecessor, president Magufuli, drew most political support.
Her incessant rhetoric that Magufuli and her were one went unheeded by this powerful voting block. She quickly went back to the drawing board.
She tapped upon past unconstitutional precedence legitimized by the then president Ali Hassan Mwinyi and appointed Doto Mashaka Biteko on September 1, 2023, to be the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Energy. In our constitution, this deputy prime minister caricature is non-existent!
However, in our misplaced identity politics catalyzed by ethnic affiliations and pride that ruse of promotion worked for her.
The appointment of Stephen Wasirra seems to hammerlock this kind of reasoning despite being archaic parochial and irrelevant to the unfolding bigger picture.
Steven Masato Wasira, an octogenarian, (born 1 July 1945) is a Tanzanian CCM politician and was a Member of Parliament for Bunda constituency since 2005 until he was defeated in 2015 by Chadema candidate, Ms. Ester Bulaya.
Ms. Bulaya left CCM in the same year after she had felt she was massively rigged in Bunda constituency’s CCM parliamentary primaries.
Wasira held various ministerial positions from 2006 to 2010.
He is now a Vice chairperson in Chama cha Mapinduzi, CCM, from 18 January 2025 to fill the vacancy left behind by Abrahaman Kinana who had quitted.
Wasira was infamous for sleeping during parliamentary proceedings, and there was a photograph that showed former president Mkapa gazing at the photograph of Wasira sleeping during parliamentary proceedings.
Mkapa was pointing his finger at the photograph of Wasira in deep slumber that was affixed on the wall while he was laughing.
Wasira attempted to win the CCM presidential nominations in 2015 but his name was expunged during five names shortlisting exercise. He did not decamp to the opposition like Edward Lowassa who had accosted similar imposing steeplechases.
Wasira has been involved in writing CCM election manifestos so he thoroughly knows CCM inside out. In every sense of a word, Wasira is an inveterate CCM insider.
The appointment of Wasira as CCM national vice chairperson is aiming to checkmate various factions enveloping the party because he has no presidential ambitions, and is also not perceived as credible presidential material.
These factions were apprehensive that president Samia could have coronated her successor through that position but should now be a bit pleased and reassured she has not anointed a successor.
Had she picked anybody with credible presidential aspirations, she would have alienated powerful forces before the forthcoming elections.
This appointment aims to glue CCM together and face their common political threat in Chadema with a horrifying proposition of the vocal Tundu Lissu looking in unassailable position to oust his boss, Freeman Mbowe, from his throne.
The appointment of Wasira may be a smart move to avoid a backlash right before the 2025 elections. CCM needs unity now more than ever before, and this decision has placated most rivals within it.
Partly, I subscribe to what Fatma Karume had observed on her X page, sometime before this appointment, that president Samia’s weakest link is lack of her own political base, an advantage her predecessor, Magufuli, had fully enjoyed and capitalized.
It is true most of president Samia’s never-ending cabinet reshuffles project weakness rather than strength. She is parlaying vast presidential appointment powers as a toolbox overflowing with carrots and sticks to whiplash conformity, docility and discipline.
However, I disagree with Ms. Karume that Magufuli had a political base of his own.
He didn’t! Had he had one, the election of 2015 would have been the cleanest in our short post independence history.
It turned out to be the dirtiest of all time because his lip service was betrayed by his real deeds.
In public he preached mineral water while privately swirling vodka!
CCM warring factions have bigger battles to fight during and after the 2025 elections largely because Tundu Lissu and his “indomitable lions” present an existential threat to CCM prolonged stay in power.
Tundu Lissu is now a superglue that keeps CCM unified because if he defeats them in a ballot box all factional entities will collectively be picking a rotten end of the stick.
There will be nothing to hassle for since Chadema will be our “new kids on the block”.
All these reckoning issues largely propound why Wasira despite being a politically spent force is a necessary evil to ingratiate the divisions and bad blood that have been tearing CCM into shards.
