Tanzania’s voting system under the microscope

In his August 2005 address to the Tanganyika Law Society, former chairman of the National Electoral Commission, the late Justice Lewis Makame, “shared some information and thoughts on two matters which are of great topical interest in our country: The Permanent Voters’ Register and Proportional Representation.”

The choice of words “great topical interest” are a temper of the times where matters of interest are mightily hard to gauge. This is absolutely in line with veteran journalist Jenerali Ulimwengu’s depiction nearly a decade ago of Tanzania as an “intellectual wasteland”.

Makame’s comments published in the then-journal The Tanzania Lawyer, are doubtless a basis on which to ameliorate our poverty of politics. I dare say that not everything that comes from the NEC was/is nasty.

To quote Makame: “As you know, essentially, an electoral system is tailored and intended for transforming votes into seats. What system you construct and employ determines how seats are obtained and distributed and is influenced by what you intend to achieve. Proportional Representation is one such electoral system and it has itself a number of varieties and variations. Let us look briefly at the Tanzania model.

In Tanzania, we have the First-Past-The-Post or Winner Take All System. But we also have the special seats for women which are distributed according to the number of seats each contending party got in the election. It provides for not less 30% for MPs and one third for Councillors.

The NEC advised that apart from these special seats for women, which is a species of PR if you like, there should be a wider proportional representation, blind to gender, and not according to seats (which would only tend to favour the big parties), but rather according to votes, which would benefit the ‘underdog’.

In our five-year report for the period from January 1998 to January 2003, about our stewardship for that period, we made Recommendation 7.6 which reads: There should be an electoral system which will incorporate a mixed constituency member and PR of MPs and Councillors that will include elected members representing constituencies and wards and a few members who will be elected on the basis of a ratio of votes won by each political party.

Our suggestion does not appear to have found favour up there, which I think is a pity and this more two main reasons:

First, because put simply the votes garnered by a party are not reflected by the consequent number of seats obtained, in any understandable, rational or logical basis. So that you can, for the sake compelling argument, have a party coming second in each constituency, with only two votes fewer than the winning party and end up with absolutely no seat...

Second thing is that the system we advocate would hopefully take care of good sold members of defeated parties and make them available to make useful inputs in parliament or district councils. It would also take in injured political gladiators, which would be an emollient and also appease their followers.

We do not advocate complete abolition of open-contested seats for that would be undesirable and would not stand the faintest chance of being accepted, considering vested interests and also because we recognise and appreciate the politics, necessity, validity, and desirability of the dynamic nexus, geographical as well as political, between the voter and the voted for.

Enough I think it is to say that there are other species and sub-species of PR. There is for example the open and simple party list...A variation of this system would be the multi-member constituency...

Which electoral system or brand of PR a particular country adopts would tend to reflect that country’s history, Its socio-political, economic philosophy as well as its national vision.

I wish to conclude by saying that it is sometimes argued, with some degree of merit, that in spite of the incontrovertible advantages of the PR system in its undiluted form it tends to cut off the representative’s allegiance to the voter and transfers it to the party, to the detriment of a country’s development.”

For the sake of record, I must refer to a book written by Ambassador Juma Mwapachu, where he crucially amplifies on this topic: “How the PR system itself should be structured would be a matter of detail to be worked out. The Nyalali Presidential Commission that recommended the reintroduction of the multi-party political system in 1992 had collected a great deal of information on the different types of PR systems.

The fact that it did not recommend it when submitting its Report, simply because it was an issue that was outside its terms of reference, should not block or delay creative instinct to examine its positive elements.”