TALKING POINT: The invisible hand of the Union in Zanzibar affairs

I travelled to Iringa and Rombo during the just ended Easter holiday to reconnect with relatives and friends. In the course of my trip, I had diverse groups of people waiting to engage me on the Zanzibar question.

Although I would have preferred to avoid serious conversations during soft times such as these, the truth of the matter is that it is not possible to avoid discussions about Zanzibar now and in the near future. May I take this opportunity to highlight some of the issues emerging from “street level democracy” debates.
First, there is the issue of how much power the Union has over Zanzibar. Some people are of the view that the Union is too much of a toothless bulldog on Zanzibar. But the question is what the expectation of the union is over Zanzibar. What is the status of the union as relates to Zanzibar legally and politically? Other people speak about the Union having too much, albeit invisible, power over Zanzibar. These belong to the group that submitted to the Constitutional Review Commission that Tanganyika was actually in a union “jacket” and that the two were almost synonymous. This sentiment has long existed and has been threatening the emergence of secessionist agitations, especially from the Zanzibar side. But one reality remains from the two lines of thinking about the relationship between the Union and Zanzibar structures in the United Republic of Tanzania.
Hence, the happenings of the Zanzibar elections on October 25, 2015 and the repeat elections on March 20, 2016 have divided the nation. For instance, an old man in Mashati asked why were the Zanzibar elections null and void when they were conducted on the same day as the Union elections which were declared free and fair? In Mkuu, a young man wondered whether the Zanzibar Electoral Commission was not an agent of the National Electoral Commission. In other words, how many electoral commissions do we have in Tanzania? Further, he wondered how was it possible to have some of the votes cast in the same polling stations in Chake Chake or Moshi valid and others invalid.
If I stand in the position of NEC and ZEC, I may submit that there is not enough civic and voter education especially amongst the “born frees”. People born after 1994 in South Africa are dubbed as such in memory of the end of the apartheid era and as a gesture to the start of the second era of democratisation in Africa from 1995.  Likewise, Tanzanians born in 1995 have just voted for the first time in 2015. For them, the Union must have a value and meaning attached to it beyond the rhetoric of sanctity. During the time of the Constitutional Review Commission, otherwise known as the Warioba Commission, a lot of these voices angrily aired the concern that one or the other side was being parasitic to the other. Zanzibar youths in particular were of the view that mainlanders had taken most of the jobs in Zanzibar, leaving young Zanzibaris jobless. On the other side, Mainland youth demanded clarity over who actually contributed what to the union coffers before discussing who gets what and how! In Tabora,  a young man queried why an MP would be elected by more than 200,000 voters in the mainland when 3,000 of their Zanzibar counterparts would actually be electing two presidents, an MP, a member of the House of Representatives and a councillor. For the enlightened among us, this discussion about federalism and forms of governance is one to which we must provide satisfactory answers. What is worse in the case of Tanzania is that the number of questions keeps ballooning without deliberate attempts to look for answers.
In my view, the repeat elections in Zanzibar have expanded the list of issues requiring urgent solutions. For instance, why did we see soldiers and security apparatus from Dar es Salaam taking over Zanzibar’s key spots immediately after the annulment of the October 25 elections? Why did President Magufuli (pictured) have to contradictorily say he had no mandate to intervene in Zanzibar after the annulment and at the same time warn that whoever would attempt to cause chaos would face the consequences? Why these double standards?
Outside the presidency, there is even more to ponder. Why did we see so few statements and interventions on Zanzibar from the mainland? Although civil society under the auspices of the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition made a few statements, the level of “action” cannot compare with what we have seen in terms of agitation against government intimidation in Dar es Salaam or Tanga. Debates on union issues must continue!
Deus Kibamba is trained in Political Science, International Politics and International Law