Having won a very competitive election with the lowest margin by a candidate of the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), it may be tempting for Tanzania’s president-elect, Dr John Pombe Magufuli to stonewall on electoral and political reforms that would weaken the party and the presidency.

Yet the fractious nature of the election, on the mainland where main challenger Edward Lowassa has rejected the outcome and announced himself winner, and in Zanzibar where the results were annulled after the opposition claimed a first-ever win, are proof that Dr Magufuli will have to reform more, not less, to keep CCM in power.

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Many who voted for Dr Magufuli did so for the man, not the party. Others, like Sulaya Kigaila, a first-time voter in the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, did so grudgingly.

“I really wanted change because I think CCM is tired but I ended up voting for Dr Magufuli,” she said. “The opposition spent years telling us Mr Lowassa was corrupt yet they took only a week to choose him as their candidate. I did not trust them.”

Elections in Africa are often violent and stolen. More than half of 300 elections in 47 African countries between 1990 and 2015 were characterised as “violent,” according to researchers from the Institute for Defence Analyses, a not-for-profit funded by the US government.

While elections across Africa have been becoming more peaceful since the return of multiparty politics in the early 1990s, the risk of extreme violence, as seen in Kenya in 2007/8, Cote d’Ivoire in 2010 and Burundi more recently, is never too far off.

Tanzania has been there before, when 40 people were killed and 2,000 forced into exile in the violence that followed disputed elections in Zanzibar in 2000.

Despite that and other sporadic episodes of violence in 2010, electoral contests in Tanzania are, in comparison with most on the continent, far more benign.

Sixty-three per cent of respondents to an Afrobarometer public survey in 2014 said they want losing parties in elections to work with the winner. Almost nine out of every 10 respondents said it was important for people to obey the government in power, regardless of whom they voted for. 

If the pollsters are right, and barring any “black swan” developments, this sentiment should see the current dissatisfaction with the outcome of the result fizzle out over coming weeks and months. Hours before the final results were announced, life was slowly going back to normal in Dar es Salaam and elsewhere.

Dr Magufuli should use that space to initiate governance, political and electoral reform, not sit on his laurels. The governance reforms are more immediate and offer the quickest return on political capital.

Anti-corruption

Having run on an image of honesty, many will be looking at the new president to address the grand corruption that has characterised the Kikwete decade.

Dr Magufuli would do well just to avoid scandals on the scale of Richmond, Tegeta, Barrick Gold et cetera but he will have to do more to get implicated officials prosecuted and support the oversight institutions of government. 

One in two Tanzanians believes corruption cannot be controlled in the country, according to a public survey earlier this year by Twaweza, a civil society organisation.

Dr Magufuli will have to challenge those perceptions with solid action and use the savings from graft to fund the water, health and education projects the country desperately needs and respondents said would influence their voting decisions.

This efficiency must be extended to the parts of the public sector that support a more competitive private sector. Notorious for its red tape, Tanzania has stopped requiring health, town and land inspections before issuing business licenses.

However, the country still lags in the bottom quartile of the World Bank’s Doing Business surveys and it still takes nine procedures and 26 days to set up a business. This is one area Dr Magufuli, nicknamed ‘The Bulldozer” by the man he is set to succeed, can move mountains.

Political reform will be harder, but no less important. Since the Union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar produced the United Republic of Tanzania in April 1964, every government in power has tinkered and dithered with the Constitution between the two entities, without making meaningful progress.

The standard procedure over the years has been to appoint a constitutional commission and then ignore its recommendations long enough for it to become the problem of the next government.

That is precisely what President Kikwete has done — choosing, pragmatically, not to force through a referendum on an unpopular draft just before a general election, and more disturbingly, to clamp down on independent media and civil society research organisations. It would be unwise to follow that script.

Not only did the last commission headed by Joseph Warioba, a former prime minister and attorney general, produce a popular and workable draft, CCM’s refusal to accept a three-tier government structure for the Union formed the basis of the Ukawa Alliance, and the strongest test of its hold on power since Independence.

Dr Magufuli can re-open debate on the draft and make constitutional reform a major part of his legacy. Done smartly, he can even delay it long enough beyond his first term, and then push it through the inevitable resistance from within CCM during his second term, when he doesn’t have an election to fight.

Electoral reform

If constitutional and political reform is too much of a first-term undertaking, then Dr Magufuli can at least focus on electoral reform with less risk and a higher return on political capital.

The current head of the National Electoral Commission, Justice Damian Lubuva, has shown some appetite for reform, by cutting back on the use of public servants in local government authorities, many of them card-carrying CCM members, in organising polls. Deeper reforms are needed, and quicker.

First, while the Ppresident can continue to appoint members of the commission, this should be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny and approval, and the commissioners should have more defined security of tenure for their time in office to give them space to act with more independence.

Secondly, the Tanzanian courts should be given the mandate to hear and rule on disputes arising out of presidential elections, as they currently do in parliamentary contests.

The current situation where the NEC is the organiser, prosecutor, judge and jury in presidential elections is undemocratic, undermines the transparency of the entire process, and is a potential recipe for violence.

The current election imbroglio is illustrative. Mr Lowassa has rejected the official results as doctored and announced his own results in which he claims to have won the presidential election with 62 per cent of the vote.

This could all be sour grapping but foreign election observers have noted that while election day voting and counting was generally peaceful and incident-free, there was a lack of transparency during the tallying and subsequent announcement of results.

In a free and democratic society, the courts would be invited to independently verify Mr Lowassa’s claims, examine his evidence, and decide whether the official results are credible.

At best — and as has happened in every Tanzanian election since 1995 — this absence of judicial oversight leaves question marks over the credibility of the election and the true extent of the support the winner genuinely has. At worst, it can trigger violence.

In each of the areas that require reform, Dr Magufuli will be pushing against entrenched party interests that benefit from the grand corruption, the unequal status quo between the mainland and Zanzibar, and an electoral process that ensures the party retains control of both State House and Parliament.

Dr Magufuli has considerable personal attributes, including a reputation for honesty and hard work.

Yet his victory can also be attributed to CCM’s entrenched advantages of incumbency; divisions in the Ukawa opposition alliance whose two leading figures, Wilbroad Slaa and Ibrahim Lipumba, walked out in protest after Lowassa’s last-minute defection; and a lower-than-expected turn-out, which usually favours incumbents.

The president-elect can lean on history the way a drunk uses a lamppost — for support, rather than illumination — and continue with the incrementalism of his predecessors, or he can take CCM out of its comfort legacy zone and, by implementing reforms that could threaten its grip on power, force it to become more agile and responsive.

It is the classic gravedigger problem and requires horsepower and brainpower to overcome.