Today, Tanzania’s entire political class is up for sale

Several years ago I wrote an article in the local press that put forward a simple hypothesis: If it is true that whatever is taken to the marketplace is for sale and that what is for sale, for the right price, will find a buyer, then our politics will soon find a buyer.

Not your regular retail buyer who, in commerce with your regular retail seller, transacts a village government here, a council there and a parliamentary constituency elsewhere, but a huge, strategic investor who wants seriously in and has the wherewithal to acquire a country lock, stock and barrel.

Today, it is obvious that Tanzania’s politics has been undergoing a sea-change, from the long-gone days of relative innocence, when not only was it obscene to flaunt your money as inducement for people to vote for you, but the very suggestion of personal affluence was frowned upon and could be a drag on political ambition.

There are no prizes for guessing who the national and international incarnation of this era was, but suffice it to say that just a decade or so after Julius Nyerere’s death, the country he founded is now mired in a politics that even his worst fears could not have conjured up.

This is the politics of the souk, the bazaar, the rialto, wherein all is sold and all is bought, and where soon national sovereignty will be coming under the hammer.

This is what I said in that ignored article, whose substance can suffer repeating:

Since our electoral politics is a matter of selling and buying, and since we have hardly any serious domestic potential buyer, soon our rialto will attract external bidders with the kind of financial muscle that our Lilliputian local players can never dream of matching.

The bidder could be from anywhere: Arabia, where oil seems to grow out of the ground in sheikhs’ backyards, or America, where billionaire corporates give away their billions and the latter always find a way of getting them back.

Or it could be hyphenated mongrels conceived in illegitimate beds offshore.

They could act alone or in concert; they would certainly rely on domestic actors — those who are currently involved in our petty trade in votes would be the best candidates — as commission agents, providers of local knowledge, bid placers and notaries public.

The maths would be incredibly simple. How much do the most enterprising candidates pay currently to win a councillorship? Maybe $10,000. How many councils are there?

Maybe 200 countrywide. Okay, let’s take only half of them so as not to arouse too much suspicion.

After all, serious commerce does not transact at that level. So, multiply 100 councils by $10,000, and you get $1 million to buy half the country’s district councils.

Of course, parliamentary seats cost a little bit more, and the going price, officially sanctioned, is $50,000 per seat.

Of the 300-something seats, we need perhaps 250 to have enough weight to throw about, and at that price this transaction will set the investor back $12.5 million.