Tanzania: Party nominees or independent candidates?

The question of how Tanzanians should elect their representatives has been with us for decades now. The rejuvenated efforts of writing a new constitution have given new impetus to this debate. An article titled “Food for thought: Is Tanzania a multi-party dictatorship?” by Andrew Bomani which appeared on February 6, in The Citizen on Sunday was undoubtedly part of the debate to that end.

Mr Bomani did not define ‘democracy’ or ‘dictatorship’ even though he was skeptical about the possibility of a ‘one-party democracy’. In the article, he makes an informed argument for independent candidates, a feature of electoral politics which continues to consume so much energy. The assumptions made are that democracy is impossible without political parties; the introduction of independent candidates will rid the country of ‘monopoly of politics’ by political parties and ‘develop our democratic system’. In short, it will be an improvement of the political climate from the current ‘multi-party dictatorship’.

The Oxford dictionary defines democracy as ‘a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives’. Britannica Encyclopedia says it is ‘a system of government in which laws, policies, leadership, and major undertakings of a state or other polity are directly or indirectly decided by the “people”, a group historically constituted by only a minority of the population’. Clearly, democracy in whatever version one ascribes to preceded the political party system as such they are merely a mechanism and not a precondition for democracy. Even his argument for independent candidates is in effect a testament that it is not conditioned on political parties.

Britannica Encyclopedia defines dictatorship as ‘a form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations’. Following the same logic, multi-party dictatorship, then can be understood as a system in which a political party or parties possessing absolute power over a member with little or no effective control beyond party structures. To this end, Mr Bomani is spot on that political parties constrain their members or deter those who wish to participate or join in politics without being tied to a particular political party.

While there is no political or legal justification for keeping independent candidates out of the elections, the assumptions that their introduction will deny political parties their monopoly on politics and develop our democratic system simplify the complexities of the endurance of the outlets as institutions and the role they play in politics. They will also prove illusory in the end.

For starters, he provided examples of some countries on the continent which allow independent candidates. Interestingly, in all those countries, political parties continue to dominate political life. In some of them, like Zimbabwe, some politicians who were popular while members of a political party and won their constituencies under the auspices of a political party, lost them to little known party candidates once they opted to run as independents. Even in Malawi, where independents have fared far better, political parties have not lost their grip on electoral politics.

In other countries which were not in the examples he offered like Kenya, the fluid nature of their political parties or alliances has not led them to lose any meaningful political ground to independent candidates. In Uganda, independent parliamentarians frequently votes with the ruling party’s MPs in parliamentary votes.

The reasons for this are many and varied depending on the context of a particular country where in some it is historical and in others there are ethnic considerations in the mix. Politics can be an emotional affair in so many ways, however, when it comes to delivering elections where candidates sponsored by political parties have struggled to fulfil them, it would not be too farfetched to argue that voters will be skeptical about the independents delivering much without the support of political parties one way or the other. Political parties can be a dysfunctional mess but they offer organisational processes beyond the reach of independents who may either be too many to mount any coherent strategy against political parties or too few to matter in parliamentary votes. Election campaigns have come to be prohibitively expensive affairs even for some small political parties let alone individuals competing in elections. On this end, political parties have far more resources than independents and can never be out-performed. This means that independents once elected can be more susceptible to being bought off or enticed to join hands with the government or ruling party. It also means the political field will be more ‘muddier’ and can lead to parochial, fractured view on politics.

Independent candidates will certainly excite some sections of reluctant voters who have given up on politics and political parties. However, our continued fascination with what they can offer on our political stage has more to do with the continued efforts to prevent them from making their appearance.