This situation has made the people of Zanzibar for generations to continually focus on the conflict, thus leading to decades of economic stagnation.
However, compared to many Island states in Africa including the Comoros, Reunion, Madagascar, Seychelles and Cape Verde, Zanzibar is relatively calm as her conflicts had never gone beyond boiling point.
Despite the turmoil that resurfaces every time, no other coup d’etats have occurred apart from the one in 1964 that installed the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar under the political arrangements existing to-date.
DHowever the coup dubbed revolution made hardly a month after Zanzibar independence on December 10, 1963, and the 2001 post-election violence whose police intervention claimed 21 lives, are the only visibly shocking and openly pronounced incidents the country has so far experienced.But the relatively calm atmosphere in Zanzibar archipelago as opposed to other neighboring islands in the Indian Ocean owes its existence to its being incorporated into the greater Tanganyika to form Tanzania soon after the revolution.
At least some experts and the overwhelming public believe that Zanzibar would have been an everlasting violent epicenter had it not been for the Union that rendered it stateless, thus under protection of the Mainland.
As a cosmopolitan society with multiracial population having migrated from other areas typical of any island, Zanzibar’s demographic composition should be that of equal divided interests among the groups devoid of racial and regional sentiments.
Under the questionable top-down political stability imposed from the Union Government, the situation in Zanzibar will never stabilize unless the grieved part of its population enjoys the green side of the pasture. This part of the populace that feels betrayed by the system in power, and curse whoever among themselves, who collaborate with the unpopular regime, branding him or her a traitor.
No wonder that Pemba as well as some regions dominated by people of non-African descent are undermined in Zanzibar because of their alleged continued allegiance to Omani-Arabs, the former rulers.
It is this great ethno-cultural chemistry that brings about cosmopolitanism and the politics of exclusion, that according to Anthony Anneti and Timothy Rich, causes the fractionalization of political interests and fuel anti-state sentiments in most island microstates, including Zanzibar.
The exclusion exacerbates the otherwise normal political contestation into antagonistic politics that once brewed can hardly be reverted due to cultural transmission of the sufferings from one generation to another, thus carrying over the grievance they have had against the state.
Ii is as complicated as the narrative over how the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, Arabs, other non-Africans, and a few Africans on the Arab side felt that their democratic government formed by the electoral coalition of Zanzibar National Party and Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party (ZPPP) that led to independence in December 1963, had been toppled.
On the other hand, the people of African descent hailing from the mainland felt to have been left out in the new government and consequently organized the violent coup.
This exclusionist politics has continued even after the African-led government has been reigning for decades.
Fearful of retaliation from the other subpopulations mainly supporting the opposition, the ruling party Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has been allegedly rigging the polls since the return of multiparty politics in the early 1990s so as to maintain status quo.
On a rather positive move no matter the intention, CCM has also been drawing people of other races into the party and reinstating them as candidates for various party and constituency positions as amongst the strategies to calm the situation down.
Since politics is a game of mistrust and suspicion, neither the opposition would trust the ruling party as having good intentions in its political strategy nor CCM would take the opposition especially the Civic United Front (CUF) that once in power they would not avenge for the evils, despite repeated anti-vengeance pledges made by the opposition icon, CUF’ Secretary General Seif Sharif Hamad.
It seems to be the case that the short lived success at instilling new hopes in the electorate through the establishing of the Government of National Unity (GNU) where the opposition and the ruling party worked together and thus was one but much needed effort to effectively renegotiate power relations in Zanzibar needs to be genuinely re-done now that it should be more people-centered than being brokered from above as it was the case before the 2010 general elections.
Aristotle once noted that all humans are political animals and are thus seeking power. It might prove extremely hard to completely forget the past but the existing differences can be mended by identifying the gaps leading to the continued mayhem in Zanzibar politics by bringing the groups together than drawing them further apart as is currently the case.
Having seen little human progress in the resource-scarce Zanzibar, it could be high time to let the questionable political stability in Zanzibar to organically evolve and be determined by Zanzibaris than the costly top-down and highly criticized approach that is architected, implemented and overseen by Mainland Tanzania.
With the reduced security cost and increased social cohesion, more money can be channeled to addressing development concerns, thus improve the human welfare in the Islands and Tanzania at large.
*Francis Semwaza is a Dar es Salaam-based Political Strategist and Development Communication Specialist. For comments: E-mail: frsemwaza@aol.com; Phone: +255 71 646 6 044.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIA
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