Browsing by Author "Makulilo, Alexander B."
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Item Authoritarian Stability Across Space: The Case of Tanzania(Springer Link, 2015) Makulilo, Alexander B.The end of the Cold War witnessed the proliferation of competitive authoritarian regimes in the third world and more particularly in Africa. Levitsky and Way, the founders of the concept “competitive authoritarianism”, maintain that although elections have regularly been held, their typical feature remains a blending of competition with varying degrees of authoritarianism. Yet, in their competitive authoritarianism trajectories, the United Republic of Tanzania is considered stable authoritarian. This article advances two arguments: (a) Tanzania, as a union of two countries, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, exhibits a case where organisational party strength varies across territory, thereby affecting electoral competitiveness and manipulation by the ruling regime, and (b) as a consequence, Levitsky and Way do not effectively capture the linkage and leverage factors concerning Tanzania.Item Beyond Polarity in Zanzibar? The ‘Silent’ Referendum and the Government of National Unity(Taylor and Francis, 2012) Bakari, Mohammed; Makulilo, Alexander B.On 31 July 2010 the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar held a referendum to decide on the government of national unity so as to end the impasse between the two main political camps, each dominating one of the two islands of Unguja and Pemba. The outcome of the referendum was that the majority of Zanzibaris voted in favour of the government of national unity. This article revisits how the referendum was carried out in terms of observing the basic principles of a democratic referendum and whether the referendum would be a panacea for the polarisation between the two islands. The main argument held here is that the referendum fell short of observing some of the basic principles of a democratic referendum since it systematically suppressed the voices of those who opted for a ‘No’ vote. Besides this, the government of national unity created after the referendum was in essence the unity of the two major political parties, namely the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and the Civic United Front (CUF). Relatedly, some of the fundamental issues causing polarisation are yet to be tackled, a situation which, if not addressed in time, would make this polarity a likely facet of Zanzibar’s future politics.Item The Fallacy of De Facto Independent Candidacy in Tanzania: A Rejoinder(2012) Makulilo, Alexander B.The independent candidate question in Tanzania has, since 1992, remained a subject of debate among political parties, judiciary, parliament, executive, the attorney general’s chamber, academics, civil societies, and election observers. The issue of this debate is whether or not independent candidates should be introduced in the electoral system. The ruling party and its government have been against the independent candidates on the ground that it would jeopardize the entire electoral system. The purpose of this article is twofold. First is to present my rejoinder to the issues raised by Frank Mateng’e’s article “Protesting the Independent Candidacy in Tanzania’s Elections: A Bona Fide Cause?” concerning one of my earlier works about the independent candidate issue in Tanzania. Second, I engage the contribution of Mateng’e to the independent candidate debates. This entails also interrogating his concept of “de facto independent candidacy”.Item From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa by Adrienne LeBas (review)(2011) Makulilo, Alexander B.In the 1990s Africa adopted multiparty democracy. Yet even a casual observation would show that in some countries opposition parties are strong while in others they are weak and fragmented, even countries that exhibit similar institutions and electoral rules. In From Protest to Parties Adrienne LeBas attempts to unravel this puzzle by means of a comparative study of Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. LeBas notes that in Zimbabwe and Zambia the main opposition parties are relatively strong, while in Kenya the opposition is fragmented. In explaining this state of affairs, she considers ethnicity and authoritarianism as central variables. This way of visualizing democracy and party politics in Africa is indeed not new. (See, for example, Sebastian Elischer’s “Do African Parties Contribute to Democracy? Some Findings from Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria” [Afrika Spectrum 43 (2):175–201 (2008)]. Tackling the puzzle, LeBas presents two main arguments. First, she maintains that where authoritarian states relied on alliances with corporate actors, particularly organized labor, as was the case in Zambia and Zimbabwe, they unintentionally armed their opponents with structures and resources that could later be used to mobilize large constituencies and exert an effective challenge to the state. “In countries like Zimbabwe and Zambia,” LeBas states, “… opposition parties were able to draw upon cross-ethnic mobilising structures provided by labour. In contrast, in countries like Kenya, authoritarian states relied on patronage and networks of ethnic brokerage in order to rule … and opposition parties were prone to fragmentation along ethnic lines” (246). While this reasoning is in may ways convincing, it fails to account for a situation in which ethnicity-based conflict is almost absent but opposition parties are weak. In Tanzania, for example, about 120 tribes exist, but ethnicity has not been a divisive force, partly owing to a successful national-building project championed by the late Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere. And yet opposition parties in Tanzania are still relatively weak. LeBas’s second argument is that opposition parties are more successful when they pursue strategies intended to intensify political polarization—that is, strategies that distance those parties from the incumbents. LeBas finds this strategy paradoxical since it sometimes leads to violence. This is partly true. In Zanzibar, for example, the main opposition party, the Civic United Front (CUF), applied such a strategy against the ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi. The result has been twofold: the CUF has been strong, but at the same time the country has remained politically unstable. LeBas presents original research based on primary data to support the arguments she advances. There are some areas where the book slips up, however. One serious problem is related to her methodology and data. LeBas claims her argument to be “generalizable to other late Third Wave democratizers” (5), but this is problematic since her study is limited to three cases. To develop a general theory, the author would have to use a large-n comparison and include many more cases to show pattern and trends. Similarly, the data presented are somewhat outdated. Most interviews were conducted in 2002, 2003, and 2004, with the largest share of the empirical attention devoted to Zimbabwe. Yet to study the strengths or weaknesses of opposition parties means to situate them against the ruling parties. In their seminal work Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1997) Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle rightly argue that a regime transition is a struggle between competing political forces over the rules of the political game and the resources with which the game is played. What I find strange is that LeBas sidesteps this point and treats the ruling parties as passive entities: “I argue that the weakness of opposition party mobilization—not the resources or cohesiveness of the ruling party—is the primary cause of this kind of authoritarian persistence. This weakness is in turn determined by the choices of parties themselves…. This book suggests that differences in opposition strength are not primarily a reflection of the skills or short-run strategies of incumbents…. Nor should we see the deficiencies of opposition as the result of political opening” (8). In some cases, LeBas makes claims without supporting evidence, which amounts to mere speculation...Item Gender and Culture – By Anne Phillips(2012) Makulilo, Alexander B.Item Imperialism and Global Political Economy – By Alex Callinicos(2012) Makulilo, Alexander B.Item Independent Electoral Commission in Tanzania: A False Debate?(Taylor and Francis, 2009) Makulilo, Alexander B.The electoral discourse in Africa today is dominated by the question of the ‘independence’ of an electoral management body as one of the prerequisites for free and fair elections. The central issue in the discourse is ‘what constitutes the basic tests of an independent body’. By overemphasising the structures and legal framework of an electoral body, institutionalists assume that the actors and the electoral body are distinctive. Drawing from the ‘institution‐actor dichotomy’ frame of analysis, this article argues that both the structure and behaviour of actors are essential in assessing the independence of an institution. Using Tanzania as a country case example, this article argues that the National Election Commission (NEC) does not pass the basic tests of an independent institution and hence its credibility is questionable for the key stakeholders. For NEC to be independent and autonomous, major reforms not only for the body but also for the entire political system and culture are needed in line with competitive politics.Item 'Join a Party or I Cannot Elect You': The Independent Candidate Question in Tanzania(2011) Makulilo, Alexander B.Independent candidates are not allowed in Tanzania. This restriction has raised debate which dominates multipartism and its efficacy in the country. Since the inception of multipartism in 1992, there have been three major cases on independent candidates. In the first two cases, the High Court ruled in favour of independent candidate. However, in the third case, the Court of Appeal, while subscribing to the need of independent candidates, it nullified the previous judgments by the High Court on the ground that the court had no jurisdiction in declaring a constitutional provision to be unconstitutional; and that the independent candidate issue being political and not legal should be resolved by the parliament. I argue that the Court of Appeal failed to exercise its mandate in administering justice. I further argue that such failure is attributed to the fear by the justices from the ruling party and its government.Item LeBas Adrienne. From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa(2013) Makulilo, Alexander B.Item Poll-'Pollution'?: The Politics of Numbers in the 2013 Elections in Kenya(2013) Makulilo, Alexander B.The 2013 opinion polls for the general elections in Kenya were discredited by politicians, academics and the general public as partisan. This was despite the enactment of the Publication of Electoral Opinion Polls Act No. 39 of 2012 which meant to ensure the scientific standards are upheld by pollsters. The purpose of this article is to interrogate the methodological issues of one of the leading pollsters, namely, the Ipsos Synovate, in order to ascertain the validity of such claims. It notes that after the official nomination by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) on 18 January, Synovate, behaving like a weather forecaster conducted only four polls in just a week time, that is, between 12 and 19 February and projected for the entire elections. The article reveals that the sampling, question design as well as reporting by the Synovate were flawed culminating into a controversial poll outcome.Item Unleveled Playfield and Democracy in Tanzania(Canadian Center of Science and Education, 2012-04) Makulilo, Alexander B.Tanzania experienced a top down democratic transition. This transition path gave the ruling party monopoly to determine the transition pace, design the rules of the game, as well as to own and benefit out of it. The de-linking of the party from the state of the previous authoritarian regime has yet happened thereby creating uneven playfield for opposition parties to be effective. This article, based on documents, interviews, and newspapers, holds that the landslide victories by the ruling party in the past general elections of 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 were largely attributed to its fusion with the state.Item Watching the watcher: An evaluation of local election observers in Tanzania(2011) Makulilo, Alexander B.The unfolding of the Third Wave of democracy cast a mounting weight on election observation in transition countries, partly due to the inability of regimes in power to conduct free and fair elections. However, observation is not always neutral. Sometimes observers distance themselves from the data they collect, leading to controversial certification of elections. In this case stakeholders may view them as partial, hence downsizing their credibility and trust. Yet observers' reports have rarely been reviewed. This article evaluates three reports by the leading election observer in Tanzania, the Tanzania Election Monitoring Committee (TEMCO) for the 1995, 2000 and 2005 general elections. It notes that despite the prevalence of the same factors that TEMCO considered as irregularities in the 1995 and 2000 general elections when it certified those elections as ‘free but not fair’, it issued a ‘clean, free and fair’ verdict on the 2005 general elections. This conclusion, at variance from the data, reveals problems in assuring observer neutrality.Item “Where have all researchers gone?” Use and abuse of polls for the 2010 elections in Tanzania(2012) Makulilo, Alexander B.More than any other period in the history of Tanzania since the introduction of multipartism in 1992, opinion polls for the 2010 general elections were highly disputed by stakeholders on the ground that they were partisan. It was claimed that the polls by the Research and Education for Democracy in Tanzania (REDET) and the SYNOVATE were in favour of the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) while that by the Tanzania Citizens’ Information Bureau (TCIB) leaned towards the opposition party, Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (CHADEMA). In this article, the methodological rigor of these polls was compared and the use and abuse of research were unpacked. Three interrelated questions formed the central focus of this article: Were polls biased against or in favour of particular parties and or candidates? How successful were pollsters in projecting electoral support for candidates or political parties that reasonably reflected the actual electoral outcomes? And what were the sources of errors committed by pollsters? In order to respond to these questions, a critical examination of research methodology for each pollster was made. The article found that the sampling, framing of questions as well as reporting were either by default or design flawed culminating in controversial polling outcomes.Item “Whose Affirmative Action is Affirmative?” Lessons from Tanzania(2009) Makulilo, Alexander B.Elections in Tanzania have resulted into the underrepresentation of women in the formal decision making organs particularly the parliament. To address this problem the government introduced women special seats as one of the ways to empower women to participate in making decisions that affect their concerns. The threshold level for such special seats was set at 15 percent in the 1995 elections, 20 percent in the 2000 elections and it was increased to 30 percent of all the parliamentary seats in the 2005 elections. This article argues that while there is a positive trend in terms of the numerical representation via an affirmative action system, the same is yet to be owned by women themselves. The affirmative action in Tanzania is strategically used to divide women and to further the interests of political parties, particularly the ruling party. Thus, women struggles for their inclusion in the formal decision making organs should simultaneously demand for the need to owning the affirmative action itself.Item Why the CCM Is Still in Power in Tanzania? A Reply(2014) Makulilo, Alexander B.In her article “Why the CCM won’t lose”, Melanie O’Gorman claims to have found a puzzling dominance of the CCM in Tanzania. Using a survey conducted in 2008 amongst subsistence farmers, she notes that respondents tend to support the ruling party despite the rural neglect. This article questions the methodology and contests the key findings. It argues that the CCM’s dominance is a function of the incomplete de-linking of the party from the state of the old authoritarian regime thereby suffocating political space not only for the opposition parties but also for the members of civil society in rural and urban areas. The electoral data from the 2005 and 2010 general elections indicate that the margin of votes across constituencies for the CCM is in steady decline, thus challenging its dominance.Item The Zanzibar Electoral Commission and its Feckless Independence(2011) Makulilo, Alexander B.Free and fair elections are some of the essential qualities of a mature democratic and stable society. Ideally, losers in an election normally concede defeat, an outcome that is more likely if they feel that the election was fairly managed. The situation is different in a deeply divided society lacking a consensus over the rules of the political game and where the main political actors do not trust each other or the institutions that manage elections. In such a society, and especially when one actor has a monopoly over the rules of the game, chaos is likely to occur. Viewed from the perspective of a divided society, an independent and impartial electoral body as one of the requirements for a tree and fair election is crucial for reducing the likelihood of post-election violence.