What Tanzania’s authoritarian turn can teach South Africa about political complacency
Key topics:
Tanzania’s ruling CCM bans opposition, jails leader Tundu Lissu
Protesters killed after disputed election giving Samia Hassan 97% win
Liberation movements across Africa accused of elite corruption and vote theft
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In 1992, Tanzania became a multiparty state after three decades of one-party rule from its independence in 1961. During that period, Tanzania’s per capita income decreased from $820 to $530, while the global average increased from $4,000 to $6,800.
Now, the East African country has reverted to a de facto one-party state to ensure the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, or ‘Party of the Revolution’) stays in power. Faced with growing opposition to its misrule, the CCM regime banned the main opposition Chadema before the election and threw its leader, Tundu Lissu, into jail on spurious charges. He remains behind bars. Essentially, his crime is to want to mount a competitive electoral challenge to the elites who have their claws in every aspect of economic life.
The stakes are high, which explains why the regime’s methods are unrestrained. Lissu, a lawyer and anti-corruption activist, had survived an attempt on his life in September 2017 in which he was shot 16 times by an AK-wielding assailant, undergoing 19 operations to piece him back together.
Now, with Lissu in the dock, President Samia Hassan has presided over an election which not only saw her garner 97% of the vote, but one in which the number of voters went up from a 67% turnout in 2015 and 50.7% in 2020 to 87%. Supposedly.
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Tanzanians have not taken this brazen theft passively. They have taken to the streets in their numbers. Thousands of protesters are reported to have been killed by security forces over the past few days, so many that the Tanzanian authorities have been seen seizing incriminating CCTV footage.
The protests and the clumsy theft of the election illustrate perfectly what many have feared for a long time: the unsustainability of combining demographic explosion with fragile institutions, shitty infrastructure, corruption and entrenched, careless elites. The average Tanzanian’s annual income is today just $1,120, less than 10% of the global figure, the population having ballooned from 11 million at independence to 68 million.
Stolen elections
The case of Tanzania, like other stolen elections in the SADC region, from Angola to Zimbabwe, also illustrates the extent to which the liberation movements – once the leaders of the fight for freedom – have been hollowed out and turned into vehicles for the promotion of power and elite accumulation.
Business as usual will not deliver African countries from the twin forces of demography and expectations fed by the world outside. It is no longer possible to drive unity and political support on race, anti-colonial sentiment or even tribal enmities when citizens can see what’s on offer elsewhere.
Passing their sell-by date does not mean that liberation movements are going to go willingly or lightly.
For one, they have international allies. Already, congratulations for the lady are streaming in despite the stolen election. At the forefront is the African Union, with the limp-wristed Commonwealth and the SADC following with meek adoration.
African autocrats have perfected the shameless art of election thievery. They don’t need Vladimir Putin to teach them how to do it. But what the Russian dictators have done is offer them the political cover and international oxygen by which to justify their actions. Putin shows just how you can lie, intimidate and bribe your way to power and international support, with no existential consequences, or so it seems.
In this, the cause of the African autocrat has been aided and abetted by Western aid regimes, which prefer stability over democracy (which is not the prerogative of the donors, by the way), and also by the withdrawal of the United States from election scrutiny in parallel with the rise of its own transactionalist tendencies. It’s also aided by some in business who have no moral scruples about where and how to make money, which explains they can’t stop themselves from partnering with undemocratic dictatorships such as those in Uganda or Sudan.
Scramble for critical minerals
There are other factors driving support for such regimes, including the scramble for critical minerals and the new Gulf War between the Emiratis and Saudis on the one hand, and Iran and Qatar on the other. Each side seeks influence for their brand of Islam, one moderate, the other less so.
What are the options?
Run for the hills is one. Some investors, usually the sensitive ones with foreign listings, will do so. But there will be plenty of unlisted, profit-hunting bottom-feeders to take their place.
The other is for SADC, the AU and the East African Community, among others, to grow a spine. But that’s wholly unlikely given that turkeys seldom vote for Christmas.
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Support in Western capitals might help, but it seems imprudent in the circumstances to expect human rights to trump interests, despite the obvious link between the two.
Rather, the onus is going to have to be on the populations of these countries, which have to raise the cost of stealing elections, campaigning for sanctions, mobilising public protests to make the countries ungovernable, and they have to stick with it.
Tundu Lissu’s leadership and courage remind us, like that of Nelson Mandela before him, that outsiders cannot want change more than insiders. It turns out that they don’t.
Tanzania teaches that, absent political change, expect more of the same, but probably worse.
*The authors are all members of the Platform for African Democrats.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission