CCM has lost appel for young peopole
By Evarist Kagaruki
The ruling party, CCM, will be holding national elections this year. The exercise will take place at a time when the party was being torn asunder by divisive and sectarian tendencies within its leadership; and when it was losing direction and getting further detached from the grassroots. The rank and file party members were getting increasingly concerned about this situation. They are greatly disappointed that their party has had no ideology since it abandoned the Arusha Declaration; and that it has renounced its fundamental principle of being the advocate of the poor, which, until the death of the Declaration, was its raison detre.
The fractious and directionless CCM may not be on the verge of a split as yet, but it is doubtlessly deeply divided. Any keen watcher would tell you that there have emerged several “CCMs” within the CCM! Political pundits attribute the wrangling in the grand old party partly to power struggle, and especially the fight for the presidency in 2015, partly to corruption and competition for resource grabbing and wealth accumulation, the latter having huge influence on the former. What this means is that ruthless competition for the presidency among CCM politicians today is motivated by the ambition to amass wealth.
Since the secret abandonment of the Arusha Declaration in Zanzibar in 1991 by the CCM National Executive Committee (NEC), the party has seen the thriving of unbridled corruption within its ranks and ruthless competition for political power. The adoption of the Zanzibar Resolution (read: capitalism) by the NEC, after jettisoning socialism and the Leadership Code, gave Tanzanian leaders an opportunity to freely engage in business (dirty or clean), abuse their positions by diverting public resources into their private coffers, and use the accumulated wealth to ascend to political office
The canker of corruption in the CCM, which continues to eat at the core of the party’s leadership (at all levels) has demolished the party’s ideological base and eroded its strength and cohesion as a political organization. Indeed, it has: jeopardized the party’s leading role in the nation’s search for democratization and social renewal; undermined the legitimacy of its earlier (socialist) gains; and distorted the whole principle of human equality as a moral imperative which the party used to stand for in the good old days of the Arusha Declaration.
Capitalism, which CCM has swallowed hook, line and sinker, by its very nature breeds conditions conducive to not only corruption, but also the widening of the gap between the haves and have-nots, frustration and cynicism among the ordinary people as well as social tensions which could lead to unrest. These are the conditions which obtain in this country today.
And because the evil capitalist system has continued to generate these conditions and produce more corrupt (rich and power-hungry) leaders, political crooks and opportunists, thieves of public property, and cynics among the poverty-stricken citizens, CCM has found itself fast losing appeal for most people, especially the youth. If elections were held today, the party would almost certainly lose or win by a whisker.
Regrettably, the party chairman, President Jakaya Kikwete, has failed to use his huge (political and executive) powers to purge the party and the whole system of the divisive, arrogant and corrupt elements and thus restore public confidence. Political pundits posit that this lack of decisive action does not auger well both for the forthcoming CCM elections and the party itself in the next general election.
The CCM elections are supposed to give an indication as to whether or not the party would face the challenges of the 2015 elections as a cohesive and solid political family, and produce Kikwete’s successor. My view is that those rich party members who aspire to become leaders, and those who got their positions in the party leadership through corruption, are still entrenched and have the wherewithal to buy their way through the electoral process. Therefore, we should not expect to see CCM’s elections this time round produce a new crop of leaders who are unblemished by corruption and are capable of restoring the party’s lost glory.