For long regarded as one of the last bastions of peace, stability and economic progress on the African continent, Tanzania has just joined the long list of countries with structural political, economic and social problems, proving that the country’s apparent exceptionality was simply an illusion.
Having gone to the polls on 29 October, Tanzanians did not wait for the results to express their dissatisfaction with the rule of President Samia Suluhu Hassan, which was probably reflected in the exclusion of two important presidential candidates, one of whom has been in prison since April.
Since its independence in December 1963, Tanzania has been one of the most stable countries in Africa, with a relatively more cohesive society and a more balanced system of resource distribution. After 20 years of enormous economic challenges that followed independence, partly because of the collectivism policies advocated by Julius Nyerere, the last four decades have been marked by a steady pace of economic growth, from 3.5 percent in the 1990s to an annual average of 7 percent in the last 25 years.
The economic policies adopted by the government in the early 1980s allowed the country to develop rapidly, which in turn resulted in the modernization that became notable with the transformation of the country’s current economic capital, Dar-es-Salaam, which was once the seat of government. The effective transfer of the political capital to Dodoma in 1996 allowed the emergence of new centralities and the dispersion of political and economic power to other regions. Unlike many African countries, Tanzania has a more diversified economy, with services, agriculture, fisheries, and mining sectors contributing significantly.
But Tanzania continued to face the same problem as many other African countries, which is the exponential population growth that is not accompanied by appropriate policies that allow young people to be effectively absorbed into the labour market. The median age of the country’s population of almost 62 million is 17.5 years.
On the other hand, for more than 60 years the country has been governed by the same party, which, like some of its allies in southern Africa, has considered itself a liberating party. The concept of “liberation parties” itself is problematic, given its distortion of reality, and is often used with a certain degree of opportunism. National liberation movements that fought for the independence of their countries were faced with the need to transform themselves into political parties that could take on the responsibilities of government.
Some veterans are still part of these movements, but most of their members or leaders had no role in the liberation movement, and it is a usurpation of the common national political heritage to assume themselves as “liberators”.
The common characteristic of these parties is that although they are presiding over multi-party-political systems, they consider that their continued stay in power should be equated with the preservation of national unity, independence and sovereignty, values which they believe would be endangered by opposition parties. But the reality is that overtime, they have undergone an ideological transfiguration that today places them in a situation where, with endemic corruption, decadent commercialism and the loss of moral values that characterize them, they constitute the greatest threat to the sovereignty and stability of their own countries.
To ensure that they keep their privileges, they do everything to remain in power, in most cases resorting to straight fraudulent elections, which are ran by electoral supervisory and management bodies whose independence is not recognized by other main political actors. These elections are certified by judicial entities that are often seen as branches of the same parties that want to perpetuate themselves in power.
The Tanzanian president was re-elected with 98 percent of the vote, with a voter turnout of almost 87 percent. In a pluralistic society such as Tanzania, these figures can hardly pass the test of credibility, unless they are explained by the fact that she was the only candidate, which itself is a serious indictment to Tanzania’s claim as a multiparty democracy.
The confluence of economic and social factors, which manifest themselves in a large number of young people who are trained but without opportunities for upward social mobility, or even for simple subsistence, and political governance concerned only with the survival of the ruling elite, becomes an appropriate environment for the conflagration of violent conflicts such as we have just witnessed in Tanzania, and seen before in Cameroon, Madagascar, Mozambique and Kenya, among many others.
The tragic reality is that it doesn’t stop there. The young African population, feeling deprived of opportunities, in an environment in which the elites enjoy all the riches, while blocking the alternatives for a different society, will continue to fight with all the means at their disposal, even if it is life itself. It is a new struggle for liberation.