Dar es Salaam.

A rise in reports of high level corruption in the country have led to a decline in President Jakaya Kikwete’s approval rating by 19 points in the last four years, a new survey shows.

The survey, conducted by Policy Research for Development (Repoa) in collaboration with Afrobarometer, between May and June 2012, indicates that the President’s job approval rating had decreased from 90 to 71 points between 2008 and 2012. This means his approval rating declined by about 20 per cent in the survey period.

Also, 7 out of 10 people who participated in the survey associated the President’s Office with corruption, an upward trend compared to 5 out of 10 people in 2008, the survey shows.

Mr Kikwete, who was recently re-elected CCM national chairman, when he spoke to hundreds of Dar es Salaam’s supporters recently, admitted that many people have lost faith in the ruling party due to various negative issues, such as corruption.He said improving the party’s image would be the foremost task of the new secretariat, noting that CCM would conduct a survey to establish why it has lost popularity and strive to rectify the situation.

Called Afrobarometer Round 5 Tanzania Survey, released yesterday in Dar es Salaam, the survey indicates that 90 per cent of the people interviewed disapproved of the way the President performed his job for the past 12 months.
The Afrobarometer is a comparative series of public attitude surveys, covering up to 35 African countries in Round 5 (2011-2013). It measures public attitudes on democracy and its alternatives, evaluations of the quality of governance and economic performance.

Presenting the report, Repoa director of governance and service delivery research Jamal Msami said on average, there were more people, both in relative and absolute terms, in the year 2012 than in 2008, who view the government as having underperformed in handling the economy. Besides the economy and food shortages, the significance of social services in underlining faith in the government was more pronounced with the recurrence of shortfalls in the services in the list of most important areas in dire need of attention.

“Generally, the composite assessment of the government’s performance notwithstanding, the 2012 survey yields more negative responses and fewer corresponding positive ones in almost all aspects of government conduct compared to 2008,” he said.

In spite of an adverse evaluation of administration’s performance, Tanzanians remain optimistic that the government can deliver on key problems afflicting them within the next five years.

In a component introduced for the first time in this year’s survey, when asked about the likelihood of the central government solving the most important problems, two thirds (66 per cent) of respondents remain confident on the government’s likelihood to solve them, compared to less than 1 in 10 who remained overly pessimistic on the government’s ability to deliver.

At the national level, about 8 per cent of adults reported that their children received free food at school, an observation that shows the school food programme is a success as a motivational element in school enrolment.

With 66 per cent of adults complaining at least once about the quality of teaching in public primary schools, this year’s survey provides ample grounds for a critical rethink of performance enhancing strategies in Tanzania
Comparison of perceptions between this year’s survey and round 4 of the survey in 2008 reveals on the overall general adverse assessment of personal living conditions.

“Not surprisingly, almost two thirds (64 per cent) of all adult Tanzanians didn’t have a job that paid them a wage compared to 56 per cent in 2008,” he added.

In both 2012 and 2008, more than half (53 and 54 per cent respectively) of all adults claimed to have gone without enough food to eat at least once in the preceding 12 months.

Other areas that the report has highlighted include law and order in need of scrutiny as crime is on the up with seven fold increase in physical assaults in four years from 6 per cent to 43 per cent.

The report also established that close to 9 in 10 (88 per cent) of Tanzanians experienced shortage of medicines and other medical supplies at least once within the past year in a public facility.
Tanzanians perceive they are worse off today than four years ago, and welfare discontent increased from 55 per cent to 65 per cent in the past four years.