Now Tanzania follows footsteps of Kenya, Uganda

*Rampant assassinations, attacks, contract killers
*Murder becoming alternative instrument  of elite competition
The President in power is reported by media to have refused to give a name of his preference to succeed him in 2015, saying it is the party’s work and resolve, while his work is supporting that candidate to the hilt.

Sarcastically he said people have to work it out themselves ( ..to sweat it out) and win over confidence of the party.

The aspirants are sweating it out to win recognition in a dangerous game of politics where the mighty truncheon, the weaklings to coerce and win the political favours of the political elite where only the strong ones survive and are admitted.

Political observers support the President for his candid approach on the question, saying it is good logic, but is bad politics as well; as the move leaves void that entrenches political rivalry for lack of orientation and evident favorite leading to murderous attempts to score.

Kikwete is right by taking history as his ground; it can be other reasons too, because learning from it, the favourites never succeeds to become presidents in this country.

It was Salim Ahmed Salim that Mwalimu Nyerere wanted to succeed him, but Ali Hassan Mwinyi took a bold move and accepted the challenge to avoid a direct sideline and triumphed.

In turn President Ali Hassan Mwinyi wanted Kikwete to succeed him, but Benjamin Mkapa emerged the winner against all odds. People in the know, allege that Jakaya Kikwete was not the favourite of President Benjamin Mkapa, and rumours are rife that he wanted Salim Ahmed Salim to take charge, but the idea was thwarted by Jakaya Kikwete’s network that overran the party machinery and emerged triumphant at the helm and Kikwete became the Fourth President of the United Republic of Tanzania.

Can one guess who the favourite is for 2015, so that he loses the highest post? As a rule, only the strong ones survive in this clean slate of aspirants; as Kikwete said let them sweat it out; and it is exactly what is happening in the political arena.

President Mwai Kibaki is known for his minimal role in political affairs and successfully completed his stint by leaving the things to take natural flow that produced marvelous elections in Kenya on March 4, this year.

President Kikwete hopes the same happens to Tanzania—to all new comers in the coming presidential race. It is the individual that is being challenged and not the party and thus politics become polarized.

Should the incumbent president in Tanzania act like Kibaki, or annul his minimal role by supporting certain values that he would like of our leader by setting benchmarks on the same? Leadership is about showing direction and the nation deserves it from the President.

The public is wary of what is emerging from this political void and want direction to shape the 2015 elections by the political ruling party that has a swathe of leaders, who are set to clobber each other if not directed. Men always become unguided missiles for lack of mission and vision.

Attacks causing fatalities, incidents involving unconventional weapons or of political significance, politically-motivated murders or other unknown motives, and other incidents of political or methodological significance, have of late been witnessed in Tanzania.

To some extent, analysts have quickly associated such attacks with assassination attempts by political foes. Assassination is the murder of a prominent person or political figure by a surprise attack, usually for payment or political reasons. A person who commits such an act is called an assassin.

In most cases assassins are never caught or identified in Africa and those that were grudgingly sent by the state for prosecution were denied that honour by the silent public declaring the moves as cover-ups.

Also an assassination may be prompted by religious, ideological, political, or military motives; it may be carried out for the prospect of financial gain, to avenge a grievance, or from the desire to acquire fame or notoriety (that is, a psychological need to garner personal public recognition).

But such attacks would only reflect a worrying pattern within African politics, where time and again a politician seemingly on the precipice of true change suffers a conveniently timed, brutally tragic demise.

Tanzania like any other multiparty democracy, is awash with conflicting interests by major political actors that find it conducive to settle their accounts through the services of the assassins, muggers and terminators.

In the same vein, another form of hit-list attacks is contract killing, a form of murder, in which one party hires another party to kill a target individual or group of people. It involves an illegal agreement between two or more parties in which one party agrees to kill the target in exchange for currency, monetary, or otherwise. Either party may be a person, group, or an organization.

Throughout history, contract killing has been associated with organized crime and with vendettas. For example, in recent United States history where the accounts have been well documented,  the gang Murder, Inc. committed hundreds of murders in the 1920s to the 1940s on behalf of the National Crime Syndicate. In Italy ‘Cosa nostra’ (Mafia) Sicilly syndicate, killed many Italian politicians like Aldo Muro on vendetta or just political intrigues.

Contract killing provides the hiring party with the advantage of not having to be directly involved in the killing. This makes it more difficult to connect said party with the murder and decreases the likelihood of establishing guilt for the committed murder, because the hiring party did not commit the murder; they only enabled it to happen. It is also often used by parties who do not have the ability to carry the killing themselves, such as a wife contracting the murder of her husband or vice versa.

List of people assassinated in Uganda included Benedicto Kiwanuka in 1972. He was the Chief Justice of Uganda. Also Janani Luwum in 1977 who was Archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga-Zaire from 1974 until 1977 assassinated by dictator Iddi Amin Daddah, then President of Uganda.

The controversy behind such attacks, murders, assassinations and road accidents involving top leaders in the island of peace called Tanzania, dates back to April 12, 1984, when Prime Minister Edward Moringe Sokoine died in a road accident in Morogoro while on his way to Dar es Salaam, where he was scheduled to handle tough assignments on corruption.

To date, many Tanzanians are reluctant to believe that it was a real accident, and some people are still calling for a thorough investigation of the crash.

The founding father of the nation, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, did not entirely help to put the rumours to rest. “Let’s believe it is an accident,” he said of the death of Sokoine, one of his key allies during the war against corruption and economic sabotage.

Sokoine was known for his tough stance on corrupt leaders and economic saboteurs that sent some top leaders to prison between 1980 and 1984, and he had clearly found enemies within and outside the ruling party.

Sokoine, a politician and Monduli Member of Parliament, had risen from the semi-nomadic Maasai community. Prior to his death, he had touched the hearts and minds of many Tanzanians with his strong leadership qualities centred on honesty and acumen ship.

Another scenario was the murder of the former Director of Tanzania Intelligence and Security Service (TISS), Lieutenant General Imran Kombe in 1996.

Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) has nodded to the move of pardoning  the murderers based on mixed identity, saying it was a good thing since the Government did not implement the death penalty to the two convicts.

LHRC Executive Director, Francis Kiwanga, said that was a “positive move towards our efforts in demanding for abolition of the death penalty as the Government has shown that it is starting to hear the outcry against such penalty.”

However, Kiwanga said it was not enough to pardon only two convicts since there were many others languishing in prisons for years waiting for execution.

On his part, Deus Kibamba, Executive Director of the Tanzania Citizens Information Bureau (TCIB), said the decision was a manifestation of the fact that the President possesses enormous powers. Godlike powers that is dangerous if held by a power monger that could easily abuse them.

He also said the move undermines the judiciary as the President could arbitrarily overturn decisions passed by the court.

“Our country follows the rule of law and no one is above the law. If the court had proved beyond reasonable doubt and decided, why then the President overturns a legal decision,” he queried.

But a President is a sovereign realm and that way can commute sentences despite other Constitutional prerogatives he maintains.

However, he said, the move was positive as it indicated that the death penalty was not accepted in the country. But, he said, that would cast doubt as the public could question reasons on why only two of them have been pardoned while there are hundreds of people still on death row.

However, a law professor, Peter Maina, of the University of Dar es Salaam, said there is nothing wrong with the move since the President was performing his duty, adding that several other people were released in the same manner.

Commenting on the issue, Zepharine Galeba from Tanganyika Law Society, said he saw nothing wrong with the supposedly presidential decision granting amnesty to those who were sentenced to death.

“I have only read it in newspapers, so I am not sure if it is the President or the convicts have won their appeal, if there was any,” he said.

“I don’t see anything wrong with that…But whether is it fair or not is the matter that should be discussed as we are in process of forming a new constitution,” Galeba commented.

Also advocate Eleutha Fabian Kapinga was killed by bandits on June 10, in Dar es Salaam. During a distinguished career Kapinga had been Deputy Director of the Tanzania Legal Corporation, many times President of the Tanzania Law Society and a board member of the Tanzania Cigarette Company.

Others on the hit-list of contracted killers included the late Chacha Wangwe, who was Member of Parliamentary for Tarime constituency, (CHADEMA). We also remember the death Issa Ngumba, a broadcaster at Radio Kwizera last year in Kigoma, Daud Mwangosi in Iringa during political activity and Father Evarist Mushi in Zanzibar. Meanwhile, Dr Steven Ulimboka  and Absolm Kibanda, the Managing Editor of New Habari and Chairman Tanzania Editors Forum, were attacked on similar pattern and have lost some body parts.

Tanzanian politics will be a dangerous game involving the Mafia-like assassination attempts of the notorious Russian Intelligence Agency, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB).

For some years, there have been rumours that there were some conspirators at work in Tanzania targeting some potential politicians by staging road accidents.

In East Africa, Kenya and Uganda were notorious in political assassinations with some prominent politicians being assassinated by the hired snipers or contract killers in what was connected by the State in those countries.

In Kenya, assassinations have been a regular feature of its succession politics. Kenyan scholar, Charles N. Mwaura in a study paper titled - 'Political Succession and Related Conflicts in Kenya,' notes that when elite interests broaden, violent conflict does manifest itself through assassinations of leading political figures.

The conflicts, he writes, often relatively restrain and characterize by competition among elites for political power and restrict within the status quo. Assassinations and murder, he says, become alternative instruments of elite competition against those who threaten the ruling faction and he mentions Pio Pinto, Tom Mboya, Ronald Ngala, J.M. Kariuki, Robert Ouko and Alexander Muge, as key casualties in the first three decades of elite contest.

Tom Mboya was just 39 years old when he was shot dead by a lone gunman in 1969, while Josiah Mwangi Karuiki, popularly known as JM, was barely 42 years old in 1975 when he was murdered by suspected state agents in horrid circumstance.

The question on everyone’s lips being:  Is Tanzania following the footsteps and pattern of Kenya and Uganda politics?  We are saying so because threats against journalists, Christians and Muslim leaders and other human rights defenders, are becoming common in the country, something never witnessed in the past. In a mere ten months  or so, more than ten human rights defenders including journalists have been attacked, injured, threatened or killed.

The murders have become current political agenda in Tanzania as Wilfred Lwakatare, the Chadema Director of Security, has been booked and arraigned for planning terror attacks and poisoning identified personalities. It is this development and dimension that calls for insights and deliberations in a public debate on the role of murder in our political game play.

Tanzania’s political scene shows that there are concerns that violence and politically motivated murders are making their way into Tanzania for the forthcoming general election come 2015. The living example of politically motivated murders were at the end of Arumeru by elections in which four high ranking Chadema cadres were gruesomely murdered. Although Police dismissed the murders as politically motivated, the local citizens insisted that the murders were linked to the political and election process in the area.

Party rivalry between Chadema and CCM, is highest while each party has elaborate  militia armies in terms of Mgambo for CCM, Blue Guards for CUF and Red Brigades for Chadema.

Therefore, there is no doubt that politically motivated murders were liked by competing forces, and thus they must be disbanded accordingly to release tension in the already hotly contested political atmosphere in the country.

Political assassinations are not something we should encourage in Tanzania. For assassinations can plunge the country into some form of endless violence and conflicts as had happened in Rwanda after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana and Melchior Ndadaye in Burundi.

One thing that must be acknowledged by all seeking political positions through bloodbath that there are no winners or vanquished in such endeavours since the outcome is a vicious cycle of revenge and vendetta.

Security, after Osama Bin Laden bombardment of the World Trade Center Twin Towers, has become cliché’ of big business as leaders build fortresses on themselves. source The African

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