Where are we 30 years after restoration of political party pluralism?

Tanzania will next year mark 30 years since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in the country. To quote from one of the books by former speaker of the National Assembly Pius Msekwa (pictured), “…looking back over those years, it can be said that the multi-party system has successfully achieved its original purpose which was to widen democracy in the county by providing unlimited space for political competition for the acquisition of state power, through periodic free and fair elections.”

This sounds like fair comment, but the reality paints quite a different picture. If anything, our journey, I believe, has seen Tanzania progressively sink to the level of a political wasteland.

To try and understand this bleak situation, it is vitally important to examine the first principles of political pluralism. Again, I’ll quote Msekwa, who alarmingly claims that, “…in the multi-party competitive system, the voters are supposed to be able to choose the party which presents the best policies which will benefit the community. But in a poor country like Tanzania, there is only one policy which will benefit the entire community, and that is the elimination of poverty, ignorance and disease. Therefore, no political party can put forward a different policy which will be more beneficial to the community. The ruling party could be accused of failure to implement this general policy, but there is no possibility of offering a different policy.

“Consequently, the highly valued multi-party doctrine of giving the voters ‘the right to choose between alternative policies’ becomes absolutely meaningless.”

To begin with, “eliminating poverty, ignorance and disease” is an objective rather than a policy. Secondly, Msekwa’s line of thinking, coming from a past senior CCM leader, points to the core of the problem. If alternative policies serve no purpose, common sense brings to the fore the question: why did his CCM take us down the expensive path of pluralism?

Unfortunately, looking at the other side of the divide, we have what I call poverty of politics. This can best be seen by how until today the Opposition has failed to expose the folly of CCM calling itself an ujamaa party.

This actually is a fundamental matter that goes right to the heart of Tanzania’s Constitution.

In such a context, the voting public is caught up between a rock and a hard place in terms of proper options.

Indeed there is a political truism that “oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them”. As a caveat, this does not mean though that the Opposition can afford to be complacent, and wait for the ruling party to self-destruct.

Quite telling as well of poverty of politics, you have, for instance, the largest opposition party, Chadema, as a full member of the International Democrat Union (IDU), a political alliance of right-of-centre political parties. One would expect them, as a supposedly pro-business party, at the very least to have a wide array of policies that would have far-reaching appeal, particularly to businesspeople. Instead what you have is more of a “protest party” as sensed in the mind of a foreign envoy who lived in Tanzania for only six months in 2015.

To cap off our poverty of politics, on the foreign relations front, an extraordinary situation played out before our eyes some years ago when you had then Cabinet minister John Magufuli freely campaigning for Raila Odinga’s ODM in Kenya. It is worth noting that CCM had previously ridiculed Chadema’s association with ODM. Later on, with Magufuli as the presidential candidate of CCM, and Odinga throwing his weight behind him, Chadema changed tack and sided with Raila’s rival, Uhuru Kenyatta.

Now with the famous Handshake in Kenya, where do our parties stand? Much as politics, we are told, makes for strange political bedfellows, this is surely the most unpalatable!