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John Magufuli, known as “the bulldozer”, will win today’s presidential election in Tanzania. Of that there is very little doubt.
But he won’t win them fairly. His economic policy over the past five years may have raised living standards, but his government has also jailed political critics, shut down newspapers and banned opposition candidates from running for office.
However, such an approach appears to backfire and galvanize the opposition Chadema party. Its leader, Tundu Lissu, has drawn record crowds of supporters even though they risk being tear gassed by police, and opponents of the president, whose party has ruled Tanzania since independence in 1961, are turning bolder.
“In this campaign, Tanzanians have been saying that they deserve certain rights and that they will not be intimidated by them so easily,” says a local political analyst. “We are seeing how far we can take this democratic notion.”
Johannesburg
On the first full day that he was president of Tanzania, in November 2015, John Magufuli entered the country’s Finance Ministry in Dar es Salaam unannounced and began asking questions.
“Who sits there?” he asked, according to a local news report, pointing to one of the many empty desks at the ministry. “And who sits there, and there, and where are they now?”
The message was clear. If you worked for the Tanzanian government and you didn’t work hard, you were getting warned. Over the next three years, the Magufuli administration cut 16,000 “ghost workers” from the government payroll, canceled trips abroad for public officials, and diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars from an Independence Day celebration to prevention efforts. of cholera.
And the austerity of his government, he often repeated, was enriching Tanzania. In 2019, the World Bank proclaimed the country “lower middle income” for the first time in its history.
But Dr. Magufuli’s well-earned reputation as “the bulldozer” extended beyond a no-nonsense approach to corruption and bureaucratic bloat. He also began shutting down the media and jailing critics. It cracked down on Tanzanians it deemed immoral, banning female contraceptives, banning pregnant girls from school, and passing laws restricting the rights of LGBTQ people.
Dr. Magufuli appears poised to win again today in a presidential election plagued by accusations of repression and intimidation from his opponents.
But if the poll results are more or less a foregone conclusion, observers say the election still marks an important moment for the country. In particular, the bold support that many Tanzanians have shown the opposition, despite the risks, suggests that Dr. Magufuli’s crushing mix of economic austerity and political repression has begun to backfire, driving more and more Tanzanians away from a party that has ruled the country. country since its independence in 1961.
“Tanzanians have been asked to choose between economic growth and civil liberties, and many of them rightly see this as an unfair choice,” says Ringisai Chikohomero, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, who studies the Tanzania politics. “So there are many … who celebrate being lifted out of poverty, but the consequence of that is that they have also started demanding more when it comes to political freedoms.”
Those demands, during this election campaign, have been loud, with thousands of Tanzanians attending opposition rallies. “We are seeing how far we can take this democratic notion. We are asking what we want for our country, what kind of government, what kind of leadership, “says Elsie Eyakuze, political analyst and columnist in Dar es Salaam.
These questions have generally been met with severe repression. Over the past five years, Dr. Magufuli’s government has shut down publications and arrested journalists who criticize his policies. When the International Monetary Fund questioned data pointing to booming economic growth last year, Magufuli simply blocked the release of his report.
Then, during the coronavirus pandemic, the government suspended and fined publications and journalists who challenged its official line – that it had fully contained the virus in May. (In fact, it had simply stopped registering new cases.) Before the elections, Dr. Magufuli banned most of the election observers and assigned foreign journalists who were government minders to monitor them. Earlier this week, police killed three people in an anti-government demonstration on the island of Zanzibar.
Meanwhile, Dr. Magufuli’s administration has tightened its grip on the country’s courts, limiting citizens’ ability to sue over unconstitutional laws and making it possible to imprison and deny bail to people accused of certain crimes, a tactic. It is frequently used to wear down critics of the government.
“An election is not won on voting day. You win the day you start to make it impossible for the opposition to compete on an equal footing, ”says Fatma Karume, former director of the Tanganyika Law Society, the Tanzanian mainland bar association. She herself has savored the ire of the government: she was permanently barred for filing an “unprofessional and disrespectful” case against the country’s attorney general.
At the same time, support for the opposition cannot be measured by its share of the final vote count alone, he says. Throughout the election season, Tanzanians have shown open support for Dr. Magufuli’s main challenger, Tundu Lissu, of the Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (Chadema) party, who was the target of an assassination attempt by unknown attackers in 2017 and campaigned this year with a bullet still lodged near his spine.
Mr. Lissu drew large crowds to his campaign rallies despite attempts by the government to suppress them by firing tear gas, briefly suspending his campaign in early October for using “seditious language” and arresting seven members of the youth wing of the opposition for “ridiculing the anthem and flag” when they sang the Tanzanian national anthem while raising their party flag.
The level of support for Chadema and Mr. Lissu is almost impossible to measure, given the lack of credible and independent polls in Tanzania. However, the party obtained 42% of the votes in the last elections, whose fairness was also questioned, and many point to the government’s suppression of opposition rallies and the refusal to allow many parliamentary and municipal candidates from the opposition to stand in today’s election as evidence is concerned about its growing power.
“In this campaign, Tanzanians have been saying that they deserve certain rights and that they will not be intimidated by them so easily,” says Ms Eyakuze, a political analyst. “So if they want to attend a rally, they are not willing to give up their right to do so just because the government is making it difficult for them.”
Ms. Karume says she is hopeful that such gestures of support for the opposition will not escape Dr. Magufuli if he is elected to a second term.
“I hope you recognize that people are demanding that you change course,” he says. “Not selfishly, but for the future of the country.”
