As Tanzanians prepared to vote in the just-concluded elections, I crossed the border to cover the polls. Whereas I felt that the election was, in many ways, fraudulent, I found myself craving for Tanzania’s tolerant, non-violent political culture as we crossed the border back into Kenya after the elections.
My ‘feeling’ that the good old election wool, sewn to stitch perfection across the African continent, was being pulled over Tanzanians’ eyes is informed almost purely by anecdotal evidence patched together. Mostly, this was gleaned as I, alongside tens of other bored journalists, watched and waited for election results to be announced by Tanzania’s National Elections Commission.
Very quickly, a trend started to form. Apart from the cities and urban towns across Tanzania’s expanse, and in Northern Tanzania, a large number of the results that came in had Edward Lowassa, Tanzania’s latter-day opposition doyen, beating Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) candidate (and now Tanzania’s president) John Maghufuli comprehensively – in constituencies with relatively small numbers of registered voters.
When it came to the vote rich regions like Mbeya at the border between Tanzania and Malawi, the trend was reversed – Maghufuli would take it by a mile. Now, the assertion here is that there may have been a padding of CCM’s figures in the regions where it mattered, and that Lowassa was robbed blind by the party he was part of for decades. But the election was far more comprehensively won by CCM at the parliamentary level.
I’m not ruling out the possibility of that kind of fraud, but I can tell that even without it (alleged fraud), Maghufuli would have won. The fraud, for me, was in Edward Lowassa believing that with barely two months to campaign, Chama Cha Demokrasia Na Maendeleo (CHADEMA) under him would upend a party like CCM – the public’s fatigue with it notwithstanding.
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There simply wasn’t enough time for him to make Tanzanians believe that they could do without CCM, or that his hair that had greyed after years in the party, would suddenly speak to the anti-establishment wisdom of CHADEMA.
The fraud also lay in the belief that with an elections body whose members were appointed by the president, a party with the networks that CCM has, and a constitution that bars challenges to election results being retained just months to this election, that the chips would have fallen any other way.
Here, I think, Tanzanians should have trusted their instincts. Then again, in spite of the fact that Tanzania has had multi party politics for just about as long as Kenya, its elective politics has been anything but competitive. So, only those who were exposed to other forms of politics saw the harbingers of this election’s results. Note that those in urban areas voted overwhelmingly for CHADEMA.
Kenyans had seen those same signs in its elective politics since single party rule. Therefore, collectively, our instincts tell us what weight they carry when heading to an election.
But let me dwell on something that Tanzania does have experience in: a lack of violence in its elective politics. That CCM has been the only belle at the tea party for so long has something to do with this. It has had the time to build on the intoxicating legacy of Julius Nyerere – Ujamaa made it so that the cacophony of tribal voices in Tanzania (they have over 120 different tribes) plays a very peripheral role in national politics. In short, tribalism doesn’t drive the agenda there. That one match that has set countries alight, by and large doesn’t exist in Tanzania.
Without tribe dividing Tanzanians, they are left to deal with bread and butter issues that do not speak as directly to their hearts as mother-tongue politics does to us in Kenya. It was deeply refreshing to be at an opposition rally and not hear any single speech making reference to the dominance of a tribe in leadership.
Tanzanians have long since passed those 10,000 hours of experience without tribal politics that, if they were to fight, it would be for far different reasons.
In Kenya, that maturity has eluded us. Our 10,000 hours have been spent stoking ethnic hatred, so much so that the ridiculous tribal stereotype that a man’s foreskin has anything to do with the way he thinks made as a matter-of-fact statement by Kiambu’s Governor William Kabogo would be greeted with applause and agreement. In Kibera, that the ne’er do well chubby ex-mayor George Aladwa would also make the most incendiary of pronouncements and not be condemned but celebrated, is proof of this.
Our expertise at tribalising everything is legendary. It pervades every political party, tea party or chama. It is so much a part of us that most of us barely notice it any more.
Many Tanzanians may have failed to recognise that CCM had the election sown up before ballots were printed, but now they do, and Tanzania’s politics will not be the same. In Kenya, we know the cost of our indiscretions and where the road that we are on now leads. I wonder when we will take our foot off the gas and turn a corner into a new political experience.
The writer is a senior KTN investigative reporter and the 2009 CNN Multichoice Africa Journalist of the Year Award winner
