Dr Azaveli Feza Lwaitama

Finally, the people of Zanzibar have decisively voted ‘Yes’ to the idea of having a government of national unity in Zanzibar.  With a 71.9 per cent registered voter turnout, they voted 66.4 per cent in favour of forming a government after the next election that will not be based on the destructive principle of winner takes all, no matter the circumstances and for how long.

They have voted in favour of the idea that the majority will only be allowed to govern if the reasonable opinions of the minority are taken into account.

They have voted in favour of the principle of unity in diversity. The class character of the social tensions that bedevil capitalist societies require that each period in a given country’s history has to be examined carefully when seeking to resolve the given social tensions.  

While a party of the oppressed majority may legitimately claim the right to assume leadership in violently taking over a government that was minority led and oppressive, this did not give that party of the majority the permanent right to impose its will on the citizens of that country for ever and ever.

Sometimes parties of the majority cease to have the right to claim to articulate the legitimate grievances of the majority of the people of a country.  In those circumstances, the disaffected masses may greatly benefit from the removal from power of that majority party.  

The situation in Zanzibar seem to have reached a stage where the main party in opposition seem to have gained the upper hand in knowing what the vast majority of the people of Zanzibar want from their political leaders.  

Critical thinking suggests that for the first time since the Zanzibar Revolution in January 1964, single political party arrogance seems to be on the verge of coming to end. The ruling party CCM is likely to loose its near dictatorial hold on the islands and the people of Zanzibar, irrespective of their social class affinities are likely to gain greater genuine freedom from the ensuring dispensation.

The stage is now set for the people of Zanzibar to successfully work towards the achievement of greater autonomy and heightened pluralist political space for themselves than was possible hitherto.

Elements in the ruling party whose political fortunes previously depended on stirring up racial animosity and appealing to racial and other ethnic affiliations may finding themselves having a hard time in the new Zanzibar. Time will tell what new political alignments may emerge and how old political labels may eventually be shed.

In the meantime, in neighbouring Kenya, the adoption of   a new national constitution after the victory of the yes vote in the referendum, may give fresh impetus to voices in Zanzibar and in Tanzania agitating for the initiation a similar process of constitutional change on this side of the Kenya border.

Certainly, the age of constitutional innocence is coming to the end in the whole of East Africa. The fact that the referendum in Zanzibar and that in Kenya to place peace and in both cases citizens endorsed radical restructuring of presidential power suggests that the mindset favouring single political party arrogance is coming to an end.  

To consolidate the impending end to single political party dominancy and arrogance, one will welcome the prospect of Chadema’s Dr Willibrod Slaa becoming the next President of the United Republic of Tanzania.

Where this to happen, and one can not rule out anything at the stage at which Tanzanian politics has reached, it is possible to envisage a situation where similarly vigorous constitutional restructuring  in the whole of Tanzania may be initiated similar to those witnessed in Kenya and in Zanzibar.  

Such a constitutional re-engineering processes may result in the birth of three governments in place of the two that now constitute the United Republic of Tanzania.

With CUF leading the Government of Zanzibar and Chadema  that of the United Republic of Tanzania  one can see the possibility of political scenarios that could well resurrect the backward but now inevitable idea of a Government of Tanganyika within the Federal Government of Tanzania.

Those of us who believe Africa will only survive if there is a continental government may well have to redouble our efforts in working towards an acceleration of the process of attaining the dreamed African Union government.   This may be the only realistic antidote to the negative consequences of the possible inevitable replacement of the United Republic Tanzania with the Federal Republic of Tanzania.

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