Tanzania is anything but 'a beacon of democracy’

It is not surprising, in a country with a patronage system as firmly entrenched as Tanzania’s, to find apologists for President John Magufuli among the intelligentsia.

The piece was not a product of the sinister Western media with its neo-colonial agenda of dirtying Tanzania’s image, as Mukiza would have us believe.

It was written by Tundu Lissu, a member of parliament, and the chief whip and Justice spokesman for the main opposition party, Chadema. He is also the past president of the Tanzanian Bar Association.

Lissu built his career as a grassroots environmental activist taking on the big Western mining companies over land rights, forced removals of communities and other community struggles.

He has first-hand knowledge of the human rights abuses that he writes about: As a lawyer, he has represented dozens of Tanzanians who have been unlawfully detained, tortured and beaten. Magufuli’s victims that Mukiza, in his ivory tower, tells us do not exist are Lissu’s clients.

Being an MP did not protect Lissu from Magufuli’s abuses of power: He was arrested six times and charged with sedition for calling the president a “petty dictator.”

But when this did not silence the outspoken MP, he was gunned down outside his house, miraculously surviving 16 bullet wounds from assailants sent to finish him off for good. The good news is that last week, after multiple surgeries and intensive rehab, he was able for the first time in 20 months to walk without crutches.

Mukiza reassures us that the shooting was, according to the police, “very unfortunate” and something that “can happen in any country”.

Actually, the circumstances of the shooting were extremely suspicious.

Lissu was gunned down in his driveway in a heavily guarded parliamentary compound. The security guards who were normally on duty were absent. The CCTV footage is missing.

It was a targeted hit: Not a single shot was fired at Lissu’s driver. The driver is in hiding outside Tanzania and has not made himself available for questioning by the police because he fears for his life.

Lissu’s shooting came two hours after Magufuli said on television, in full view of the nation, that “when the country is engaged in an economic war, those who betray the country and oppose the struggle… don’t deserve to survive”.

Later, when parliament refused to pay Lissu’s medical costs, the speaker of parliament revealed that it was Magufuli himself who had withheld authorisation of funds for his treatment.

I have news for him, something we learnt in South Africa during the dark days of apartheid: State-sponsored thugs don’t hand out business cards.

These attacks on Magufuli’s critics are not isolated examples.

Bernard Saanane, the personal assistant to Chadema leader Freeman Mbowe, went missing in 2016 shortly after he questioned Magufuli’s academic credentials. He was never seen again.

The journalist Azory Gwanda disappeared in 2017 after exposing dozens of killings south of Dar es Salaam carried out by the security forces.

Mukiza wants us to believe that the threat to the rule of law was that Quintal and Momo were working in Tanzania on tourist visas, not the permanent removal from society of the journalist who was reporting on mass killings.

What all these and many other incidents have in common is that despite claims that the crimes are being investigated, the police have not even bothered to round up and charge the usual suspects.

Mukiza’s claim that Tanzania is a beacon of democracy is extremely questionable.

While Tanzania has all the trappings of democracy, including a constitution providing for multiparty democracy and a bill of rights, and made great strides during the previous decades, Magufuli has effectively banned opposition politics since he came to power in 2016.

All opposition public meetings and rallies have been prohibited and even Central Committee meetings of the main opposition party Chadema have been raided and shut down.

Dozens of opposition members are in jail or on trial. MPs are frequently arrested for speeches made under privilege of parliament.

Many are charged with sedition, a law that has been on the statute books since British colonial times, but never before applied with such zealousness. It is basically defined as “making or publishing any statement that makes the government look bad”. Good luck in trying to be in opposition if is against the law to criticise the government.

The leader of the opposition, Freeman Mbowe, was recently released by the high court after being imprisoned for four months with another Chadema MP, Esther Mathiko, because he missed a court date where he was facing charges of sedition. Mbowe has been the victim of severe harassment over a number of years.

If Mmusi Maimane or Julius Malema were jailed for four months and charged for saying unpleasant things about the ANC we would not be proclaiming that South Africa is a beacon of democracy.

The most egregious example of the ruling party’s contempt for democracy is Zanzibar, an integral part of the union. During the elections in 2015, it soon became clear that the opposition Civic United Front was winning what all observers, including SADC and the East African Community, declared to be the best-run elections yet on the islands.

How would South Africans react if the ANC, without even the flimsiest fig-leaf of an excuse, cancelled the Western Cape elections because the Democratic Alliance was winning?

The “irregularities” have to this day never been explained and the opposition boycotted a rerun, expecting that it would be rigged to produce a different result.

Mukiza carefully parses his words when he mentions that no journalists are in detention for a “common felony”. I suspect that his definition of common felony excludes journalists and social media activists who are in jail under the Cybercrimes Act for criticising Magufuli and the ruling party, even in the most innocuous terms, on Facebook and WhatsApp.

Mukiza does not parse his words in seeking to justify the persecution of members of the LGBTQ community.

Mukiza conjures up a Magufuli who is a giant casting a “global shadow” and mentions a number of public and private projects initiated by him that are under way. There is no space here to respond these claims, some of which Lissu already dealt with in his piece, and no doubt Magufuli is chalking up some achievements.

But Mukiza surely cannot have spoken to international investors, local businesspeople, the development community and donor agencies, civil society, the leaders of the Catholic Church and the Muslim community or European and American diplomats if he believes people think things are going well in Tanzania.

Mukiza and his ilk would have us believe that this hostility is part of some sinister Western agenda because Magufuli is standing up to the imperialists.

The language of patriotism and radicalism parlayed by the Mukizas of the world is a very thin disguise for Tanzania’s dependency on those he denounces as imperialists.

Or it could reflect the fact that the image of Tanzania still benefits from the legacy of its former President Julius Nyerere, whose greatness is evidenced by the fact that Tanzania remained largely peaceful and free from tribalism for decades as its neighbours staggered through coups, wars and ethnic conflict.

Tanzania under Nyerere was a good friend of the liberation struggle and the bonds of deep affection with South Africa remain strong. There is incredible promise in the two countries working together.

It is not, as Mukiza alleges, Daily Maverick that is working to destroy the image of Tanzania. It is the crude authoritarianism of the Magufuli regime.