Dr Azaveli Feza Lwatama
Parliament is currently in its budget sitting and it is sad watching the conduct of the majority of its members. The sitting is supposed to be used by MPs to perform their cardinal civic duty of effecting oversight over government expenditure. Ministers are supposed to be held to account for the use of budgetary allocations passed by the last budget sitting.Parliamentarians are also supposed to scrutinize and pass the next financial year’s budgetary allocations. What is sad is that parliamentary procedures such as threatening to block a ministry’s budget if the minister fails to give clear policy answers to questions put to him or her by parliamentarians are rendered ineffective by the tendency of the majority of MPs drawn from the ruling CCM to vote on the basis of party loyalty instead of the merits of arguments put forward by the minister’s response. Sadly, these ministers are also CCM parliamentarians, who were previously on the ruling party’s parliamentary backbenches.
Sadly, also, parliamentarians drawn from the ruling party constitute more than two thirds of the total number of lawmakers and can thus pass anything they wish without conceding anything to opposition MPs. Yet it is most often the case that parliamentarians drawn from the three main opposition parties, namely Chadema, CUF and NCCR-Mageuzi, who constitute less than one third of all MPs, are the ones who relentlessly seek to take away a shilling from the salaries of ministers whose answers are not only unsatisfactory but invariably delivered in an arrogant and paternalist tone meant to put down opposition lawmakers who seek ministers’ policy clarifications.
Again and again, one hears ministers nonchalantly stating that only a fraction of the financial resources the last budget allocated to their ministries were actually disbursed to them by the Treasury. Yet ruling party parliamentarians would only make feeble noises of protest over such budgetary misconduct. This is apart from ministers being allowed to get away with minor political injuries after their ministries had been clearly tagged by the Controller and Auditor General with red flags over allegations of misappropriation of public funds and other financial audit misdemeanours.
Even the CCM Publicity and Ideology Secretary, Nape Nnauye, earlier this week repeated remarks he and the party’s secretary-general Abdulrahman Kinana, had earlier made to the effect that ministers responsible for some key ministries, including agriculture, water, and education, were a great public burden (mizigo) and they ought to be held accountable.
Yet in Parliament, one observes the sad spectacle of CCM parliamentarians rallying support for these very ministers whenever an opposition MP directs an attack on their ministerial performance.
It was even sadder listening to contributions by CCM MPs relating to the passing of the ministerial budget of the office of the Vice President. This is the office in the Union government that is supposed to coordinate Union government activities, targeting the removal of what are cryptically called Union irks (kero). Instead of confronting the serious structural abnormalities of a two-tier “federal” government system that is crying out loud to be turned into a more normal and transparently federal structure consisting of three governments, CCM parliamentarians took it upon themselves to hurl insults and ridicule at the opposition spokesperson on legal affairs, Tundu Lissu.
It was after the clever opposition parliamentarian, who has been turned into a scarecrow by CCM propagandists, pointed out the irksome legal absurdities of the “unique” union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar. CCM parliamentarians wish everyone to forget that this great union was hurriedly stitched together by Tanzania’s great Pan Africanist but human founding fathers, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and Sheikh Abeid Karume, in the murky geopolitical security waters in which both Zanzibar and Tanganyika were swimming back in 1964.
Critical thinking multiplies one’s sadness at the lack of foresight in the contributions of the defenders of the two-tier “federal” government Union structure when one looks at the stated top priorities of this year’s Sh19.6 trillion Union government budget, almost all of which covers Tanganyika’s non-Union maters such as infrastructure, water, energy, agriculture, basic education and basic healthcare. No wonder most Zanzibaris of goodwill have for years kept on demanding the adoption of a three-tier federal government structure that allows non-union matters of Tanganyika and Zanzibar to be given equitable support by an impartial federal sovereign state.
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