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Where should CCM-NEC have met, Butiama or Zanzibar?
2008-03-29 09:26:12
By Ani Jozen
Plans were being finalized for the ruling party National Executive Committee to hold an auspicious meeting at Butiama, the birthplace of the late party founder, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.
They would be meeting at a house-cum-museum facility, and by virtue of meeting at that place, underline the party`s newfound leadership orientation, namely the fight against what is perceived as gross corruption.
It would initiate measures to anchor in party policies the ``separation of business from leadership.``
While it isn\'t clear that the top leadership of the party is quite happy with this projection of party policy and organizational inclination, it equally appears that it is seen as the only way to rejuvenate the party as it is now in the doldrums of popularity.
The sort of contest it recently faced at Kiteto, while it perhaps wasn`t cliff hanging for the candidate who finally won, had enough to place the party on alert that opposition sympathies are making serious inroads into public sympathies.
That may easily lead to start looking over the shoulder and adopt popular slogans.
The question that isn't being posed with the candour it should, or it is being taken for granted, is what sort of turn is needed at the moment, and on this account, the consensus is that a left turn is needed.
Indeed it isn`t a new turn but an affirmation of the 2005 turn during the CCM nomination process, where the thrust of public opinion was an unstated repudiation of economic reform, or `globalization.`
Fourth phase actions have adhered to this intuition, but its support gallery demands much more than token actions against globalization, urges wholesale changes.
The misconstrued issues about the supply of 100MW power generation facility and then electoral financing in 2005 which has cleverly been retained as mere large payments of cash from the central bank, have in a way provided much needed occasion to revert to the Leadership Code.
Most commentary on the upcoming NEC meeting, slated for Butiama, is clear on the intention and is upbeat on that event, since the consensus on policy has for nearly two decades blamed hardships on IMF-directed reforms.
A Leadership Code affects the mood for enterprise, not policy.
Were it that there is a school of thought in CCM which looks at the issue positively, it would probably be clear that the NEC is supposed to meet not in Butiama but in Zanzibar, not to restore the failed socialist drive of the late 1960s but give a new thrust to personal initiative and private enterprise.
It should be a conference that would look at the big issue of making enterprise come true, that land isn`t in private hands and thus credit is hampered, enterprises can`t get loans, Tanzanian firms can`t compete, etc. It then takes enormous steps forward to resolve the issue.
As a matter of fact, the government has signed, in a silent way rather than showing the public the full implications and opportunities that are opened by the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union, which Tanzania signed as part of the East African Community - or in clearer terms, as part of a forthcoming East African Common Market.
But that should not surprise anyone as recently, with the business sector looking forward to making progress in EACM discussions, it is a minister who tells them to examine the record in the East African Customs Union protocol first.
Does that mean they seek excuses to reject, or delay it?
Over the past legislative session, plenty was being urged by MPs about the way in which immigration is taking jobs from locals, that an intense drive to control that situation be mounted.
The government was lately in an affirmative tone on a nationwide identity card project, ostensibly to keep out immigrants from picking jobs meant for locals.
The fact that in a year or so we should formally start preparing for open markets when it comes to jobs, obtaining land or in selling goods, services does not arise.
Were it that the government and the ruling party are fully cognizant of the breadth of engagements that bind Tanzania to the outside world, they would see the importance of a correctional drive to sentiments and beliefs that underline media and legislative attitudes at present.
In the sphere of academics, the method has always been to treat these binding ties that Tanzania has developed with other countries in the region and multilaterally as a viewpoint in debate.
They don`t see it as a historical fact and a structuring aspect of national life that must be taken as it is.
There is plenty that the NEC needs to do to return the country to a minimum of serenity in the wake of what has been happening lately.
The Richmond saga in the legislature showed that MPs are fully incapable of telling a good deal from a bad one, and secondly, that it is impossible to please them in a commercial act of any kind.
Their committees will in a predictable manner discover that the beneficiary knew some top officials in the government and secondly, that such officials also stood to benefit.
On the basis of the two rules, making each MP an investigator for this or that scandal, indistinguishably from the commonest of tabloids - and where the media itself lacks a conservative news outlet that puts these claims into question - anarchy is gathering pace.
When the NEC plans to meet in Butiama to fully bless this slide into anarchy, instead of taking a trip to Zanzibar, to bless the coalition government pact and to reinforce economic reform, it is wasting time.
Urgent action is needed to stem the seeds of racial disharmony and weakening the government`s ability to legislate, or to conclude agreements, as a scandal hunting Parliament is ready to scuttle all such accords. Or does CCM need full anarchy to act?
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