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

In the face of all this, the leadership within the ruling party appears clueless.

Despite repeated declarations that those who engaged in corruption and other malpractices would be severely dealt with, the party has proven singularly inept at dealing with the gangrene that is wasting it.

In a feeble attempt to show it meant well, it outsourced its problems to the anti-corruption police, who made matters worse with their bull-in-a-china-shop approach.

There is more than just suspicion that the anti-corruption police is itself corrupt and that since it was attacked by a number of MPs in the outgoing parliament over its incompetence, and worse, it is generally seen as damaged goods, kicking up dust and raising a hue and cry simply to camouflage its impotence, and in the end doing someone else’s job.

The task of cleaning up the party’s stables is the party’s own, and outsourcing it to police organs is serious shirking on the part of chairman Jakaya Kikwete and his coterie of absentminded lieutenants.

Too many of them are busy chasing that extra shilling, and too many of them consider their posts more important than the country they are supposed to be serving.

In the recent party organs’ meetings called to designate party flag bearers in the civic and parliamentary elections, we are told, one cardinal principle was to endorse whoever won in the primaries no matter how they won.

As a result, the list that emerged at the end reads like a roll call of Jack the Ripper, Houdini, Benito Mussolini, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Adolf Hitler, Son of Sam, Falstaff, Mata Hari, and the Artful Dodger, together with Mother Theresa and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Go figure how to fashion a leadership.