{UAH} Allan/Pojim/WBK: WHAT OTHERS SAY: Tanzania’s Magufuli, lessons for Kenya - Opinion/Editorial | The Citizen
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WHAT OTHERS SAY: Tanzania's Magufuli, lessons for Kenya - Opinion/Editorial
I have fielded some very puzzled questions about President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto's move to form a new party on which they will contest the next elections.
Their confusion comes, among other things, from the fact that the new party would be called the Jubilee Party, and yet the two leaders already have the Jubilee Alliance coalition with which they are ruling.
"What is the difference?" they ask. Even in Kenya, there are many people who look at this party flipping and flopping with a great degree of frustration, and accuse politicians of being only obsessed with "election vehicles", not party building.
However, there is always a more fundamental reason for why things happen, and if we look hard enough we will find them.If you exclude coups, uprisings, and revolutionary war, in democratic or half-democratic polities, there are really only three ways politicians gain power.
One is through what we might loosely call the "dividend of history". In Africa, we saw this with the many leaders, like Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda and Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta. They were "founding fathers" that "brought independence".
They and their parties earned their continued place in power from that historical role which, after independence, became the "nation building" project.
In Tanzania, the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) – together with the Botswana Democratic Party and Algeria's Front for National Liberation (FLN) – is one of the most successful 1960s independence parties in Africa that has cashed in for very long.
CCM has had an unbroken run at the top for over 50 years, although it most its latter-day comment comes less from championing independence, and more from the Nyerere-led Ujaama nation-building project.
The second way is by leveraging the advantages of incumbency. Like a marriage, however troubled, you are likely to stay together longer the longer you stay together. Voters – especially lazy and risk averse ones – feel safe with the devil they know, than gamble on a pretender angel.
In Africa, though, incumbency is often abused – the big man of the day is able to tap into state resources, exploit his or her edge in state media, and state largesse – a road here, a new school there, and some tractors and fertiliser over there – to buy their way into power. The third way is the ability of a party or leader for renewal and/or reinvention. Thus a military ruler can return to stand for elections as a reformed democrat and win, or a party tainted by corruption, like CCM in Tanzania, can present itself as the new anti-corruption force and offer an unlikely leader, and so you end up with a President John Magufuli! Kenyan electoral politics these days plays almost exclusively in this third category, thus since 1997 no electoral formation has gone into two elections exactly the same. Even if the name has remained the same, the insides have changed, as in the case of CORD.
The reason for this is that as society and its challenges change and evolve political currents driving how its governed can dry up, and thus the historical dividend ended in Kenya in 2002, and its vestiges buried with the new constitution of 2010.
At first it might seem that these variations don't make a big difference. After all, as they say, African politics is all the same.
But they do. On one hand, a party like CCM that has been around forever cannot just sit on its historical laurels. It still needs to offer something "new" and find fresh sources of life.
Since it can't change policy much, it offers something new through its presidents. It's in this way we got Magufuli who, in his early days, has turned out to be delightfully eccentric and a tree shaker. Hopefully he won't tire soon.
In Kenya, on the other hand, renewal and reinvention comes in the form of new parties and alliances, but the men and women remain the same, so opposition leader Raila Odinga, Kenyatta, Ruto, have been and will be around for a while. Often, election politics is the highest form of misdirection. In the film Swordfish Gabriel (John Travolta) explains it rather well:
"Have you ever heard of Harry Houdini?...He was an artist. He could make an elephant disappear in the middle of a theatre filled with people, and do you know how he did that? Misdirection.
"Misdirection. What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes".
The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter@cobbo3
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