BY MIKI TASSENI
2nd December 2012.
Two years ago it stood at a not so encouraging 125th position, then lost two positions last year to 127th, and this year it lost a full seven positions to 134th in world rankings, for the simple reason that it is satisfied with the level of reforms which earned it praise during the third phase administration, whose work was largely the second phase. The third phase notably created the tax authority, and formalization of businesses.
The other notable feature of the current economic situation is the progressive emergence of natural gas as a factor in economic life, and steadily the fissures in policy cohesion which had started to emerge with several gold mining projects seem to be widening with natural gas.
One unexpected factor is that while gold is mined and simply sold outside after limited processing at the source, and involves little local participation especially at government and parastatal level, the precise opposite is true for natural gas.
In that case weaknesses in policy, costing and accountability are likely to widen still further, when the petroleum monopoly gathers greater force to dominate the sector like Tanesco in grid electricity.
At the political level, the climate hovers between reaffirmation of stability (that is, unity) and fissures of a profound sort, for instance in relation to the Union, apart from fragmentary loyalties that are building up ahead of 2015 polls.
There is a vast difference between the next general elections and the previous run in 2005, in the sense that at that time there was only a personality contest without a profoundly expressed policy, ethical or probity question involved, as contentions came up well into the fourth term, whether it was the EPA charges raised by the opposition Chadema, or the Richmond/Dowans dispute that was fuelled by dissent within CCM ranks in Parliament. CCM will this time be more fragmentary and perhaps even chaotic, as open contention of the authority of current party chairman is being cultivated.
For one thing, the procedure of vetting aspirants and how they will be shortlisted at central committee level and then voted for at the National Executive Committee level is likely to prove a challenge, as the CCM Secretariat has never really been able to take charge of things.
It is an expendable quantity after a specific job has been done, and usually it is disbanded after the polls are over and the party candidate has won, as it usually reflects loyalties of the previous administration – and habitually the person the ‘system’ seeks that he is picked by NEC and the national conference loses.
Not one president has so far been able to cultivate loyalty in the party for a leader of his choice and succeeded, but it has at times been possible to build consensus around a compromise candidate,, the way Mwalimu accepted the nomination of Ali Hassan Mwinyi after the central committee rejected his nominee, Salim Ahmed Salim.
Without jumping the gun, as it is still too early to the nomination, something of the sort is apparently coming up, the difference being that the candidate the incumbent president may prefer isn’t from the Isles but the Mainland, stalwart comrade in arms who once said ‘me and JK did not meet in the streets.’
Still chances of that nomination going ahead without sparking more than a few fireworks are limited, in which case a compromise candidate would be veteran Union vice president and current Isles president, though such a pick would not come about without, in figurative terms, bodies lying all over the place.
A key denominational leader told Edward Lowassa in the face, before a church congregation, that once he is president he should remember to restore ownership of schools ‘nationalized’ long back in the 1960s.
While the particular denomination is entirely convinced their fellow parishioner is walking untrammeled to the presidency, agitation is rising all over the country not just on the constitution but a portend of societal disunity, where radical Islamic organizers berate a ‘mfumo Kristo,’ that is, a church-engineered modus operandi of the state, where the Catholic Church is supposedly the centre of core governmental loyalties.
This danger to unity has been held in check partially because key people in the hierarchy of government at present are Muslims, including the president and the Inspector General of Police, and for some recent purposes (the desecration of the Quran and asking people to remain calm) the city or zonal police chief. In the census contention, it was the president and the VP who convinced Muslims to abide.
What can rapidly be said about this problem is that there is insufficient awareness of its scale among a few religious quarters, who even blame the presidency for excesses of the radical groups, since these quarters see things in bland religious terms (Muslims against Christians).
This makes such quarters fail to properly appreciate the contribution of current authorities to maintaining peace, calm and building bridges in an otherwise delicate imbalance of sentiments and loyalties, and on that account, they might equally fail to see the need for necessary compromises in 2015.
How far such shortsightedness will be corrected by the constitutional rewriting exercise – whose later processes or procedures are likely to restore agitation to the full as to the policy and institutional underpinnings of a new constitution – is an open question, but if history is any guide, recalcitrant classes don’t learn in history without cataclysms.
That is why it is difficult to map out a process of handing over power in 2015 that is as calm as 1995 and as straightforward as 2005, despite that there is a candidate who was present in 1995 – and at that time he was more popular than his cabinet colleague JK – but Mwalimu rejected him.
Now that criticism is for all intents and purposes something of the past, but other things are coming up, including parliamentary queries as to ‘millions of dollars in Swiss banks,’ where a few names are being cited.
Yet, for someone who was on the edge of the precipice, with scores of MPs pursuing a program of an individual’s removal from all his positions and prosecution – touching a number of powerful individuals – stashing away some granary abroad isn’t the most strange of things, yet a score of radical socialist opinion fails to realize this.
In 1995 there were powerful interests behind the former prime minister, whom Mwalimu excluded with the moral authority he had
and at the risk of his public dissociation with the likely CCM candidate, and in 2005 there were concerns of personality and loyalty on candidacy, not strategic choices as to ‘what must be done.’ Since then positions have hardened, and precisely because of these hard positions the country (that is, the government) has failed to conduct reforms it needs to bring up to make the economy more dynamic. Meanwhile the displeasure and despair at various quarters is rising, as is resistance to reforms.
This is perhaps the proper legacy of the country as it nears 51 years of independence, that while other African countries seem to be travelling a clear path, if not a straight one, to proper economic reform and a market economy, the intensity of resistance on the part of Tanzania is remarkable.
Even Burundi, which is often compared to Tanzania (though it may be closer to Zanzibar in its factions and rivalries) was lately garlanded as the fastest reforming state in Africa, which means it is taking up the Rwanda model, also reflected in Kenya’s rise to a middle income economy whereas they have a fraction of the natural resources Tanzania boasts of (the usual swansong, as natural resources aren’t the key to growth but infrastructure for purchase of property and circulation of credit).
Tanzania is more or less along in East Africa in its steadfast anti-reform mentality and to that extent, anti-integration mentality, which may have found a match, with ongoing US policy moves for a trade pact with EAC member countries.
Tanzania, in its 51 years of independence has been crippled sentimentally first by its unifying Kiswahili language which also imposes a cultural map and modality of how to do things, that is, an inward looking sentimentality taking its past as its reference point.
That is where a second problem arises, that Tanzania became famous around the world for the Arusha Declaration, which the rest of the world knows to be a failed experiment, but – as in the case of Germany under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler – Tanzanians are being told that the socialist experiment did not fail; it was sabotaged by MPs and top government officials wishing to engage in business, so they adopted the Zanzibar Declaration in 1991.
Most of the country’s educated elite wants to prosper by taking up jobs in parastatal organizations, which now seem to be the sponsors of parliamentarians in the various committees. It may take a revolution, chaos, to tear this up.
SOURCE: GUARDIAN ON SUNDAY
No comments :
Post a Comment