Dar es Salaam-based political and social commentator
What you need to know:
Will this new Seif-Kabwe alliance provide a counterweight to Magufuli and ensure the survival of plural politics in Tanzania, or will all this amount to naught in the face of the man who doesn’t mind being called the Bulldozer?
The Tanzanian political scene has recently become an intriguing ballet of musical chairs, revolving doors, shifting sands and banana skins, whose musical soundtrack should contain that immortal refrain, “Anything you can do, I can do better.”
The most recent episode in the melodrama has been the announcement by Edward Lowassa, who contested the last presidential election on the opposition ticket and lost to the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi’s John Magufuli, the current president, all the same managing to secure an impressive six-million-plus votes to the victor’s eight million-plus.
When he made the decision to rejoin CCM, Lowassa got a rousing welcome from Magufuli and the ruling-party bigwigs in ceremonies suggestive of the Prodigal Son fable of Biblical fame.
The wagging tongues went to work immediately, some saying he was doing it to help release his son-in-law who is in long-term remand for bank fraud, others saying this was a desperate measure by Lowassa to ward off government pressures on his businesses and properties.
Hardly anyone thought this was a seismic event in political terms, mainly because Lowassa, who decamped from the ruling party because CCM had refused him its presidential candidacy, is most unlikely to be given another chance by the opposition.
The only political importance of his return to the fold move was that he was doing this while the chairman of his adopted party and leader of the opposition in parliament, Freeman Mbowe, was still languishing in remand, “unfairly” according to the judge who subsequently released him on bail.
What was seismic, however, and a candidate for a Richter’s rating was what happened just last week, when it was announced that the veteran opposition kingpin in semi-autonomous Zanzibar’s troubled politics, “Maalim” Seif Shariff Hamad, was abandoning his party, Civic United Front (CUF) to join the much smaller outfit, the Alliance for Change and Transparency, or ACT.
Seif’s radical step came in the midst of a protracted power struggle between him and his erstwhile chairman, Ibrahim Lipumba, an economics professor, who resigned his chairmanship three years ago, only to come back to reclaim it a few months later.
In the tussle that ensued, the professor seemed to enjoy the support of the government’s interventionist Registrar of Political Parties, provoking complaints from Maalim Seif that Lipumba was a state agent.
Windfall
Maalim Seif’s move to ACT is a potential game-changer. ACT may be a tiny organisation with only one Member of the Union Parliament, its founder Zitto Kabwe. But Kabwe is a smart politician who may be about to make a huge gamble: Give Maalim Seif a vehicle to help him navigate the political waters of Zanzibar as well as the Mainland while he, Kabwe, gains a political foothold in the Isles.
What is certain is that Maalim Seif has such a grip on his followers in Zanzibar that his departure from CUF means that Lipumba has literally nothing left to deal with, while Seif can still count on the support of some pockets of former CUF supporters on the Mainland, which should prove a windfall for Kabwe.
What is likely to happen is that Kabwe may now emerge as a central opposition figure on both sides of the Union.
What does that do to the political fortunes of the hitherto main opposition party, Chadema, and its chairman, Freeman Mbowe? They may find themselves weakened as a result of the numerous fronts on which they are being forced to fight.
Almost the whole top leadership of Chadema is involved in some criminal case or other, including charges of sedition, insulting the president, illegal assemblies etc.
In addition, some of them have been hit where they live, with attacks on their businesses, farms and other interests. Their parliamentary chief whip, Tundu Lissu, is still in a Belgian hospital, after undergoing scores of surgical procedures following a vicious attack on him in Dodoma one-and-half years ago during which 16 bullets were pumped into his body.
Times are hard for the Tanzanian opposition, and they may get even harder. Magufuli does not brook any opposition and, to be fair to him, he has been so transparent in his antipathy toward the opposition that only the stubbornly blind cannot see that.
Will this new Seif-Kabwe alliance provide a counterweight to Magufuli and ensure the survival of plural politics in Tanzania, or will all this amount to naught in the face of the man who doesn’t mind being called the Bulldozer?
Watch this space.
Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]
