Listening carefully to messages coming from the electioneering verve velvet, it looks like we are heading towards one of the bloodiest elections this country has ever seen since we gained independence. All this is avoidable. At the heart of Tundu Lissu and Chadema’s posturing is the empowerment of the electorate to choose their own leaders. The election law regime has been structured in such a way that the electorate will not be choosing our leaders, knowing that power has been handed over to the most corrupt institution this country has ever seen: TAMISEMI. It is TAMISEMI that will disenfranchise voters in favour of CCM. What is called INEC or the Independent National Election Commission is an imposter that has no say in how our elections are being managed beyond crafting rules and regulations that violate even the election laws. This article considers Tundu Lissu’s stance and what portends for the October elections.
The least this country needs right now is election violence, but the election law as currently constituted is egging on us to head in that ominous direction. Tundu Lissu is right that without pain, there is no gain. All post-independent Africa that successfully ousted freedom-fighting political parties suffered political persecution before gaining power. Once globally recognized as the haven of peace, Tanzania is steadily embracing political violence to sustain CCM in power!
The 2024 TAMISEMI-managed elections were a reincarnation of the 2019 elections which confirmed beyond reasonable doubt CCM has no intention of accepting the will of the electorate without political violence pushing her into a corner. Across Africa, a second wind of change is sweeping our beloved continent, but CCM has buried her head under the sand dunes. She reads nothing, and she sees nothing evil beckoning. That is how regimes fall because they fail to read. Times have changed, and in order not to die, dinosaurs must take in full stride the reform initiative. CCM has no intention of respecting the electorate. It is determined to conduct fake elections and declare herself the people’s choice while she is not!
Under the current election laws, the election commission is an extended department of CCM. For a country that boasts of practising multiparty democracy, the appointment of the commissioners and chairperson with their deputies should have been the purview of registered political parties, not CCM alone. The continuation of one-party-rule election laws to manage multiparty elections is a source of bitterness and discontentment.
Kenyan election reforms did not come without bloodshed in 2007, and Tanzania, through unfair and unconscionable election laws, Tanzania has opted to foment political violence before enacting election laws that will reflect and capture the multiparty democracy spirit and letter. Our constitution didn’t stipulate that NEC would delegate her constitution mandate to manage our elections to a constitutional alien called TAMISEMI, rendering all elections conducted since the reintroduction of multiparty democracy in 1995 illegal. All those governments that ran the nation were illegal, but we tolerated them, and now we cannot take it any more. We have just hit our teether of tolerance.
CCM deludes herself into thinking that her power lies with the military. CCM now solely depends on brute force to stay in power. Security forces have been seen interfering with the democratic process in many ways, including banning opposition polling station supervisors from doing their statutory duties. As a result, only CCM is invigilating the elections in the polling station booths. Security forces have also been used to prevent opposition candidates from returning their candidature forms to the returning officers. Basically, opposition candidates find it extremely difficult to return forms as required by the law.
If this is not enough, returning officers who are presidential appointees and doubling as CCM cadres ferret for loopholes to disqualify the opposition candidates. Dates of birth, spelling of names, missing photographs or signatures of the candidates, lack of oaths from the resident magistrates, etc. All these guardrails are not recognized in the Constitution. Our constitution stipulates that a candidate must be a Tanzanian citizen who can read and write and has no criminal record of more than a year. It is the extremely biased election commission through her rules and regulations which violate clear stipulations of the constitution. Such a commission shouldn’t be running our elections because, from the word go, it has no intention of running a free, fair and verifiable election. We really cry out for a reset of the election laws. The country cannot perpetually go on disenfranchising the electorate and expect peace and tranquillity to rule a day. It doesn’t work out that way!
Like the 2019 local elections that CCM used to test how far she can get away with murdering our 2020 election, the bungled 2024 local elections have emboldened CCM they can repeat the election sins of 2020 in the October elections! However, this election is going to be different for two reasons. One, the electorate is much more aware and sensitized that it has been consistently disenfranchised in the past and is not willing to let the status quo continue to choose leaders on their behalf. The second reason is the historical second wind of political change that is sweeping Africa. If in the 1960s we had a first political wind of change, now we have a second economic wind of change sweeping mother Africa. In Senegal, the rulers of the day unleashed violence to stay in power, but the more they murdered and maimed innocent people, the more the resistance grew until the governors knew it was over. Senegal handed power peacefully to save their own country from total destruction. We should applaud them and emulate them.
The political abduction, torture and murders of Kibao and others may have been an attempt to scare reformers inside and outside CCM. We may never know the identities of the perpetrators of these callous atrocities, but we know their intentions. The problems they will face in this epoch are behind fear. The fear factor will not work this time around because history demands a new political direction away from the one we have today: Economic emancipation is all this generation is asking for, and we will ultimately get it with or without the CCM leadership.
Political violence as a tool for political survival has been used by many regimes across the world with one outcome: the time comes when nobody fears anything because they have seen and endured everything. This fits with the human DNA of a fearless animal. If political violence can successfully scrounge and foliage political reforms, then today, the Boers of South Africa would have still been in power. They are not because brute force has a very limited lifespan. It reaches a point where even murderers are fatigued to kill others because we were created in the true image of God. We know God has never seen corruption, and abductions, tortures and murders corrupt humanity to the point of death. This is why murderers ultimately end up committing suicide because they are too traumatized to the point death is better than living.
Those who argue there are few days to election to carry out the reforms are disingenuous. We need a maximum of two weeks before the election to rewrite the election laws and pick a new INEC that will recruit its own independent secretariat to manage our elections. Therefore, time is on our side. TAMISEMI is not going to manage our 2025 elections because she has disqualified herself in the 2019 & 2024 local government elections. She has also disqualified herself in the 2020 general elections. TAMISEMI is good for nothing, and everybody ought to beam a big picture, marching forward.
Tundu Lissu is very right in every way: NO REFORM, NO ELECTIONS. Those who pontificate: “peace, peace…” while there is none ought to come out of their shell and tell us why they wrote such bad election laws in the first place. Also, they should answer us why they are preaching peace, peace whilst they are fomenting political violence through the enactment of unconstitutional election laws. Not a single human life deserves the evil of what Kibao and others went through, so it is time to take a deep breath and fix what has been destroyed before it’s too late to salvage ourselves from the hellish fires that are likely to blow all of us into smithereens.
First, President Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s views on political reforms should guide us going forward. When a political wind of change toward multiparty democracy blew in the late 1980s, Nyerere counselled us that it was better if CCM provided leadership over it, or others would. If they did, it might turn out to be a fracas.
Can CCM provide leadership on election laws, or will she be bypassed by events and become a follower rather than a leader? Time will soon tell us whether CCM still has intelligent leaders with powerful foresight or is a mere nibbler of the national cake.
Read more analysis by Rutashubanyuma Nestory
