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The post Interactive Timeline: IPTL, Richmond and “Escrow” appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

Framed as an “emergency” supplier to address an energy crisis in 1994-95, Independent Power Tanzania Ltd (IPTL) did not serve the national grid until 2002. It then became a permanent feature of the energy sector for the next 15 years. In the process, the facility burdened the Tanzania Electric Supply Company (TANESCO) with overpriced, diesel-fuelled power that was not part of the country’s “least cost” strategy, while seriously undermining the development of gas-fuelled power that was. To make matters worse, a second “emergency” project known as Richmond – later Dowans and finally Symbion – failed to address another energy crisis in 2006, and remained idle for two years after its eventual completion, while still collecting capacity charges of US$4m a month. Finally, an escrow account, set up in the central bank to hold monies owed by TANESCO to IPTL while a dispute between the two parties underwent arbitration, was paid to the new “owner” of the facility in suspicious circumstances. This led to further litigation and, in July 2017, the arrest of the principals involved on charges of fraud and criminal conspiracy.

This Briefing Note chronicles how politics and rent-seeking have subverted the development of Tanzania’s power sector during the past quarter of a century and offers tentative estimates regarding the extent of the irreparable damage caused.  

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• South-South cooperation trumps the World Bank
• The Richmond Scandal
• Enter “Escrow”
• The damage to Tanzania
• No way to do business
• Power, politics and profit
• Postscript
• Notes
• Appendix

South-South cooperation trumps the World Bank

The IPTL saga began during the presidency of Ali Hassan Mwinyi (1985-95). In 1992, the Government of Tanzania published a national energy policy [1] favouring the development of power generation using natural gas from the Songo Songo offshore field (see Appendix). Reducing dependence on unreliable hydropower and imported diesel was a key objective of this least cost expansion plan. But while the government engaged in discussions with Canadian company Ocelot to develop the natural gas project (“Songas”), it received an unsolicited proposal from Mechmar Corporation (Malaysia) to finance and build an emergency diesel-fuelled power plant to help mitigate the power-rationing crisis in 1994-95.

Like many other companies, Mechmar rode on the diplomatic coattails of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed (1981-2003), who spearheaded national investments in utilities, telecoms and real estate across Africa during the 1990s, under the banner of “South–South cooperation”.[2] Despite not being in line with the government’s official least cost power strategy, Mechmar and the government signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) in May 1995. By then, the power crisis had come and gone. Meanwhile, Songas was to encounter one bureaucratic hurdle after another.

IPTL’s local partner and 30% shareholder, VIP Engineering and Marketing, a Dar es Salaam-based concern owned by Tanzanians of Asian descent, secured official endorsement for the deal. VIP director (and later owner) James Rugemalira fended off strong opposition to IPTL from within the Ministry of Water, Energy and Mineral Resources by playing the South–South card and, crucially, bribing senior officials and politicians.[3] The contract breached the government’s covenant under the World Bank-funded Power VI Project that it would not procure major power generation projects without consent. In July 1997, the Bank – the main financier of Songas[4] – suspended further support until the government dealt with the potential threat IPTL posed to the financial viability of TANESCO.

Among other things, TANESCO accused IPTL’s owners of significantly overpricing the plant and substituting cheaper medium-speed generators for slow-speed generators specified in the PPA.[5] In 1999, the dispute was taken to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) for arbitration. More than three years later, during which Tanzania endured further shortages of power due to the continued dependence on hydropower, ICSID finally assessed the real cost of IPTL at US$127.2m, compared to the original US$150.7m.[6] Without the tenacity of the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Water, Energy and Mineral Resources, Patrick Rutabanzibwa,[7] Mechmar would also have saddled TANESCO with substantially higher monthly capacity charges. ICSID reduced these from US$4.5m to US$2.6m a month.[8]

From 2002, instead of having a short-term emergency facility in IPTL, Tanzania was shackled for the next 15 years by an overpriced power plant running virtually full-time on imported (and overpriced) diesel fuel. The planned generating capacity of Songas was downsized and its commissioning further delayed to 2004. Even so, commissioning IPTL and Songas within two years of each other added about 40% to existing installed capacity, giving Tanzania considerably more power than it needed.[9] A further round of arbitration initiated by TANESCO on the grounds that IPTL was still overcharging, another emergency power scandal and the contested acquisition of the IPTL plant ensued. The creation of IPTL presaged what was in effect the takeover of energy planning and project development in Tanzania by private interests.

The Richmond Scandal

In 2006, just four years after IPTL began commercial operations, Richmond Development Company won a tender to generate 120 megawatts (MW) of gas-fired electricity for an investment of US$123.2m. This second emergency power supplier resembled IPTL in its excessive cost and the methods its sponsors used to subvert the project evaluation, selection and negotiation process.[10] In November 2006, the government prevented TANESCO from terminating the Richmond PPA for non-performance. By the time the Richmond plant in Ubungo was commissioned in 2007, the power shortage it had been supposed to address had passed as a result of above average rainfall. Tanzania was nevertheless legally committed to buy its power or incur penalties.

A parliamentary select committee set up in 2008 to investigate growing suspicions of malfeasance expressed in the media and the National Assembly revealed that Richmond was a shell company with no power generation experience; that the tender was fixed; and that the delays in commissioning were in large part the result of the company’s inability to finance the procurement and transport of the generators, and technical hitches with their installation. It was further revealed that Richmond had been taken over in late 2006 by Dowans Holdings, an entity based in the United Arab Emirates.[11] After the plant was commissioned, it remained idle for two years but continued to earn its owners capacity charges of about US$4m per month.

These revelations prompted the resignations in February 2008 of Prime Minister Edward Lowassa and Minister of Energy and Minerals Nazir Karamagi. But that was not the end of the fiasco. Dowans took TANESCO to arbitration at the International Chamber of Commerce and, in 2010, was awarded US$65.8m (plus interest) for breach of contract for non-payment of capacity charges. In March 2017, Symbion Power, the current owner of the plant, went to the same arbitration body to claim US$561m from TANESCO for breach of contract, power supplied and not paid for, and other monies owed.

Enter “Escrow”

Part two of the IPTL saga came to be known as “Escrow”. In 2007, TANESCO requested arbitration from ICSID for a second time, again maintaining that IPTL was overcharging for electricity. The claim was based on the failure of VIP to pay up its 30% equity stake in the company.[12] It took the best part of seven years for ICSID to reach a decision. In the meantime, capacity charges payable by TANESCO to IPTL were held in escrow at the Bank of Tanzania, in the so-called Tegeta Escrow Account (TEA). Finally, in February 2014 ICSID upheld TANESCO’s claim and instructed Standard Chartered Hong Kong – the owner of IPTL’s debt since the company had gone into receivership in 2005 – and TANESCO to agree on how much the utility had been overcharged. However, by the time the ruling was made IPTL was under new ownership and more than half of the money held in escrow had already been paid out to IPTL’s new owner, Pan African Power Solutions (PAP), owned by Harbinder Singh Sethi.[13]

Revelations of the extent of foul play involved in the transfer of ownership of IPTL to PAP and the withdrawal of funds held in the TEA filled the Tanzanian media during most of 2014. The scandal was revealed by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC), chaired by opposition MP Zitto Kabwe,[14] and a series of investigative articles in The Citizen newspaper. Kabwe instructed the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau and the Controller and Auditor General’s Office, Tanzania’s supreme auditor, to investigate.[15]

Among other things, the public learned much about Sethi, a Tanzanian-born “tycoon” in his sixties who made his fortune in Kenya as a building contractor during the presidency of Daniel arap Moi (1978-2001).[16] He had acquired Mechmar’s notional 70% shareholding in IPTL[17] through an elaborate scheme that involved a Mechmar director, an intermediary based in the British Virgin Islands, and payment of the astounding sum of US$75m to Rugemalira for his 30% shareholding, using part of the first tranche of the TEA funds released to him.[18] To do this necessitated bribing senior politicians and government officials, regulators, judges, lawyers and bankers. Rugemalira was subsequently shown to have made payments of up to US$1m each to a long list of senior officials, including former Attorney General Andrew Chenge, a key facilitator of IPTL since its inception.[19] In late 2014, despite overwhelming evidence in the public domain of malfeasance on the part of Sethi and Rugemalira, President Jakaya Kikwete (2005–2015) in effect endorsed the looting of the TEA by settling for a few symbolic resignations and minor prosecutions.[20]

The damage to Tanzania

While IPTL has benefitted individuals connected to Mechmar, VIP and PAP, and a few senior Tanzanian politicians and government officials, the direct and indirect costs of the scam have been borne by all power consumers, actual and potential, and Tanzanians at large. Its consequences have included overpriced electricity, avoidable power crises, the subversion of planning for timely and appropriate expansion of the energy sector, and TANESCO’s insolvency. Not all are precisely quantifiable.

The box (“Direct costs of “emergency” power projects in Tanzania”) shows the direct costs to Tanzania incurred as a result of IPTL and other “emergency” power projects.

The sum of the direct costs of emergency power projects, though substantial, is almost incidental when compared to the indirect costs to Tanzania. These are harder to quantify precisely, but the order of magnitude starts to become apparent when collating relevant sources and occurrences. For example:

• According to a World Bank estimate, the cost of power outages to the Tanzanian economy in 2005 – a single year – was 4% of GDP, or nearly US$2 billion.[21]
• The price of the delay in pursuing and expanding the least cost strategy is discernible from the claim made by PanAfrican Energy Tanzania (PAET, not to be confused with PAP), the owner of Songas, that the partial use of natural gas instead of imported diesel has saved Tanzania more than US$6.2 billion since 2004.[22]
• In 2014, international donors withheld budget support worth over US$500m in protest at the Escrow scandal. Negotiations for a second US government Milennium Challenge Account grant worth US$450m, largely earmarked for power generation, were suspended. The grant was eventually cancelled over the annulled Zanzibar elections in 2015.[23]

It is even more difficult to be precise about the most significant cost of all, that of economic growth, employment and opportunities to improve welfare foregone. A more efficient, least cost power supply in Tanzania would have generated income from power sales, which could have been used to extend the grid for the benefit of commercial and domestic users alike and leverage private investment in new power plants. Instead, while big companies could install costly standby generators that mostly ran on imported diesel, countless small manufacturers and service providers were simply forced to close down.

No way to do business

A 2016 World Bank study of IPPs in five countries in sub-Saharan Africa concluded, “the lessons from Tanzania’s experience with IPTL could not be more explicit: when power is not planned and procured transparently and consistently, the implications are potentially grave, far-reaching and on-going”.[31]

Numerous surveys have reported availability and cost of electricity as major constraints on “doing business”, investor confidence and competitiveness in Tanzania. In 2006, 88% of Tanzanian firms cited inadequate electricity as a key hindrance to their operations, placing Tanzania 122nd out of 139 countries surveyed.[32] According to a report published by the government and the United States Agency for Development in 2011, “Tanzania’s well documented electricity problems [are] by far the most important infrastructure constraint to investment and economic output”.[33] A 2013 World Bank Enterprise Survey estimated power outages in Tanzania cost businesses about 15% of annual sales. In 2016, a report by CDC Group and the Overseas Development Institute found that in Tanzania and other African countries, “both GDP and formal private sector employment were closely and positively correlated with increased supply and consumption of electricity”.[34] As a result of poor planning and regulation, vested interests and the other factors described in this note, only 20% of Tanzanians have access to electricity compared to a median of 34% for sub-Saharan Africa.[35]

The World Bank and international development agencies have promoted IPPs as a means of mobilising private capital to build and manage power plants. Such arrangements have had positive results in a number of countries, including Kenya, whose power utility KenGen makes profits and distributes dividends, despite numerous cases of corruption.[36] While Kenya started developing geothermal power within a decade of its discovery, Tanzania took two decades to begin exploiting its natural gas deposits – and increasing the supply of gas to keep up with the growing demand for power is by no means guaranteed.[37]

In 2011, the government negotiated an expansion of Songas with owner PAET to meet the ever-growing demand for power. But the launch of the National Natural Gas Infrastructure Project (NNGIP) drew the policy focus away from the short-term development of Songas to long-term development of the gas sector. Not for the first time, the privately funded Songas expansion was put on hold. NNGIP included the construction of a 532km pipeline from Mtwara to Dar es Salaam, at a cost of US$1.2 billion, financed by China’s Exim Bank.[38] Completed in early 2015 the new pipeline has been functioning at a maximum 4% of capacity. The use of emergency power providers continues.

Between 2010 and 2014 new offshore deposits of natural gas were discovered, vastly increasing the extent of Tanzania’s known offshore reserves to 57 trillion cubic feet. While leading politicians and planners are pinning their hopes for economic development on the construction of a liquefaction plant, which will cost up to US$30 billion, the country’s poor regulatory record and trends in global fuel prices make it unlikely that these hopes will be realised any time soon.[39] Meanwhile, chronic gas shortages undermine the rationale for the massive planned expansion of gas-fuelled power plants.[40]

Power, politics and profit

A modest 100MW power plant should not have the potential to derail a nation’s energy policy, render its electricity utility insolvent, and trigger repeated power crises with massive knock-on effects on industrial, commercial and domestic electricity consumers. Yet that is what IPTL has managed to achieve in Tanzania since 1994. While IPTL cannot be held responsible for all the woes of Tanzania’s energy sector, it is by far the largest single cause.

The absence of robust regulatory and oversight institutions in Tanzania allowed corrupt politicians and officials to ride roughshod over formal energy planning and project management procedures. Most of the critical commentary on IPTL and subsequent Richmond and Escrow scandals have highlighted the corruption dimension. This misses the main point. Corrupt rent-seeking in public procurement and contracting is widespread in countries much more developed than Tanzania, but not all rent-seeking has equally devastating economic and financial consequences.

If one small power plant can undermine the entire energy sector and cost percentage points of GDP, then such rent-seeking has the potential to permanently compromise the entire economy, limit growth and impede employment creation. While “smart” corruption might involve taking a one-off cut on a justifiable project that is required by official policy, generates employment, is productive and contributes to government revenue, “dumb” corruption derails key national policies and imposes huge additional recurrent costs on end users, taxpayers and international donors.[41]

Postscript

On 19 June 2017, Harbinder Singh Sethi and James Rugemalira were arrested and charged with economic sabotage, criminal conspiracy, money laundering and numerous other offences. If convicted, they could face long jail terms. Their arrest was a dramatic and unexpected development, since both men had enjoyed a privileged relationship with powerful and influential figures in government, in Rugemalira’s case for almost 25 years. The charges relate specifically to Sethi’s controversial acquisition of the IPTL plant in 2013 and consequent looting of the TEA, not to the origins and negative impact of IPTL over the years.[42] Cynical observers had been arguing that President John Magufuli’s aggressive anti-corruption policy was selective in that he avoided “sensitive” issues such as IPTL and Escrow, in which his predecessors were implicated.[43] The arrest of Sethi and Rugemalira may prove the cynics wrong.

For more than three years since the Escrow scandal broke, IPTL has been able to continue reaping the spoils. It may not survive much longer. In August 2017, Magufuli ordered the Energy and Water Utilities Regulatory Authority to stop negotiations over an extension to IPTL’s contract with TANESCO.[44] Any satisfaction at this news needs to be tempered by the fundamental lesson of the IPTL saga, emergency power provision and deficient energy policy formulation in Tanzania. Namely, that the costs to the Tanzanian public far exceed the sums made by a few opportunistic rent-seekers.

Brian Cooksey is an independent consultant based in Tanzania. He has been monitoring IPTL since 1997

Notes

[1] United Republic of Tanzania (1992), The Energy Policy of Tanzania, Ministry of Water, Energy and Minerals.

[2] As chairman of the South Commission, former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere was sympathetic to the “delinking” of Africa from Western economic domination (see South Commission (1990) The Challenge of the South, Oxford: Oxford University Press). When apprised of the nature of IPTL, however, he declared that colonialism was preferable to such “South–South cooperation.” The promoters of IPTL used anti-World Bank rhetoric to counter their critics. See Cooksey, Brian (2002) “The Power and the Vainglory: A $100 million Malaysian IPP in Tanzania” in Jomo, KS (ed.) Ugly Malaysians? South-South Investments Abused, Institute for Black Research, Durban.

[3] Evidence of bribery by Rugemalira was contained in affidavits by three government officials presented to ICSID in 1999. For details see: Cooksey (2002); and Kabwe, Zitto (2014) “How PAP acquired IPTL for almost nothing and looted US$124m from the BoT”, https://escrowscandaltz.wordpress.com/

[4] The US$266m Songas project included a 225km pipeline to Dar es Salaam, fuelling a 115MW power plant, and other engineering components. The World Bank provided US$100m, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the European Investment Bank a further US$106m of concessional finance, and private equity investors US$60m (Gratwick, Katharine; Ghanadan, Rebecca; and Eberhard, Anton (2007) “Generating Power and Controversy: Understanding Tanzania’s Independent Power Projects”, Management Programme in Infrastructure Reform and Regulation Working Paper, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town). Concessional lenders and private investors changed substantially before Songas was commissioned.6

[5] Overcharging included infrastructure and staff houses that had not been constructed. There is substantial evidence that Wärtsilä, the Finnish company that built and later ran the plant, was complicit in the overcharging. See Cooksey (2002) for details.

[6] US$163m if the price of conversion from diesel to gas-firing (which was envisaged in the PPA) is included (Eberhard, Anton; Gratwick, Katharine; Morella, Elvira and Antmann, Pedro (2016:208) Independent Power Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, Lessons from Five Key Countries, World Bank, Washington DC.

[7] Cooksey (2002) relates how Rutabanzibwa fought a losing battle against politicians over the relative merits of Songas and IPTL. During one Cabinet meeting, he unsuccessfully challenged the attorney-general’s support for IPTL. Without Rutabanzibwa’s insistence, there would probably have been no arbitration over the inflated cost of the plant.

[8] Capacity charges were calculated on the basis of the actual cost of building the plant. The PPA required the plant to be ready to provide power at short notice, failing which penalties would be incurred. The main running cost was fuel to power the generators. Both capacity charges and the cost of fuel proved contentious.

[9] Eberhard et al. (2016:208-9) “As a result, Tanzania found itself overcommitted in terms of capacity; the country needed at the most one plant, but certainly not two”. The literature is unclear on why, if IPTL plus Songas constituted excess capacity, there was another power crisis only two years after the commissioning of Songas.

[10] Richmond turned out to be a “special purpose vehicle” with no experience of power generation. The report of the Parliamentary select committee chaired by Dr Harrison Mwakyembe MP asserted that: “The proprietors of Richmond are Prime Minister Lowassa and his close friend (Igunga MP) Rostam Aziz.” Lowassa denied the claim, although he resigned. Aziz subsequently withdrew from what he termed “dirty” politics. See Tanzanian Affairs (2008) “Report on Richmond Scandal”, April.

[11] Although of unclear ownership, Dowans was shown by the committee to be represented in its Tanzanian subsidiary by Rostam Aziz, a wealthy Tanzanian businessman and ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party MP (1993-2011), central committee member (2006-2011) and national treasurer (2005-2007).

[12] ICSID determined in the first round of arbitration that the actual cost of the IPTL plant was US$127.2m. This was divided 70:30 between Mechmar and VIP. Mechmar’s investment consisted entirely of debt, valued at US$89.04m. VIP’s investment was the remaining US$38.16m, which the company claimed was contributed “in kind”, rather than as equity (Eberhard et al. 2016:219). TANESCO therefore argued that the monthly capital (“capacity”) charge should be revised downwards since the actual construction cost of the plant was 30% lower than the ICSID estimate. For comparison, Songas was also financed 70:30 through debt and equity, but the 30% equity was fully paid up by the private investors.

[13] See Kabwe (2014) and Policy Forum (2015 and 2017) Tanzania Governance Review 2014 and 2015-2016 for details of the controversial acquisition of IPTL and the looting of the TEA.

[14] Tanzania follows the British system of appointing opposition MPs to head the PAC. At the time a member of opposition party Chama cha Demokrasia (CHADEMA), Zitto Kabwe later resigned and founded his own party, the Alliance for Change and Transparency.

[15] The Bureau’s report was never published, probably because it implicated State House officials and relatives of Kikwete.

[16] According to the leaked Kroll Report, Sethi co-owned controversial IPP Westmont Power (Kenya) Ltd with Nicholas Biwott, a close associate of President Daniel arap Moi. Sethi was also said to manage a large property portfolio in South Africa on behalf of Moi’s son, Gideon.

[17] “Notional” since Mechmar was in receivership when Sethi acquired the shares and Standard Chartered Hong Kong purchased the debt incurred in building IPTL, as described above; see Africa Confidential (2014), “Power fraud unravels”, Vol. 55 no.19, 26 September.

[18] This payment theoretically valued IPTL at US$250m. Sethi’s total outlay to acquire Mechmar’s 70% shareholding was not more than a few million US dollars. See Kabwe (2014).

[19] See Cooksey (2002), inclduing for evidence of Chenge’s role in facilitating the official endorsement of IPTL in 1994. See also Policy Forum (2017) Tanzania Governance Review 2015–16: From Kikwete to Magufuli: Break with the past or more of the same? for evidence of Chenge’s continued collaboration with Rugemalira at the time of “Escrow”.

[20] See Table 1, Policy Forum (2016) Tanzania Governance Review 2014: The year of ‘Escrow’. In a long and convoluted speech to Dar es Salaam elders and others, Kikwete repeated the rather lame argument that the TEA money was “private” rather than “public”. The next day’s headline news was the sacking of Minister of Lands Anna Tibaijuka, a relatively minor player in the Escrow drama, although she received the equivalent of US$1m (TShs1.6 billion) from Rugemalira.

[21] Eberhard, Anton; Rosnes, Orvika; Shkaratan, Maria and Vennemo, Haakon (2011:11) Africa’s Power Infrastructure: Investment, Integration, Efficiency, World Bank, Washington DC.

[22] The Citizen (2017) “Relief as Tanzania saves Sh14tr by extracting Songo Songo gas”, 10 August; The Guardian (2017) “Songo Songo gas project prevails over operational hitches to deliver innumerable benefits and savings”, 15 August.

[23] In 2008, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Government of Tanzania signed a five-year US$698m compact to finance roads, power and water supply.“

[24] Eberhard et al. (2016:202-210).

[25] BBC News (2011) “Power firm Aggreko wins £23m Tanzania contract”, 22 June.

[26] Eberhard et al. (2016: 217).

[27] Tanzania Invest (2017) “Symbion power claim US$561m to Tanzania Electric Power Company”, 29 March.

[28] Law360 (2017) “ICSID pauses enforcement of US$148m award against Tanesco”, 13 April.

[29] Bloomberg (2016) “Tanzania power issues casts shadow on $12 billion debt plan”, 16 February.

[30] Eberhard et al. (2016:202).

[31] Eberhard et al. (2016:91).

[32] World Economic Forum survey, cited in World Bank (2013:102) Enterprise Survey: Tanzania.

[33] Governments of the United Republic of Tanzania and the United States of America (2011:102) Tanzania Growth Diagnostic: Partnership for Growth. CDC and Overseas Development Institute (January 2016:1) “What are the links between power, economic growth and job creation?”, Development Impact Evaluation Evidence Review: “in Tanzania and other African countries both GDP and formal private sector employment were closely and positively correlated with increased supply and consumption of electricity”.

[34] CDC/ODI op.cit.

[35] Kojima, Masami and Trimble, Chris (2016) Making Power Affordable for Africa and viable for its utilities, World Bank, Washinton DC; Eberhard et al. (2016) claims that Tanzanian access to power is about average for sub-Saharan Africa.

[36] For a comparison between TANESCO and KenGen, see Policy Forum (2016: Chapter 4); also Daily Nation (2015) “Increased power sales sees KenGen post Sh11.5bn net profit”, 14 October.

[37] Daily News (2015) “Kenya’s geothermal overtakes hydro before completion of plant”, 22 October.

[38] Opposition MP Zitto Kabwe claimed there was massive corruption involved in the pricing of the pipeline.

[39] “Tanzanian LNG, which has already suffered delays relating to land acquisition and regulatory uncertainty, may slip further down the lengthy waiting list of… LNG project(s).” See The East African (2017) “Uncertainty clouds Tanzania gas investment as low prices persist”, 23–29 September. See also Policy Forum (2015:54-56) Tanzania Governance Review 2013: Who will benefit from the gas economy, if it happens”.

[40] Eberhard et al. (2016:213) lists planned state-owned and public-private partnership gas-powered projects costing over US$1.4bn to generate 1,240MW of electricity.

[41] This is an important distinction that helps explain why some countries – China, for example – develop rapidly despite widespread corruption.

[42] Cooksey, Brian (2017) “Focus should now turn to IPTL, they created Escrow”, The East African, 24 June

[43] IPTL was conceived during the “second phase” government of President Ali Hassan Mwinyi, commissioned during President Benjamin Mkapa’s decade in power (1995–2005) and survived intact, including Escrow, under President Jakaya Kikwete (2005–2015).

[44] Daily News (2017) “IPTL’s licence extension flops”, 31 August.

Appendix

The post IPTL, Richmond and “Escrow”: The price of private power procurement in Tanzania appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

Dr Nic Cheeseman, associate professor of African politics, University of Oxford; author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform

• The Afro-pessimists: For Afro-pessimists, the regular holding of elections not only hides authoritarian regimes but provides them with a degree of international legitimacy. The most stable regimes in the world are where an authoritarian leader runs very tightly controlled elections. Afro-pessimists argue that democratic regimes are no better at representing women; that elections generate periodic violence; that the quality of civil liberties across the continent has declined as the number of multi-party systems has increased; and that there is no clear correlation between free elections and political freedoms.
• The Afro-positivists: Afro-positivists, on the other hand, argue that the holding of elections entrenches democratic traditions and values. They point to studies that show support for democracy is high amongst African citizens and that term limits are starting to bite. When respected once, term limits have never been subsequently rejected on the continent. Enforcing term limits also provides opportunities for the political opposition: when a ruling party fields a new candidate, rather than the incumbent, its chance of victory drops from 85% to 50%.
• Three Africas: There are three different camps of democratic development in Africa. The first is racing ahead. In countries like Benin, Senegal and Ghana democratic values have been consolidated over time with transfers of power, a trajectory that is likely to continue. The second is in a turbulent middle ground where low incentives to give up power have created an environment in which elections have often been conflictual and skewed in favour of the ruling party. Examples include Zimbabwe and Kenya. The third is stuck in an authoritarian backwater, ruled by military leaders in civilian clothes. In places like Rwanda and Ethiopia elections are used as a means of control and political legitimation. The trajectory of democracy on the continent is not one of convergence but of divergence.
• A role for the international community: Developing political institutions is an area where international actors can have a significant impact on democratisation. But geopolitics are also at play. Western powers provide unwavering support to regimes due to natural resources and security considerations, which in turn often undermine efforts to promote democracy. China’s arrival makes the politics more complicated, but the basic rules have not changed. Ultimately, outside processes can only do so much; domestic factors shape the success of democratisation.

Prof. Ibrahim Lipumba, former national chairman, Civic United Front (CUF); four-time presidential candidate in Tanzania

• One nation, two governments: The United Republic exhibits a significant contrast between mainland Tanzania and the Isles of Zanzibar. The mainland does not have a strong history of political opposition because of the principles espoused by the first president, Julius Nyerere. Until the introduction of multi-party politics in 1992, political competition was limited to the confines of the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). Even after five elections, CCM continues to exert its dominance. In Zanzibar, political opposition has a long history that pre-dates independence. The most contentious elections took place in 1995, when the Civic United Front (CUF) emerged victorious only to see the decision reversed.
• Polls in Zanzibar: With a history of closely contested polls in Zanzibar, in 2010 an agreement was reached – and enshrined in the constitution – that parties securing more than 5% of the vote would be included in a government of national unity. This stipulation was designed to reduce electoral contestation and prevent violence. But in 2015 the chairman of the Zanzibar Electoral Commission unilaterally annulled the election results, despite lacking the legal mandate to do so. This occurred as CUF took half of the seats in the House of Representatives – and presented evidence of having won the presidential vote. Currently the Isles are without a functioning government. However, Professor Lipumba said “I remain optimistic regarding Tanzania’s democratic development; I believe we can reach a solution on Zanzibar”.
• Two terms: Term limits are a respected part of Tanzanian democracy. They are important because in a second term the president can push harder for political reforms, knowing he will not compete again. In 2015, the outgoing president, Jakaya Kikwete, tried to push for constitutional reforms. Even though political pressure eventually meant that he failed to hold a referendum on the Warioba draft constitution, he reopened a debate on the manner in which the nation is governed.
• Valuing democracy: Democracy is not a cultural imposition but a universal value. Africans prefer a democratic system of government. Democracy is so omnipresent that even coup-makers claim to carry out their actions to preserve democratic principles.

Vera Kwakofi, current affairs editor, BBC Africa

• The voice of citizens: The media can play a role in entrenching democratic principles. But in 2015 conventional media had to play “catch up” with the sentiments of people on the ground. WhatsApp is revolutionising politics in Africa. It has been transformed from a social tool to a political organising platform and a pseudo-medium for sharing news content. Because of its encryption it is harder to censor, meaning it has put the power of communication into the hands of citizens.
• Investigative journalism: The investigation into the judiciary in Ghana by Anas Aremeyaw Anas provides an inspiring example for the continent. Anas exposed wide-scale corruption in an institution that holds historic importance in Ghana, and which has always been seen as non-politicised. 20 judges have already been sacked and over 180 judges and court officials are still under investigation. The media should hold politicians to account, but journalists are not doing enough of this in Africa. More attention should be given to examining the institutions of state and interrogating how effective they are and what they are really doing.
• An African Fourth Estate: There is more at stake for local media than international media. Its primary role must be as educators – to explain the actions of actors, functions of government and processes of democracy as independently as possible. By detailing how the state works, local media can empower citizens to make informed choices. The international media should be observers of society and portray events to the rest of the world. However international media too often performs the function of local media. African media houses and journalists are better placed to understand local cultures and histories; however, the lack of a supportive environment prevents them from doing so.

 Event podcast:

Interview with Prof.Ibrahim Lipumba

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The post The State of Democracy in Africa 2015 appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

October 2015

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Tanzania’s fifth multi-party elections on 25 October 2015 could mark a watershed in national politics. Former prime minister Edward Lowassa is the flagbearer for Ukawa, an opposition alliance forged during a heated contest over constitutional reform and the structure of the Union. After two terms in office the incumbent president, Jakaya Kikwete, is standing down. While opinion polls indicate that his successor John Magufuli and CCM, the ruling party since 1977, are clear favourites, uncertainty about the intentions of the huge number of young voters and the level of turnout make predictions hazardous. Despite the unresolved battle over constitutional reform, campaigning has eschewed issues of importance to all Tanzanians in favour of an emphasis on personalities, and small-scale promises. This Briefing Note considers the variables in what is likely to be the most keenly contested poll since the first multi-party elections in 1995.

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• The katiba controversy
• Enter the ‘big man’
• The fall-out
• CCM’s safe pair of hands
• What’s in it for me?
• Who will vote?
• CCM’s partial eclipse?
• Sources

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The katiba controversy

Between July and December 2012, Tanzania’s Constitutional Review Commission (CRC) visited all districts in the United Republic, held 1,773 meetings and received the opinions of 1.4 million citizens, as well as civil society organisations and international experts.¹; The consultation process rekindled nationwide discussion about the degree of autonomy afforded to Zanzibar, land ownership, citizenship, and human rights. Issues, rather than personalities or party politics, were to the fore.

Two drafts of a new katiba, or constitution, were vigorously debated by a constituent assembly in the capital Dodoma during 2014. The main stumbling block – as in the previous two constitutional reviews – was the structure of the Union. Delegates from Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the ruling party since 1977, steadfastly defended the status quo. Opposition party delegates supported the CRC’s recommendation for a three-tier federal arrangement, adding a new government for the mainland to the existing ones for the Union and the Zanzibar Isles. Despite a boycott by opposition delegates, a draft constitution was narrowly approved by the constituent assembly in October 2014. But a popular referendum on the new katiba scheduled for April 2015 was postponed until after the general election. High politicking supplanted the deliberation of weighty matters that affect the daily lives of all Tanzanians.²

The heavy-handed conduct of CCM in the constituent assembly divided the nation; the decision to defer the referendum left it in constitutional limbo. Four opposition parties found common cause during the katiba review, uniting under the banner of Umoja wa katiba ya Wananchi (Coalition of Defenders of the People’s Constitution) or Ukawa. The alliance has survived the indefinite postponement of a resolution to the constitutional issue.

Despite seemingly incompatible ideological positions, Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (Chadema), which was established as a pro-business platform and draws its support from northern Tanzania and Dar es Salaam; the Civic United Front (CUF), a liberal party with strong support in Zanzibar and pockets of the coast; the National Convention for Construction and Reform (NCCR-Mageuzi), popular on the shores of Lake Tanganyika; and the National League for Democracy (NLD) have agreed a joint manifesto and endorsed a common list of candidates for the general election. The endurance of Ukawa suggests that the poll will be the most keenly contested since the first multi-party elections in 1995.

Enter the “big man”

Ukawa’s electoral prospects were transformed in July 2015. Former prime minister Edward Lowassa defected from CCM to Chadema, the largest opposition party, after failing to secure CCM’s nomination as its presidential candidate. Lowassa’s exclusion by the ruling party’s Security and Ethics Committee came as a surprise to many. A political heavyweight from Arusha, he is influential, well-connected and able to draw on substantial backing from Asian and Arab businessmen. But his relationship with CCM seldom ran smoothly.

Older Tanzanians recall that Lowassa failed to secure the CCM presidential nomination once before. In 1995 his candidacy was widely thought to have been vetoed by Julius Nyerere himself, founding president of the republic. Benjamin Mkapa, the victor on that occasion, did not offer Lowassa a cabinet post during his first term and only conferred a slot at the Ministry of Water and Livestock in his second. In 2005 Lowassa supported Jakaya Kikwete’s successful bid for the presidency on the tacit – and ultimately mistaken – understanding that the favour would be returned in 2015.

[quote]51% of those surveyed believe that “corruption cannot be controlled at all” in Tanzania[/quote]

For all his charisma and influence, Lowassa was seemingly considered unsafe by CCM elders. He was tainted by his association with the Richmond Development Company energy corruption scandal that occurred when he was premier and prompted his resignation in 2008. While Lowassa was never prosecuted for any wrongdoing, the episode inspired the nicknames Lo-Rushwa and Fisadi-in-Chief, derived from the Swahili for “bribe” and “corrupt” respectively. His close association with certain businessmen prompts frequent and widespread speculation. “One wonders why he is the ‘magnet’ that attracts such money. More significantly, what if there is ‘pay back time’ if he wins the elections?” asked one commentator in June.³

Chadema’s leader and Ukawa co-chair Freeman Mbowe appeared unperturbed by such questions when courting Lowassa, and speedily ensured that his prize was confirmed as Ukawa’s presidential candidate. The recruitment of Lowassa has entailed compromise. Ukawa was forged to promote ambitious principles and progressive values during the battle to introduce a new constitution. But the coalition is equally determined to win the presidential election and has judged the former prime minister to be the man to deliver victory, despite mutterings of an “integrity deficit”⁴.

Lowassa has proved adaptable. He toed the CCM party line over the katiba as it sought to stymie support for radical changes to the structure of the Union, which might have loosened its grip on power. However, when presented as Ukawa’s candidate he called for the constitutional debate to be reopened. Lowassa’s campaign rallies across the country have drawn vast crowds, partly because he arrives by helicopter. He is presented by Chadema as independently wealthy, a man who has no need of a position in government to enrich himself. This may not matter to voters: 51% of those surveyed by civil society organisation Twaweza in June 2014 asserted that “corruption cannot be controlled at all” in Tanzania.⁵ But for all his apparent popularity, Lowassa’s transfer to Chadema and Ukawa has threatened to fracture the coalition.

The fall-out

Lowassa’s arrival in their midst proved too much for some of Ukawa’s leading figures. CUF national chairman and Ukawa co-chair Prof. Ibrahim Lipumba and Chadema secretary-general Dr Wilbrod Slaa resigned. Both stood for the presidency in 2010 and retained ambitions to occupy the Ikulu, or State House. The two men also have reputations as principled individuals with a strong grasp of policy. Their departure from the election campaign heralded a shift away from programmatic politics, while Lowassa’s ascendancy brought a greater focus on personality.

For Lipumba, the identity of Lowassa’s running mate also touched a nerve. The National Elections Act (2010) requires that candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency come from the same party, with one from the mainland and one from the Isles. Because Ukawa is not formally registered as a political party, Juma Duni Haji – Lipumba’s Zanzibari running mate in the 2005 presidential elections – resigned as CUF’s deputy chair to join Lowassa on the Chadema ticket.

The departure of Lipumba and Duni leaves CUF very much in Chadema’s shadow. Meanwhile, Lowassa and Duni make an unlikely pairing. Duni made his reputation as a vociferous campaigner against CCM hegemony on Zanzibar. His incarceration following a by-election victory in 1997 led to him being listed as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International; Lowassa has never been unduly concerned with tensions in the Isles.

At his departing press conference, broadcast live across Tanzania, Slaa launched an uncompromising attack on Lowassa and those thought to be his backers. The former Catholic priest has campaigned tirelessly against corruption and named Lowassa on a “list of shame” in September 2007. Slaa emphasised Lowassa’s failure to honour promises: “I had been told that he was crossing over with about 50 members of parliament and 22 regional party chairmen. In the end, this did not materialise.”⁶ The tirade made headlines for days. It was not the only controversy. The way that Lowassa asked a Lutheran congregation in Tabora to pray for him because the country has never had a president from this protestant denomination has also caused unease in a nation where religion and politics have largely been kept apart.⁷

CCM’s safe pair of hands

Dr John Magufuli may be low profile, but he has never been embroiled in a corruption scandal and, as minister of works, has earned a reputation for being a sound – if occasionally demanding – technocrat, with a detailed knowledge of his brief. Dubbed tingatinga (“bulldozer”) by Kikwete, Magufuli was the safe choice for CCM.

Despite 20 years in government, Magufuli is attempting to position himself as the change candidate, rather than the executor of Kikwete’s legacy. His campaign billboards display only a small CCM logo, in contrast to the green and gold banners that Kikwete used in 2005 and 2010. In at least one respect, Magufuli does represent a break with the status quo. Born in what is now Geita Region, south of Lake Victoria, he is the first CCM presidential candidate from the interior since Nyerere.

Magufuli appears to have more in common with his running mate, Samia Hassan Suluhu, than Lowassa has with Duni. Suluhu is MP for the Zanzibar constituency of Makunduchi and the first female vice-presidential candidate in CCM’s history. As Minister of State for Union Affairs, she personified CCM orthodoxy over Zanzibar; and as deputy chair of the constituent assembly during the katiba review, she frequently attracted the wrath of Ukawa delegates.

CCM has pushed through a flurry of legislation in the run-up to the election, including bills relating to the management of Tanzania’s future, potentially substantial, hydrocarbon revenues. New infrastructure initiatives have been announced. Ukawa, in contrast, has no track record and no access to the machinery of government.

In a June 2015 poll conducted by Twaweza, 46% of respondents listed “policy ideas” as the most important criteria they considered when electing a president.⁸ However, neither the media – with the notable exception of the televised debate series MkikiMkiki – nor campaign rallies carry much meaningful discussion of policy or feasible solutions to widespread poverty, power and infrastructure deficits, and overloaded social services. “The election campaign has been short of serious debate about how to tackle important issues”, Deus Kibamba, the chair of Jukwaa La katiba Tanzania (Constitutional Forum), told ARI.⁹

What’s in it for me?

Whatever people say to pollsters, personalities and party loyalty will inevitably trump policy and issues in the elections. It has always been thus. Magufuli and Suluhu face a tougher campaign on that score than any of their predecessors in CCM. Their public profile was negligible before the campaign started compared to that of their opponents.

What young Tanzanians make of the personalities on show and how they cast their votes will be of critical importance in determining the outcome of this election – and many more to come. The August 2012 census indicates that approximately 55% of Tanzanians were aged 19 or under. Of voters registered for October’s elections, over 60% are under 35 and nearly 80% are under 45.¹⁰ Magufuli is 55 years old, Lowassa 62. Fewer than one in ten Tanzanians are, like them, old enough to remember the formation of the Union in 1964.

[quote]Over 60% of registered voters are under 35 years of age[/quote]

On the campaign trail, CCM and opposition parties have made promises to improve local roads and water supply.¹¹ Pecuniary inducements are commonplace during elections. But voters do not forget. In a Twaweza poll conducted in July/August 2015, two-thirds of those surveyed said they were aware of promises made by their MP during the last election, mostly relating to the provision of local infrastructure; nearly half of them indicated that none of the promises had been fulfilled.¹² Voting an MP out of office remains all but impossible in the majority of mainland constituencies due to the clear ascendancy of one party or another. But in 2015, for the first time ever, a united opposition offers voters a presidential candidate with a chance of success.

Twaweza’s July/August 2015 opinion poll refutes the possibility of an opposition victory. About a quarter of respondents said they intended to vote for Lowassa, as opposed to almost two-thirds (65%) for Magufuli. Lowassa’s strongest showing was among urban, young, male and more educated respondents.¹³ Although the poll did not include Zanzibar, and could therefore underestimate support for the opposition, Lowassa’s score was comparable to Slaa’s 25% share of the vote in the 2010 presidential election. It is far short of the 37% polled by all opposition candidates in that contest. This suggests that Lowassa may not be all that non-CCM voters were hoping for from Ukawa. Again, the voting behaviour of the potentially substantial number of first-time voters will be of critical importance. So, too, is turnout.

Who will vote?

Turnout almost halved for presidential elections between 2000 and 2010, falling from 84% to 43% of registered voters. In the same period the size of the electorate doubled from 10 million to 20 million. The figures speak either of immense – and growing – antipathy to a formal political scene dominated by CCM, a failure on the part of CCM to attract new voters, or a combination of the two.

Despite declining turnout, CCM increased its number of votes in presidential elections by 1.2 million between 1995 and 2010 – double the 635,000 combined increase recorded by opposition parties. The ruling party is experienced and skilled at mobilising grassroots structures in rural areas untouched by the opposition. CCM’s past victories, it has been said, “can be attributed more to the regime’s broad social base and organisational power than to the popularity of its policies or the performance of the government.”¹⁴ Kikwete was keenly aware of the need to nurture rural voters, launching a series of agricultural development programmes during his time in office. Three-quarters of Tanzanians derive a livelihood from agriculture. The party’s secretary-general, Abdulrahman Kinana, has carefully cultivated an image of agrarian activity, to differentiate CCM from opposition “city types”.

[quote]Turnout almost halved for presidential elections between 2000 and 2010, falling from 84% to 43% of registered voters[/quote]

The opposition share of the presidential vote has fluctuated since 1995 but the 37% achieved in 2010 was similar to the first multi-party elections. Whatever recent polls indicate, the presence of Lowassa as Ukawa’s presidential candidate could plausibly provide a 5% boost by attracting new voters to the opposition. If he and Ukawa can “get out the vote” – by mobilising a large number of young, hitherto disaffected voters – a 10% swing might be achievable, and with it a convincing bid for the presidency. However, a substantial turnout among youth voters is as difficult to achieve in Tanzania as elsewhere.

Ukawa’s appeal to young voters might have been greater had Chadema not expelled Zitto Kabwe, an energetic and plain speaking former chair of the parliamentary accounts committee. Being below the age of 40, Kabwe was ineligible to stand for the presidency under Tanzania’s 1977 constitution, but he founded his own party hoping that a new constitution might enable him to compete. Lacking established grassroots structures, Kabwe’s Alliance for Change and Transparency (ACT-Wazalendo) is unlikely to gain much traction.

CCM’s partial eclipse?

CCM is the clear favourite in the elections. The constituency map is likely to resemble a crescent moon. Seats adjacent to Lake Tanganyika will be split between CCM, NCCR-Mageuzi and ACT-Wazalendo; those in the densely-populated area around Lake Victoria will be shared by Chadema and CCM. Much of the Northern Zone will fall to Chadema, which will also see its vote surge in Dar es Salaam. CUF should take half the seats in Zanzibar, while making inroads in some coastal constituencies. CCM will successfully defend its hegemony in the southern highlands and central zone. The encroachment of the opposition on CCM’s agrarian heartland in previous elections continues.

The fate of Tanzania’s draft constitution, and the future of the coalition that was formed to defend it, is more uncertain. Assuming Ukawa survives the election intact, its leaders and members may not have the inclination or stamina to fight again for radical reform of the katiba. The departure of Lipumba and Slaa has left CUF and Chadema significantly weakened, while NCCR-Mageuzi and NLD may suffer from their electoral association with bigger parties and more prominent political figures.

If Lowassa proves costly to Ukawa in terms of credibility and support, recriminations within the alliance will be vociferous and bitter. To many, an election campaign grounded on points of principle and common grievance about constitutional reform would, with hindsight, appear to have been the shrewd long-term strategy as opposed to an over-ambitious, opportunistic tilt at power entailing erosion of Ukawa’s raison d’être. As Deus Kibamba told ARI, “politicians crossing the floor to join Ukawa did not augur well with the coalition taking a serious position on the constitutional project. Had Professor Lipumba and Dr Slaa remained at the helm, Ukawa’s campaign would have placed a much greater emphasis on the values which united its member parties at the constituent assembly.”¹⁵

Katiba reform appears to be dead and buried. Given Magufuli’s desire to distance himself from Kikwete, one cannot see a plausible reason for him to expend valuable political capital on a constitutional referendum which might only serve to fuel the opposition. He will surely follow the lead of previous residents of the Ikulu, each of whom set aside pursuing the constitutional legacy of their predecessors and started the process anew in their own good time.

For further analysis of the party manifestos, see “Manifestos for Change? 12 observations on the CCM and Chadema documents” and for legislative elections, see “How will Tanzanians vote on Sunday 25 October?” [forthcoming]

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1. Report of East African Consultative Theme on the Tanzania Constitutional Review Process, Kituo Cha Katiba: Eastern Africa Centre for Constitutional Development, Kampala, 2013, pp. 21-22

2. For further details, see Nick Branson, “Party rules: Consolidating power through constitutional reform in Tanzania”, Briefing Note, Africa Research Institute, London, March 2015

3. Chambi Chachage, “Edward Lowassa and the politics of rumour and endorsement”, African Arguments, 5 June 2015

4. Kitila Mkumbo, “Edward Ngoyai Lowassa: Mchapa kazi mwenye nakisi ya uadilifu na falsafa”, Raia Mwema, Dar es Salaam, 17 September 2014

5. “Have more laws, agencies and commitments against corruption made a difference? People’s perceptions of corruption in Tanzania”, Sauti za Wananchi Brief No. 14, Twaweza, Dar es Salaam, August 2014 p. 9

6. Jenerali Ulimwengu, “Wilbroad Slaa throws spanners, Ukawa wheels untouched”, The East African, Nairobi, 5 September 2015

7. Anne Robi, “Lowassa spurned on divisive view”, Daily News, Dar es Salaam, 9 September 2015

8. “Do they know? Data on voter knowledge”, Sauti za Wananchi Brief No. 26, Twaweza, Dar es Salaam, September 2015, p. 2

9. Conversation with the author, 21 September 2015. For further details, see Nick Branson, “Manifestos for Change? 12 observations on the CCM and Chadema documents”, Africa Research Institute website, 1 October 2015

10. “Basic Demographic and Socio-Economic Profile”, National Bureau of Statistics – Tanzania and Office of Chief Government Statistician – Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, April 2014

11. Nick Branson, “How will Tanzanians vote on Sunday 25 October?”, Africa Research Institute website, [forthcoming]

12. “Let the people speak: Citizens’ views on political leadership”, Sauti za Wananchi Brief No. 27, Twaweza, Dar es Salaam, September 2015, p. 4

13. Ibid. pp. 12-14

14. Tim Kelsall, Business, Politics and the State in Africa: Challenging the Orthodoxies on Growth and Transformation, Zed Books, London, 2013, p. 60

15. Conversation with the author, 21 September 2015
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The post What’s in it for me? Personalities, enticements and party loyalties in Tanzania’s 2015 elections appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

March 2015

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The basic law – katiba in Swahili – has been the subject of persistent controversy and contestation since the creation of the United Republic of Tanzania in 1964. Despite being presented at the outset with a seemingly unsustainable constitutional settlement, a strong executive has repeatedly deferred and obstructed a radical overhaul of the katiba. The imperative to preserve national unity has often been cited as the pretext. Successive presidents have carefully directed popular participation in reform, restricting it to the confines of the dominant party. The recommendations of legal experts have been routinely ignored, resulting in a series of incoherent, disjointed and sometimes even contradictory constitutional amendments that have failed to address the concerns of citizens and the key issue of the distribution of power. This Briefing Note summarises the history of constitutional reform in Tanzania – a history that renders unsurprising the ruling party’s steadfast response to contemporary demands for a fundamental overhaul of governance.

Click here to view a timeline of constitutional reform in Tanzania

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• Two governments, one state
• The party of the revolution, subordination and protest
• Nyalali’s challenge
• From Kisanga to Warioba
• Dividing lines
• Towards a popular referendum

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Two governments, one state

Pressure for constitutional reform in Tanzania has been primarily driven by – and repeatedly failed to address – tensions between the nation’s two constituent parts, mainland Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Isles. The 1964 Articles of Union provided for a stopgap constitution modelled on that adopted by Tanganyika in 1962, but required the president to initiate a constitutional review and establish a constituent assembly to debate the draft katiba within one year.

The Union was governed by an “imperial presidency”, with the executive pre-eminent over the legislature. As part of the ostensibly temporary arrangements, it had a dual-government structure rather than being a fully-fledged federation. Julius Nyerere became president of the new United Republic; as president of Zanzibar, Abeid Karume was automatically vice-president. A national assembly, or Bunge, was empowered to enact legislation relating to 11 “Union matters” for both the mainland and the Isles. Zanzibar retained its own executive, legislature, and judicial system for all non-Union matters.

[quote]Episodes of constitutional tinkering were characterised by the application of patches to the basic law as a means of perpetuating the political status quo[/quote]

In March 1965, an act of parliament granted the president discretion to commence the constitutional review “at such times as shall be opportune”, overriding the requirement of the Articles of Union. In the meantime, an interim constitution was adopted that formalised a dual-government but single-party system – led by the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) on the mainland and the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) in Zanzibar. President Nyerere prioritised the promotion of national unity and self-reliance over a new katiba, despite this violating his promise upon forming the Union.

The party of the revolution, subordination and protest

In March 1974, faced with popular unrest caused by rising food prices, Nyerere tasked TANU and ASP executive committees with incorporating the doctrines of national unity and self-reliance into the interim constitution. This was the first of many episodes of “hesitant and disjointed”¹ constitutional tinkering, characterised by the application of patches to the basic law as a means of perpetuating the political status quo and consolidating power in the hands of a single party.² Debate was restricted to a joint party conference.

In June 1975, parliament unanimously approved the amendment despite the fact that it made Bunge, the national assembly, subordinate to the executive committees of TANU and ASP. By law, all political activities from then on were to be “conducted by or under the auspices of the party”. The following year, when a national debate on constitutional reform was launched, TANU and ASP local branches ensured that popular participation in the debate was vigilantly overseen and directed. Co-operation between the parties continued at a further joint conference to agree the draft text for a new national constitution and culminated in a merger to form Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the “party of the revolution”.

In March 1977, Nyerere mandated a 20-person CCM committee to act as the constitutional review commission. Bunge was transformed into a constituent assembly to endorse the new constitution. Twelve years after the adoption of the interim constitution, the imperial presidency and dual-government within a single-party state were enshrined in law. In 1979, Zanzibar adopted a first permanent constitution of its own, based on the new Union model. It provided for a partially-elected House of Representatives, reducing the influence of the Revolutionary Council, an appointed cabinet that had ruled by decree since 1964. It also stipulated that the president of Zanzibar be elected, albeit with a single name on the ballot.

In promulgating the new constitution, Zanzibaris lost their bill of rights, which predated the establishment of the Union. By the early 1980s, calls for a new katiba and a national bill of rights became increasingly voluble and widespread. Popular interest in human rights was fuelled by the language used to mobilise public opinion during the war with neighbouring Uganda in 1978-9; the invasion was justified after the event by accusations of abuses by the regime of Idi Amin. Tanzania was closely involved with the preparation of the 1981 African (Banjul) Charter on Human and People’s Rights. CCM responded by announcing a series of constitutional amendments. Party activists were again deployed to manage popular reactions and debate. The party dictated that the reform process would focus only on the powers of the president; the authority and representative nature of parliament; consolidating the union; and the power of the people.

[quote]The main stumbling block – as ever – was the structure of the Union[/quote]

The legitimacy of the one-party state was openly challenged in some constitutional debates. After Wolfgang Dourado, former attorney general of Zanzibar, questioned the dual-government structure at a seminar organised by the Tanganyika Law Society, he spent 100 days in custody³. In January 1985, the constitutional amendments were enacted. The presidential mandate was restricted to two terms and a system of two vice-presidents was introduced, one being the president of Zanzibar and the other the prime minister of Tanzania. Article 47 stipulated that the president of the United Republic and the first vice-president should come from different parts of the Union. The new provisions came into effect in the run-up to a general election, at which Nyerere stood down in favour of his chosen successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi.

Nyalali’s challenge

In 1990, the year Nyerere retired as chairman of CCM, he delivered a series of speeches about political change and multi-party democracy that launched a further national debate under the auspices of CCM. President Mwinyi established a steering committee for constitutional reform and a commission, chaired by Chief Justice Francis Nyalali, was charged with assessing how Tanzania might implement multi-party democracy. The commission’s consultative meetings, of which more than 1,000 were held nationwide, attracted genuine popular interest and participation.

In his report to the president and CCM leadership, Nyalali called for a repeal of the 1977 constitution as well as 40 laws identified as being contrary to democratic principles and human rights. He recommended that a constitutional commission draft a new katiba with considerably reduced presidential powers; that this document be subject to a free and open public debate and a popular referendum; and that Tanzania embark upon a major public education programme on multi-party politics and democracy. However, parliament was not allowed to debate the Nyalali Commission report, and the executive largely ignored its recommendations. Instead, in February 1992 a CCM conference decided which of Nyalali’s proposals were acceptable. Among the laws the party failed to repeal was the 1962 Preventive Detention Act, a favoured tool of the Nyerere state.

Constitutional amendments were drafted with a view to entrenching CCM’s dominance in the multi-party era. For example, CCM was exempted from new rules regarding the registration of political parties⁴. Party leaders were given the power to dismiss elected representatives in parliament and replace them at will, strengthening the authority of the political parties at the expense of the United Republic’s institutions. Before the first multi-party elections could be held, the High Court ruled that preventing independent candidates from standing for election to the presidency, parliament and local councils violated constitutional provisions for freedom of association and political participation. In response, parliament passed an amendment stipulating that political participation had to be through a political party. Measures were also taken to mitigate the possibility of a “cohabitation” government, whereby a CCM president of the Union could be deputised by an opposition leader from Zanzibar. This was a genuine risk, underscored by closely contested elections in the Isles in October 1995 that saw the opposition Civic United Front (CUF) come very close to clinching victory.

From Kisanga to Warioba

In July 1998, Tanzania’s third president, Benjamin Mkapa, appointed a new constitutional reform committee, chaired by appeal court judge Robert Kisanga. Mkapa failed to consult the political opposition or civil society on the scope of the review, but gave Kisanga the mandate to consider a wider range of issues than Nyalali. These included the structure of the Union; powers of the executive; the voting system; independent candidacy; and human rights. The committee sought the views of more than half a million Tanzanians from across the country, but the ruling party was again active in “organising opinion they favoured”.⁵

CCM’s efforts did not prevent Kisanga’s 800-page report from including a recommendation that the United Republic should have three governments – for Union matters, the mainland and the Isles. President Mkapa was the first to publicly attack this counsel and insisted that it would have to be approved by CCM committees before being debated in the National Assembly. A 13th amendment to the 1977 constitution implemented some of Kisanga’s recommendations. The number of special seats reserved for women and minorities was increased, but so too was the authority of the president.

In 2011, Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania’s fourth president, announced his intention to emulate his predecessors with a constitutional review. The diplomatic corps, assembled at the annual New Year Sherry Party, were told by the president that “the people of Tanzania will be fully involved in the process and ultimately, they will be the one to decide.”⁶ Fifteen months later he appointed a 30-member Constitutional Review Commission (CRC), chaired by Joseph Warioba, a former prime minister and attorney general of Tanzania. Between July and December 2012, the CRC visited all districts in the United Republic, held 1,773 meetings and received the opinions of 1.4 million citizens as well as civil society organisations and international experts.⁷

Further popular consultation was organised at ward level through constitutional councils, or baraza. On the mainland, CCM maintained its control over the process by using its dominance of ward development committees (WDCs) to screen those applying to join the councils. Civil society was permitted to convene its own meetings, although some observers noted restrictions on individuals and organisations. Despite the machinations of the ruling party, ever keen to preserve the status quo, the majority of those consulted on the mainland maintained that they should have an assembly and government of their own, as Zanzibar does.

Dividing lines

The commission released its final draft in December 2013, for consideration by a constituent assembly. Chaired by Samuel Sitta, former Speaker of Bunge, the assembly comprised 640 members: all 357 members of the Union parliament, 82 members of the Zanzibar House of Representatives and 201 civil society delegates. Endorsement of a constitutional text required a two-thirds majority among delegates from both Zanzibar and the mainland before the text could be put to a popular referendum. CCM representatives occupied just under half of the seats.

After scrutinising the draft, delegates promptly agreed that a new constitution must provide for an independent electoral commission and permit legal challenges to presidential election results. There was no consensus regarding the percentage of votes required for victory by presidential aspirants or permitting independent candidates to compete for the highest office. Similarly, opinion was divided over the CRC’s proposals to restrict MPs to serving three five-year terms and provide for their recall from parliament by the electorate in the event of malfeasance.

[quote]Politics has become increasingly polarised[/quote]

The main stumbling block – as ever – was the structure of the Union. CCM members steadfastly defended the status quo; opposition party members supported the CRC’s recommendation for a three-tier federal government. To advance their agenda, representatives of the three largest opposition parties – Chama Cha Demokrasia Na Maendeleo (Chadema), CUF, and the National Convention for Construction and Reform (NCCR) joined with delegates from civil society to form the Coalition of Defenders of the People’s Constitution, or Umoja wa Katiba ya Wananchi (Ukawa). In March 2014, Ukawa’s secretary claimed a membership of 286 delegates – a number high enough to enable the opposition to block approval of a constitution that failed to reform the government structure.

In April 2014, Ukawa announced that it was boycotting the constituent assembly until its grievances about the apparent rejection of key recommendations of the CRC were heard. Deadlock ensued until September, when President Kikwete met with opposition parties and promised that the assembly would be suspended on 4 October. However, Samuel Sitta, the assembly’s chairman, determined that it should press on with its business despite the pending suspension. Legislative provisions were amended to permit electronic voting by absent delegates, and provisions for a secret ballot were removed, thereby ensuring that CCM elected representatives towed the party line or risked losing their parliamentary seats.⁸ With the October deadline just days away, Sitta presided over a final sitting of the assembly that voted to adopt the draft constitution.

Outraged members of the opposition disputed the legality of the assembly’s proceedings, questioning the vote among delegates from Zanzibar in particular. The deputy clerk, Dr Thomas Kashililah, countered that 147 Zanzibar delegates had voted in favour – a single vote more than the two-thirds majority required. Ambar Khamis, an opposition politician from Zanzibar, claimed that a “yes” vote had been recorded for him despite his absence from the assembly since April. Zazia Meghji, a former finance minister who held a mainland seat, was listed as a representative of Zanzibar. Ukawa stalwarts accused CCM of bribing delegates to vote for a constitution that safeguarded continuity rather than promising change in the structure of the Union.

In Zanzibar, Attorney General Othman Masoud Othman was summarily dismissed for voting against three chapters of the draft constitution, including the one enshrining changes to the structure of the Union – a sacking that threatened to destabilise Zanzibar’s Government of National Unity, formed in 2010. Minister for Constitutional Affairs and Justice Abubakar Khamis Abubakar opposed the move to amend the Isles’ constitution to bring it into line with the proposed Union constitution.

Towards a popular referendum

Despite opposition protest, the government scheduled a referendum on adopting the new constitution for 30 April 2015, with one month of campaigning permitted. This contravened the advice of the National Electoral Commission (NEC), which maintained that the timeframe was overly ambitious. The NEC is legally obliged to educate the public about the draft constitution and the significance of the vote, yet copies of the text only began circulating in February 2015.

The haste to stage the referendum has been interpreted as an attempt by President Kikwete to prevent any judicial challenge to the vote and gain decisive “leverage on the process – and perhaps even the outcome.”⁹ Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda, eager for the president’s endorsement as his chosen successor, is also keen for Kikwete to leave a constitutional legacy. Meanwhile, uncertainty over the feasibility and outcome of the referendum is fuelling wider disquiet in the run-up to the general election in October 2015.

Politics has become increasingly polarised. In November 2014, youth aligned to CCM disrupted a public meeting where constitutional commissioners, including Justice Warioba, attempted to speak about the shortcomings of the proposed katiba. Intolerance of dissent has seemingly galvanised ties between the main opposition parties: Ukawa plans to field a single presidential candidate in October.

Drawing inspiration from the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) formed during Kenya’s 2005 constitutional referendum, the opposition is first seeking to deprive the referendum of its legitimacy and President Kikwete of his legacy. Ukawa has criticised delays and shortcomings in the preparations to deploy biometric voter registration for the first time. A flawed registration process would disenfranchise voters and undermine the credibility of both the referendum and elections. As if recognising that fighting a referendum campaign and a general election within six months might overstretch its resources and stamina, Ukawa has threatened to boycott the referendum.

If the constitutional referendum goes ahead on 30 April, polling stations are unlikely to witness long queues of eager voters. Turnout for general elections fell from 72% in 2005 to 43% in 2010. Only 40% of the electorate registered for local government elections in December 2014. With the contents of the proposed constitution still unfamiliar to most citizens, the outcome could well be determined less by ordinary Tanzanians and more by the ability of the government and, if it participates, the opposition to mobilise their core supporters. With the katiba requiring a 50% popular endorsement on both the mainland and in Zanzibar to become law, the Isles could yet prove decisive. There, the House of Representatives must ratify any changes to the constitution by a two-thirds majority.¹⁰ As CUF hold 31 of the 82 seats, this requirement poses a significant obstacle to CCM’s plans.

While a defeat of CCM in the October elections is highly unlikely, the handling of the constitutional review process has generated significant antagonism. Opposition parties have found common cause in denouncing the ruling party’s resolute defence of the political status quo. Even if the referendum proceeds, politicking will have undermined the stature and popular espousal of the new constitution. President Kikwete will claim a constitutional legacy regardless. If the referendum is postponed, and it is left to his successor to revisit the constitutional question, the widely acclaimed draft proposed by the Warioba Commission would be a sound start point for the task. In the meantime, the constitutional controversy will ensure that Tanzania’s general election is the most keenly contested since the restoration of multi-party politics in 1992.

Nick Branson is Senior Researcher at Africa Research Institute

[message_box align=”right” title=”SOURCES” color=”none”]
1. Mwesiga Baregu, “Tanzania’s Hesitant and Disjointed Constitutional Reform Process”, Paper presented to conference on constitution-making processes, July 2000

2. Inconsequential constitutional amendments have been referred to as “patches” or viraka. See Chris Maina Peter, “Constitution Making Process in Tanzania: the Role of Civil Organisations – A Case Study prepared for the Civil Society and Governance in East Africa Project”, Dar es Salaam, December 1999, p.11

3. Chris Maina Peter, “Civil Society and Constitution Making in Tanzania: A Tall Order”, in Civil Society and Constitutional Reform in Africa, Mwengo, Harare, Zimbabwe (2014), p. 109

4. Mohabe Nyirabu, “The Multiparty Reform Process in Tanzania: The Dominance of the Ruling Party”, African Journal of Political Science, Volume 7, Number 2 (2002), p.104

5. Mohammed A. Bakari, “The Union Between Tanganyika and Zanzibar Revisited”, in Ulf Engel, Gero Erdmann, and Andreas Mehler (eds.) Tanzania Revisited: Political Stability, Aid Dependency, and Development Constraints, Institute of African Affairs, Hamburg (2000), p.145

6. “The President’s Sherry Party speech”, Dar es Salaam, 7 January 2011

7. Report of East African Consultative Theme on the Tanzania Constitutional Review Process, Kituo Cha Katiba: Eastern Africa Centre for Constitutional Development, Kampala, Uganda (2013), pp.21-22

8. Pesa Times, “CA to use both open and secret ballot”, 29 March 2014

9. Salma Maoulidi, “Proposed Constitution: Jinx or Providence?”, The Citizen, 31 December 2014

10. See Article 80 (ii) of the Constitution of Zanzibar [/message_box]

The post Party rules: Consolidating power through constitutional reform in Tanzania appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

Edward Paice is Director of Africa Research Institute and the author of Tip & Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).

• Cat and mouse
• Imperial rivalries
• Tipperary mbali sana sana
• The butcher’s bill
• “There came a darkness”
• A forgotten conflict
• Notes

Mahiwa-Nyangao is certainly not listed among the better-known battles of World War I. Even people living close by these settlements on the B5 road, which runs inland from the southern Tanzanian port of Lindi to Masasi, are unaware of the fighting between British and German colonial troops that raged in their neighbourhood almost a century ago. Yet here, in dense bush, one of the most ferocious actions of the entire East Africa campaign of the Great War took place over four days in October 1917.

Casualties among the 5,000-strong British force – including three battalions from the Nigerian Brigade, three from the King’s African Rifles, and the Bharatpur Infantry and 30th Punjabis from India – were estimated at between one third and a half. The 16 companies of German Schutztruppen opposing them – about 2,000 men – sustained 25% casualties. Equally importantly at this stage of the campaign, when all hopes of resupply from Germany had evaporated, the German units expended nearly a million rounds of precious ammunition during the battle.

The combined casualties at Mahiwa-Nyangao were comparable to those of the bloodiest battle in the Anglo-South African, or “Boer”, War of 1899-1902. In addition to being recognised in contemporary military histories as “one of the greatest battles ever fought in Africa”,¹ Mahiwa-Nyangao also prompted the universal acknowledgement that “the courage displayed on both sides by the African soldier, be he Nigerian, King’s African Rifles, or German askari was remarkable”.²

Almost a year after Mahiwa-Nyangao, as the war entered its final phase, German and British forces clashed at Lioma and Pere Hills, to the east of Lake Nyasa in what is today Mozambique. For displays of outstanding courage 28 Distinguished Conduct Medals were awarded to askari of the King’s African Rifles. This was one sixth of the total number awarded to the regiment during the Great War in East Africa – for a single battle. The citations make hair-raising reading. Three British officers were also awarded the Distinguished Service Order. One of them remarked of the askari: “they do not know what fear means; they have won the war for us in East Africa”.³

Although the losses at Mahiwa-Nyangao, the costliest battle of the Great War in East Africa, do not compare with those of the battles at Verdun or the Somme, the campaign was neither minor nor insignificant. The death toll among combatants and civilians was colossal. The privation suffered by the populations of a theatre of war encompassing an area of 750,000 square miles – three times the size of the German Reich – was far worse than in all but a handful of areas of Europe traversed repeatedly by fighting. The financial cost to the Allies was comparable to that of the Anglo-South African War.

1st King’s African Rifles occupying Longido in German East Africa early in 1916

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Cat and mouse

The first shot fired by a British unit anywhere in the Great War was from the rifle of an African soldier – Regimental Sergeant-Major Alhaji Grunshi of the Gold Coast Regiment – as an Anglo-French force invaded the German colony of Togoland (today’s Togo) on 7 August 1914. The last German troops to surrender did so in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) on 25 November 1918, fully two weeks after the Armistice in Europe.

Togoland fell to an Anglo-French force after a fortnight, German South-West Africa was taken by South African troops in mid-1915 and German resistance to British, French and Belgian colonial troops in Cameroon finally ended in March 1916. But the Allies’ attempt to overcome German East Africa from the six neighbouring British, Belgian and Portuguese colonies – and German resistance – was of an altogether different magnitude.

About 150,000 Allied combatant troops were deployed against an enemy whose strength never exceeded 25,000

At the outbreak of war in Europe the prospect of small colonial defence forces of a few thousand African troops in each colony waging war against each other was as remote as the likelihood of the “main show” lasting beyond Christmas 1914. But over the next four years more than 125,000 British imperial and South African troops served in the East Africa campaign, Portugal sent 20,000 men in a number of expeditionary forces to Portuguese East Africa (today’s Mozambique) and Belgium threw 15,000 men of the Congolese Force Publique into the fray.

In all, about 150,000 Allied combatant troops were deployed against an enemy whose strength never exceeded 25,000. The total ration strength of British imperial forces – combatant and non-combatant – in the final phase of the war was still over 110,000 men, despite the fact that the headcount of the enemy they were by then pursuing through Portuguese East Africa, back into German East Africa and then into Northern Rhodesia had dwindled to a few thousand.

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Imperial rivalries

Improbable as it seemed to civilians and colonial authorities alike in Africa in August 1914, an imperial war on the continent – a final, bloody phase of the “Scramble for Africa” – had been considered a very real possibility by European leaders from the mid-1890s. In May 1896, Joseph Chamberlain, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, warned the House of Commons that such a conflict would be “one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged…It would be a long war, a bitter war and a costly war…It would leave behind it the embers of a strife which I believe generations would hardly be long enough to extinguish.”

Three years after Chamberlain’s warning war did break out in Africa. Although it pitted Britain against the Boer republics of South Africa rather than a rival European power it was unmistakably imperialist in character and intent. Far from being the rapid and immediately profitable pushover envisaged by British hawks, the Anglo-South African war lasted two and a half years, involved the mobilisation of more than 400,000 British and colonial troops and left much of South Africa in ruins.

“In money and lives”, wrote the historian Thomas Pakenham, comparing the cost of the conflict to the Napoleonic Wars, “no British war since 1815 had been so prodigal.”⁴ The bill to the British Treasury was over £200m, £12bn in today’s money and ten times the value of the coveted output of the Transvaal gold mines in 1899. British casualties exceeded even those of the Crimean War half a century earlier; and the toll wrought on Afrikaner and African alike was immense.

None of Britain’s European rivals intervened in South Africa. But Germany, France and Russia roundly criticised the aggression, and incidents elsewhere in Africa exacerbated imperial tensions. In 1898, war between Britain and France over an incursion by the latter into the upper reaches of the Nile was only averted by the narrowest of margins. Belgium and Portugal were intensely suspicious – with good reason – that Britain, France and Germany meant to dispossess them of their vast African empires.

Many prominent and well-informed individuals even
believed that Africa was a prime cause of the whole conflict

Despite a period of Anglo-German entente in Africa immediately before the outbreak of war and a widespread belief in Africa that the palaver in Europe would not touch the continent, by the end of August 1914 the British government was planning military action against German ports and wireless stations in Africa and the creation of Mittelafrika, a “second Fatherland” straddling all of central Africa, had become a fundamental war aim of the German government.

The backdrop of three decades of imperial rivalry in Africa is crucial to understanding how the Great War came to be fought there as well as in Europe. Many prominent and well-informed individuals even believed that Africa was a prime cause of the whole conflict. At the Pan-African Conference in 1919, William DuBois, the African-American activist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, declared that “in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see [because] in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots not simply of war today but of the menace of wars tomorrow”.⁵ In similar vein, Sir Harry Johnston, the African explorer and administrator, was convinced that “the Great War was more occasioned by conflicting colonial ambitions in Africa than by German and Austrian schemes in the Balkans and Asia Minor”.⁶

Although the importance of Africa to imperial rivals meant that the war may have shared the same roots as the conflict in Europe, the conduct of the campaign in East Africa could not have been more different. For the most part it was as mobile as trench warfare was static, but equally attritional.

 

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Tipperary mbali sana sana*

When 50,000 British, Indian, South African and Belgian troops advanced into German East Africa from the north and east in early 1916 they did so on a front 1,500 miles long – nearly three times the distance from Calais to Nice. In 1918, when the fighting had moved to Portuguese East Africa, the area of operations for just 12,000 British and German combatants was two-thirds the size of France. That year a column of two King’s African Rifles battalions marched 1,600 miles in seven months, forded 29 large rivers and fought 32 engagements. In July alone it covered 330 miles virtually without rations, subsisting on what could be foraged. When the officers and men were inspected at the end of their stint in the field they were described as resembling the victims of famine. Their experience of the hardships of war in East Africa was typical, not exceptional.

In the north-west Belgian troops commanded by Colonel Tombeur advance towards Tabora, capturing the town in September 1916

The war in East Africa, in the words of the quartermaster of the Cape Corps, a unit raised from South Africa’s “coloured” population, “involved having to fight nature in a mood that very few have experienced and will scarcely believe”.⁷ The accounts of many a British – and German – combatant in East Africa attest to the fact that “there is no form of warfare that requires so much inherent pluck in the individual as bush fighting”; and to the terrible loneliness which “tested the nerves of the bravest”.⁸ In 1917 an officer in the 40th Pathans who had fought on the Western Front wrote: “what wouldn’t one give for the food alone in France, for the clothing and equipment. For the climate, wet or fine”.⁹

Disease was a bigger killer of British troops than combat, exacerbated by the poor supply of inadequate rations and a scandalously deficient medical establishment. The troop return of the Gold Coast Regiment is instructive. By the time it returned to West Africa at the end of its service the regiment had sustained 50% casualties in a force 3,800-strong. Those killed in action numbered 215 whereas 270 had died from disease. The wounded totalled 725, those invalided by disease 567.

Keeping troops supplied with adequate food and within reach of rudimentary medical attention was virtually impossible. The supply line for General Northey’s troops in Northern Rhodesia extended back to Durban, via Portuguese East Africa – the longest supply line of any British force in the Great War. As the availability of livestock for transport proved incapable by mid-1916 of matching the depredations of disease, the onus fell on the only alternative – human porterage. The mathematics are sobering. For example, the distance from the railhead to Northey’s front was 450 miles. This meant that 16,500 carriers were required to transport a single ton of supplies – enough to feed 1,000 askari and their camp-followers for one day – for the simple reason that 14,000 of them were needed to carry food for the column while 2,500 carried the food for the troops.

In the first two years of the war service as a military carrier was voluntary, short-term and remunerated nearly as well as service as an askari in the King’s African Rifles. But as the theatre of war and number of troops expanded, carriers’ pay was cut to a pittance and recruitment became in effect by force. The seeds of one of the greatest tragedies of the Great War were sown.

*“It’s a long way to Tipperary”: King’s African Rifles marching song

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The butcher’s bill

The official death toll among British imperial troops who fought in East Africa was 11,189 – a mortality rate of 9%. Total casualties, including the wounded and missing, were a little over 22,000. But the troops required more than a million carriers to keep them in the field. No fewer than 95,000 carriers died, bringing the total official death toll of the British war effort to more than 105,000. Among African soldiers and military carriers recruited from British East Africa alone, today’s Kenya, more than 45,000 men lost their lives. This equated to about one in eight of the country’s total adult male population.

The true figures were undoubtedly much higher. As many a British official admitted, “the full tale of mortality among native carriers will never be told”.¹⁰ Even 105,000 deaths is a sobering figure. It equals the number of British soldiers killed in the carnage on the Somme between July and November 1916. It is more than 50% higher than the number of Australian or Canadian or Indian troops who gave their lives in the Great War – and whose sacrifice is much more widely recognised. Indeed the death toll alone in East Africa is comparable to the combined casualties – the dead and wounded – sustained by Indian troops in the Great War.

The troops required more than a million carriers to keep them in the field

The scale of the catastrophe which befell the men employed or impressed as carriers did not attract immediate attention in Europe or Africa, not least because the compilation of statistics was delayed by the many problems of demobilisation. Even when the details began to emerge in the summer of 1919 the Chief of the Colonial Division of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference speculated that “the number of native victims…may be too long to give to the world and Africa”.¹¹

There were many British combatants in East Africa who paid tribute to the carriers on whom they were utterly dependent for survival. General Northey declared that he “would award the palm of merit to the [carriers]”.¹² Colonial officials warned the military establishment in 1917 of the consequences of seeking to mobilise virtually every adult male in the entire theatre of war. But when the mortality rate became common knowledge in Whitehall it was deemed a “bloody tale” best ignored, or even suppressed, as Britain sought colonial prizes in Africa at the Paris Peace Conference. As one colonial official put it, in particularly arresting terms: the conduct of the campaign “only stopped short of a scandal because the people who suffered the most were the carriers – and after all, who cares about native carriers?”¹³

The logistical challenges – and the solution – were no different for German commanders. No fewer than 350,000 men, women and children undertook carrier “duty” and it is inconceivable that the death rate among them was lower than one in seven. In contrast to the practice in British colonies, no records were kept for the carriers and, with the exception of those permanently attached to German units, they were not paid.

To exclude dead carriers from the death toll of the Great War in East Africa, as has been the case for a century, is unacceptable. At best it fails to recognise that the campaign could not have been fought without them; at worst, it is tantamount to depicting them as somehow not human.

As for the financial cost, when the contributions of India, South Africa and Britain’s African colonies were included the bill, in the words of one senior colonial official, “approached, if it did not actually exceed that of the Boer War”.¹⁴

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“There came a darkness”

The brunt borne by East Africans during the conflict was not limited to carrier service. In German East Africa newly harvested crops were routinely requisitioned by German colonial troops without payment. In 1916, in central Ugogo district, the effects were exacerbated by poor rainfall and the following year brought a famine during which one fifth of the population died. All told, an estimated 300,000 civilians perished in German East Africa, Ruanda and Urundi as a direct consequence of the authorities’ conduct of the war, excluding those conscripted for carrier service. This was an even higher death toll than that inflicted by German colonial troops during the suppression of the Maji-Maji rebellion a decade earlier.

Although the peacetime administration was less dislocated in the British colonies and protectorates, sowing and harvesting were disrupted almost everywhere – by the weather if not by the absence of men on carrier service or fighting. Food price inflation, tax rises and increasingly repressive land and labour laws compounded the hardships. “People in South Africa tell me they are sick of hearing about the German East Africa campaign; I’m sure that these poor natives in East Africa are pretty sick of it too”,¹⁵ wrote an officer in the 5th South African Infantry in late 1917.

The worst calamity of all was saved for last. For the surviving troops and carriers on both sides, and for the civilian populations prostrated by four years of fighting, October 1918 – “Black October” – brought something worse than total war. The Spanish influenza epidemic spread far more rapidly along the wartime lines of supply and communication than it would otherwise have done. This new curse was so virulent that a man could simply drop dead while on a short walk.

The official influenza death toll for British East Africa was 160,000. But it is unlikely that fewer than 200,000 died – a far greater loss of life than that caused by the war itself and nearly a tenth of the total population of the country. By the time the epidemic was over 1.5-2 million had died in sub-Saharan Africa in a matter of months. It was the final, diabolical confirmation that the Great War in East Africa was above all a war against nature and a humanitarian disaster without parallel in the colonial era. One phrase was common to many oral histories of the time: “there came a darkness”.

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A forgotten conflict

A post-war booklet declared that “if there had been no war in Europe the campaigns in the German colonies [in Africa] would have compelled the interest of the whole world”.¹⁶ The point is a good one. Using any yardstick but the war in Europe, the scale and scope of the Great War in East Africa, in particular, was gargantuan. It produced cameos of extraordinary courage and preposterous improvisation on land, on sea and in the air to rival anything witnessed in the “main shows”. Comparison with the Anglo-South African War is arguably more appropriate than comparison with the “main show” of the Great War, the Western Front.

The fighting in East Africa – and its consequences – also put the highfalutin’ talk of the European powers of their so-called “civilising mission” in Africa, and imperialism itself, on trial. In so doing it exposed unremitting colonial ambitions to adegree of scrutiny unsurpassed since the beginning of the Scramble for Africa. As William DuBois lamented at the Pan-African Conference, “twenty centuries after Christ, black Africa, prostrate, raped and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe”.

If there had been no war in Europe the campaigns in the German colonies [in Africa] would have compelled the interest of the whole world

In East Africa, the memorials and graveyards of the fallen attract little attention. Elsewhere Africa’s involvement in the Great War is all but forgotten. There is no askari or carrier monument in London. The best-known accounts of the war are fictional – C.S. Forester’s The African Queen, Wilbur Smith’s Shout at the Devil and William Boyd’s Booker Prize-nominated An Ice Cream War. If an episode is recalled at the mention of the conflict, it is usually of the thrilling adventure variety: Germany’s attempt to resupply the troops in East Africa by Zeppelin in 1917; the extraordinary British naval expedition to capture Lake Tanganyika; the thrills of the British operation to sink the German cruiser Königsberg in the Rufiji Delta in 1915; the determination and ingenious guerrilla tactics of the German commander, von Lettow-Vorbeck. Perhaps the disastrous British expeditionary force landing at Tanga in the first months of the war, a precursor of the disaster at the Dardanelles in 1915, might be vaguely familiar.

These episodes have their place. But they are corners of a much larger canvas. They should not be allowed to obfuscatethe reality of war to the detriment of the memory of those who fought and the suffering of the civilian population. The voices and memorials of the Great War in East Africa are predominantly European. But African combatants and carriers called upon to march twenty miles a day for months on end, in searing heat and torrential rain, subsisting on minimal rations and out of reach of medical resources, would have concurred with the sentiment expressed by one young British officer. In 1914 Lt Lewis had witnessed the slaughter of every single man in his half-battalion on the Western Front and had experienced the horrors of trench warfare. Sixteen months later, in a letter to his mother from the East African front, Lewis wrote: “I would rather be in France than here”.¹⁷

Left: Askari of 2/4 King’s African Rifles in Portuguese East Africa.
Right: M’Ithiria Mukaria, the oldest surviving veteran of the King’s African Rifles, in Isiolo (photographed by the author, February 2002)

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NOTES

1 Downes, W.D., With the Nigerians in German East Africa (Methuen, 1919), p.226

2 Haywood, A., and Clarke, F., The History of the Royal West African Frontier Force (Gale & Polden, 1964), p.235

3 Matson papers 5/14, p.159, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House

4 Pakenham, T., The Boer War (Abacus, 1992), p.572

5 DuBois, W.E.B., The African Roots of War, Mary Dunlop Maclean Memorial Fund Publication No.3 (1915), p.714

6 African World Annual, 1919, p.29

7 Difford, I., The Story of the First Battalion Cape Corps (privately published, Cape Town, 1920), p.93

8 Sheppard, S.H., “Some Notes on Tactics in the East African Campaign”, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, February 1942, pp. 138-9

9 Thornton papers, Imperial War Museum

10 Duff, H., “White Men’s Wars in Black Men’s Countries”, National Review, Vol. 84 (1925), p.909

11 See Steer, G.L., Judgement on German Africa (Hodder & Stoughton, 1939), p.262

12 Northey papers, Imperial War Museum

13 CO/820/17, The National Archives

14 Duff, op. cit.

15 Lt Rice in The Nongqai, November 1918, p.508

16 See Foreword, Through Swamp and Forest: The British Campaigns in Africa, (privately printed, undated)

17 Lewis papers, letter dated 15 April 1916, Imperial War Museum

Other resources

Edward Paice interviewed by James Naughtie on BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme on 7 August 2014

Edward Paice guest speaker at King’s African Rifles dinner marking the centenary of the outbreak of World War I

The post How The Great War Razed East Africa – Edward Paice appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

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Tanzania and Senegal have long records of political stability. Both made peaceful transitions from single-party ‘African socialism’ to multiparty democracy, becoming favourites with foreign donors and development agencies.

Recent elections were declared free and fair by international observers, but the course of institutional reforms in each country has diverged. These notes compare the prospects for democratic institutions.

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In Tanzania:

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• New Standing Orders increased power of Bunge, the National Assembly
• Corruption enquiry forced resignation of Prime Minister Edward Lowassa
• Public Audit Act granted autonomy to Auditor General
• Governing party set up watchdog to monitor ‘loyalty’ of MPs

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In Senegal:

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• Election boycott by opposition handed parliament to incumbent party
• Speaker’s term cut to one year after clash with president
• Budget reports submitted several years late to parliament
• Multiparty system entrenched, opposition victory in local elections

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State of the nations Peace and stability in Tanzania and Senegal have attracted financial rewards. Tanzania receives more development aid per capita from the G8 group of industrialised nations than any other African country. Senegal, a secular Muslim democracy, retains generous bilateral support from the US. In September 2009, the American government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation announced a financial assistance package for Senegal worth US$540 million over five years. Each country
receives more donor funding per capita from Britain and France, respectively, than any of their other former colonies.

Neither country possesses oil or mineral reserves of strategic significance. Senegal has never experienced a coup, and there has been no serious internal strife in Tanzania since 1964. Despite religious and ethnic diversity, an enduring peace has withstood separatist movements in the southern Casamançe region of Senegal and on Zanzibar.

Tanzania’s legislative elections in 2005 were won by Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the ‘Party of the Revolution’ which has dominated Tanzanian politics since independence. But President Jakaya Kikwete’s campaign promises for more open and accountable government encouraged advocates of greater autonomy for Tanzania’s democratic institutions.

Also Read: Diehards and democracy: Elites, inequality and institutions in African elections

In Senegal, the main opposition parties boycotted legislative elections in June 2007 amid accusations of irregularities in the presidential election earlier in the year. The boycott consigned parliamentary opposition to just half a dozen MPs. The overwhelming majority of the Sopi, or Change, coalition has enabled it to centralise power at the expense of political institutions.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]Because of this president’s leadership and that of his two esteemed predecessors, if you want to see a country that is on the road to progress, go to Senegal. – Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State (1)[/quote]

The Tanzanian parliament has brought in legislation to empower key institutions, while its counterpart in Senegal has overseen a weakening of supervisory bodies. Yet Senegalese voters have been able to elect an opposition party to power. While Tanzania’s reforms have been sanctioned by a party that has been in power since independence, they have not secured the unanimous support of CCM’s members.

Tanzania

Political inheritance

At independence, Senegal and Tanzania’s first leaders argued that political stability would be threatened by multiparty democracy. Julius Nyerere – Tanzania’s Mwalimu, or Teacher – established a single party state embracing ‘African socialism’. By the early 1980s Nyerere’s policy of villagisation and collective farming, Ujamaa or Familyhood, had failed.

Tanzania became heavily dependent on foreign donors who urged multiparty democracy. Nyerere stepped down voluntarily in 1985 and his successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, oversaw the transition to a plural system. Tanzania’s political framework is a hybrid of presidential and British parliamentary models. Executive power is vested in the president, but the daily business of government is conducted by ministers who, following the Westminster system, retain their parliamentary seats.

Since the introduction of multiparty polls in 1992, Tanzanian opposition parties have won fewer seats in each successive election. None has secured more than 15% the number of seats in Bunge gained by CCM. In 2005, the two largest opposition parties, Civic United Front and Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo(CHADEMA), secured 22.5% of the vote but only 42 of 323 seats. Independent candidates are not permitted to stand for election.

The election of Samuel Sitta as Speaker ofBunge in 2005 by an overwhelming majority of MPs reflected an appetite for reform among parliamentarians. Sitta, a former minister for justice and constitutional affairs, has led a drive to improve the ‘oversight’ and ‘challenge’ functions of Bunge. According to Sitta: “The ideal situation is to have the teeth and also to have the meat to chew on.” (3) Two high-profile corruption investigations were concluded without interference.

BoT and Richmond

In early 2008, opposition MPs played a leading role in bringing allegations of corruption at the Bank of Tanzania to the attention of Bunge – a story covered extensively by the independent media. The exposure of fraudulent payments worth US$120 million to 22 local firms led to the sacking of the bank’s governor, Daudi Ballali. Thirteen people were arrested and charged by state prosecutors with fraud, conspiracy and theft in November 2008. Hearings began in June 2009.

Bunge, and CCM MPs, were responsible for uncovering the Richmond Development Company scandal in 2007. Concerns raised by William Shelukindo, chairman of the Trade and Investment Committee, prompted Samuel Sitta to appoint a select committee to investigate a contract for emergency electrical generating capacity awarded to Richmond. Led by lawyer and CCM MP Harrison Mwakyembe, the committee reported its findings within a month of the exposure of the Bank of Tanzania scandal. Prime Minister Edward Lowassa and two other ministers implicated in the findings resigned and cabinet was dissolved.

Democratic Dodoma

The appointment of the Richmond select committee was made possible by a revision of the Standing Orders which regulate the working of Bunge. Reforms adopted in 2007 encourage greater parliamentary debate and enhance the supervisory role of parliamentary committees. Previously, any request from MPs for a committee of enquiry was readily quashed by the ruling party. In 2006 no request for any kind of investigation was proposed in parliament.

Other reforms incorporated in the new Standing Orders give MPs a larger role in law-making, and require the prime minister to appear regularly in Bunge for Prime Minister’s Questions. The creation of a new National Assembly Fund has assigned control of the parliamentary budget to a Commission of Parliament chaired by the Speaker. A new Corporate Action Plan for parliament will set priorities for Bunge, backed by a ‘Democratisation Fund’ to which the World Bank contributed US$19m in 2008.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]The National Assembly Fund is a sign that the government has accepted that parliament  should be completely independent. – Samuel Sitta, Speaker of Bunge (4)[/quote]

Under the new Standing Orders, the report of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) must be debated by Bunge. The PAC reports to Bungewith an analysis of the annual report of the Controller and Auditor General (CAG), followed by a two-day debate in parliament. Previously, no such discussion was required. The CAG is empowered to take legal action against suspected public sector fraudsters.

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Three new committees – the Local Authorities Accounts Committee, the Public Investments Committee, and the Public Organisations Accounts Committee – have been set up to increase parliamentary oversight of state spending. In the Westminster tradition, all three accounting bodies are headed by members of the opposition. A new Public Audit Act, processed under a presidential certificate of urgency in July 2008, established the financial and managerial autonomy of the National Audit Office under Auditor General Ludovick Utouh.

Senegal

Democratic Dakar

Léopold Senghor, Senegal’s poet president and founder of the Négritude movement, adopted a less radical version of African socialism at independence than Tanzania’s Nyerere. But economic dependence on groundnut exports, compounded by falling prices and drought, proved as damaging as Ujamaa. Senegal also became reliant on foreign aid, while donors pressed for democratic reform. In 1981, Senghor became the first African president to step down voluntarily. His protégé, prime minister Abdou Diouf, oversaw the transition to multiparty elections.

As the administrative and commercial centre of  l’Afrique occidentale française, the collective term for France’s eight West African colonies, Senegal inherited a framework of political institutions from its former colonial power. Effectively, power rests with the president – as in Tanzania. But ministers can be selected from outside the ranks of elected officials. Those appointed from within parliament must surrender their seats to a suppléant, or replacement. French remains the official language for government business, although fewer than one in four Senegalese speak it fluently.

In 2000, Abdou Diouf lost the presidential election and relinquished power without protest to Abdoulaye Wade, after four terms as president. The reform of electoral institutions, begun in the late 1970s, culminated in the defeat of the Parti Socialiste, the governing party since independence – a political landmark dubbed ‘the coming of age of democracy’ in Senegal. The election was regarded as one of the most free and fair to have taken place in Africa.

Senegal’s democratic credentials were called into doubt in 2007. The main opposition parties boycotted legislative elections in the hope of forcing their cancellation and prompting an enquiry into the conduct of the presidential elections earlier that year. The gamble proved to be a miscalculation. Wade’s Sopi coalition took 131 of 150 seats in the National Assembly.

A malleable constitution

A new constitution was introduced by Wade’s government in 2001 to fulfil promises for reform made during his presidential campaign, but it has undergone regular revision. Wade and his coalition have amended the constitution 11 times since the beginning of 2007. Amendments have eroded the independence of parliament and increased presidential powers. The constitution remains vulnerable to political interference because most articles can be amended by a three-fifths majority vote in parliament.

The Senate, the second chamber of parliament, was abolished in 2001 – discredited for its record as a means of distributing patronage under the Parti Socialiste. In 2007, it was reinstated. Of 100 seats, 65 are directly appointed by the president. In its former incarnation, only one fifth of the members were presidential appointees.

In 2008, the term of the President of the National Assembly – equivalent to Bunge’s speaker – was reduced from five years to one by constitutional amendment. Incumbent Macky Sall, a former prime minster and campaign director for Abdoulaye Wade, was subsequently sacked. Sall had summoned Wade’s son, Karim, in his capacity as President of the National Agency of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (l’Anoci), to answer questions about construction sites for the 2008 OIC summit.

Budgetary oversight

The Cour des Comptes, the administrative court of specialised magistrates charged with preparing the annual report on public accounts for parliament, has not received details of government expenditure for 2007 and 2008.6 The loi du règlement, a law which should be passed annually, confirming parliament’s approval of public accounts, has not been passed since 1999. Some newer MPs remain unaware of the requirement to pass such a law.

An attempt by the Cour des Comptesto expand its mandate and resources appeared to have gained presidential support, but in 2008 the proposed legislation was withdrawn by the government following an inspection of Karim Wade’s l’Anoci (7). Meanwhile l’Inspection Générale de l’État, a body which answers directly to the president and was charged with monitoring public accounts prior to the creation of the Cour des Comptes in 1999, continues to work in parallel.

Presidents, parties…

In the absence of any split in CCM ranks, the governing party will retain power in Tanzania for the foreseeable future. Approval ratings for President Kikwete have dropped by almost a fifth since 2005, but he remains six times more popular than his closest rival, CHADEMA’s Freeman Mbowe (8). Civic United Front and CHADEMA, the main opposition parties, will remain minority players.

In contrast, Senegal’s multiparty system is firmly entrenched. Abdoulaye Wade’s victory in the 2000 presidential election demonstrated that voters could bring an opposition to power. In the 2009 local elections, the electorate once again backed an opposition coalition. Benno Siggil Senegaal, Wolof for ‘united to boost Senegal’, won in all but one of the cities. Against a backdrop of rising food prices and unemployment, the ballot was regarded as a test of popular support for Sopi’s performance ahead of presidential and legislative polls in 2012.

Speculation that President Wade is grooming his son Karim as his successor has provoked dissent in Senegal, but few voters fear an illegal transfer of power. On his first foray into politics in 2009, Karim Wade, who speaks French as a first language and is not fluent in Wolof, failed to win Dakar’s mayoral contest. He was subsequently appointed to his father’s cabinet as minister of state for international cooperation, urban and regional planning, air transport, and infrastructure.

…and institutions

Reforms in Tanzania have raised hopes of greater transparency in the allocation of national resources and donor funds. Procedural and legal changes reduced institutional dependence on the executive. The new Standing Orders and Public Audit Act increased the autonomy of key oversight bodies. Their work, notably in exposing corruption, has been widely reported in Tanzania’s vibrant press.

Institutional reform in Tanzania will depend on continued support from CCM parliamentarians. MPs who advocate further reforms believe they have the tacit support of President Kikwete, or at least that he will not impede them. Samuel Sitta, Bunge’s reforming Speaker, remains unhappy about the influence of party whips in limiting debate: “In the early years of the one-party state we used to have a much freer atmosphere in terms of discussions in parliament, because party loyalty was not an issue.” (9) He would welcome a legal challenge to test party rules against Article 100 of the constitution which guarantees free speech in parliament.

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The conduct of some CCM MPs in recent days shows that there is neither protocol nor discipline. MPs sometimes openly confront ministers. The NEC will not hesitate to expel such members from the party and remove them from their leadership posts. – John Chiligati, CCM ideology and publicity secretary (10)

The reform agenda has threatened the hegemony of the party elite, causing ructions within CCM. In August 2009, the issue of party discipline was prominent in a ‘dialogue’ between Samuel Sitta and CCM’s National Executive Committee. A three-man team led by former president Ali Hassan Mwinyi was appointed by the committee to ‘monitor’ and ‘moderate the conduct’ of MPs. In the ensuing media ferment, opposition leaders and CCM colleagues voiced concern that the party was attempting to gag parliament.

Senegal’s institutions have proved unequal to the will of an executive with a overwhelming parliamentary majority. The governing party has modified to its own advantage the constitution it introduced in 2001. The electoral code has been altered repeatedly, the Senate has been re-established, and the term of the Speaker has been radically reduced. Other institutions have been similarly adapted, abolished or reinstated, according to the priorities of the executive (11).

The case for a more resilient constitution features prominently among recommendations drawn up by the committee of the Assises Nationales, a public consultation organised by opposition and civil society groups. Its report proposes that constitutional amendments which influence the role of state institutions should be put to national referendum.

A win for Sopi in the 2012 legislative elections is unlikely to reverse the trend of weakening institutions. The dismissal of former Speaker Macky Sall and reduction of the Speaker’s term to one year discourage would-be reformers. The expulsion of two Sopi MPs, perceived to be allies of Sall, demonstrates that dissent will not be tolerated in the governing coalition. L’alternance, the democratic transfer of power, is a source of pride in Senegal. But to nurture democratic institutions will require determination and support from parliament, a task which has proved harder than the election of a new government.

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1. Speech delivered at signing of the MCC financial package to Senegal, September 16th 2009.
2. Parliament of Tanzania website.
3. Interview with Mark Ashurst, October 2008.
4. A Parliament with Teeth, Africa Research Institute, 2008.
5. The Ibrahim Index of African Governance, 2008.
6. Magistrate of the Cour des Comptes, October 2009.
7. Magistrate of the Cour des Comptes, interview with Aoiffe O’Brien, April 2008.
8. Synovate opinion poll, August 2009.
9. A Parliament with Teeth, Africa Research Institute, 2008.
10. The Citizen, August 19th 2009.
11. Assane Thiam, 2007. “’Une Constitution, ça se révise!’Relativisme Constitutionnel et état de droit au Sénégal.” Politique Africaine108, December 2007.

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