Political power in Tanzania. Business as usual or turning in a new direction?

In 2008 the then prime minister of Tanzania, Edward Lowassa, resigned amid accusations of corruption made by a parliamentary select committee. It was led by a member of his own party, CCM. Nothing similar has ever happened before in Tanzania.

In April this year, the Controller and Auditor General issued his annual report summarising the financial performance of the country's government organisations. His past reports have often been highly critical but subsequent actions to reprimand those in error have been rare. This time, however, members of parliament from both the opposition and the ruling party demanded that six ministers be removed. In May, again in an unprecedented move, President Kikwete ordered precisely that.

What is happening within the core of Tanzania's ruling elite? Is CCM finally coming clean - having ruled Tanzania for fifty years but amidst increasingly vocal accusations about wide-spread corruption? Is the party renewing itself - as it has done in the past?

There can be no certain answers to these questions. Tanzanian politics is, as it has always been, full of unpredictable surprises.

Nevertheless, reading “Continuity and change in Tanzania's ruling coalition: legacies, crises and weak productive capacity” will provide a very useful basis for a better understanding of Tanzanian politics.

The paper does so through analyses of the current composition of Tanzania's ruling coalition, comprised mainly of the ruling party (the CCM), the bureaucracy and the military. This is based on analyses of how the coalition and its funding has changed since independence in 1961. Several things stand out in the analyses.

Continuing dominance of the ruling party
The working paper adds to the knowledge about CCM’s internal politics, which is an under-researched but important issue for understanding Tanzanian politics.

For since competitive elections were reintroduced in 1992 CCM has survived and thrived by winning all four rounds of elections at all levels with very large majorities. Indeed, CCM got 92 per cent of the seats in the 2010 village government elections, but the party is also very dominant at district, national and presidential elections. Elections on Zanzibar are the important exceptions to this general trend.

Therefore the main political drama occurs around the internal politics of the party. Who the party nominates to run for elections is particularly important - especially when a new presidential candidate must be found at the end of the two-term limit for the incumbent president. For once the party nominees are identified, they have (so far) been pretty certain to win political office through the ballot box. Consequently, it is conflicts about power within the party among the strong factional elites and their supporters at lower levels that should be watched - as should political developments on Zanzibar.

The importance of the bureaucracy
The two authors also show why and how the state bureaucracy (including local governments) continues to play an important role in Tanzanian politics and policy implementation.

Not only does the bureaucracy continue to be loyal to the ruling party and to help it to mobilise voters during election time. Many of its members are also well organized. This gives them considerable influence.

Indeed, both the reintroduction of competitive elections and the decentralization reforms in the public sector have strengthened the lower level factions of the party and the bureaucracy since the mid-1990s.

Bureaucratic self-interest, and how it affects specific policies and their implementation, is therefore an important factor in understanding the political economy of Tanzania.

Weak economic entrepreneurs and smallholders
Economic entrepreneurs in the formal productive sectors are few and poorly organised. Their relations with the ruling coalition are ambiguous and largely informal, although exchanges of money and rents are of increasing importance in the relationship – but largely transacted informally.

Moreover, informal sector entrepreneurs and smallholders in agriculture are mostly excluded from the ruling coalition. There is little evidence that CCM and its ruling coalition – despite decades of political stability – has used its position to build and strengthen the productive capacity of domestic entrepreneurs and smallholders. Generally, these are simply not sufficiently important (yet) to exercise sufficient political influence. This helps to explain why few state initiatives focused on poverty alleviation through improvements in smallholder agriculture or the informal sector have not been particularly successful.