Dishonest traffic police will use their uniforms to finance their homes, some magistrates sell justice to own posh houses, some bankers, too, will steal to finance their mansions and journalists are not spared; they will use their pens to finance their dream homes, and so goes the shameful game! To some of the business communities the shortcut way to own a palatial home is through tax evasion, frauds or dirty business like drugs trafficking. While in a country like South Africa buying a $1 million home without borrowing from the bank or having clear source of funds can land you in jail, in Tanzania, the situation is the opposite.26
According to a 2009 survey of corruption, Tanzanians viewed the police force as the most corrupt institution alongside the judiciary and the health sector, followed closely by land tribunals and local governments.27 An updated survey conducted in 2011 by the independent anti-corruption NGO Front Against Corrupt Elements in Tanzania (FACEIT), funded by the government of Denmark, added the Tanzania Revenue Authority to this list.28 A fuller list of corrupt institutions would include the Tanzanian military, recently given the grade D– by Transparency International for a variety of corrupt practices, including procurement, promotions, and extractions from local communities.29 The Tanzania Corruption Tracker has cited numerous complaints about the corruption at the Port of Dar es Salaam, including loss of containers, smuggling of banned cargo, and loss of revenue.30 It has also cited the National Housing Authority, whose officials continue to extract bribes for rental or repair of government-owned apartments.31 All these reports point toward a single conclusion: corruption enables a stratum of public officials in these institutions to afford a lifestyle beyond the imagination of most ordinary Tanzanians.
During Tanzania’s socialist period, public officials hid the wealth they gained through corruption. The CCM’s leadership code and the ethos of social equality discouraged conspicuous consumption. This is no longer so. Today, the wealth of Tanzania’s politico-economic oligarchy is easy to observe. Almost any Dar es Salaam taxi driver can provide a guided tour of the city’s “posh” neighborhoods as well as a detailed narrative of the lifestyles of the rich and famous who reside there. The exclusive residential communities on the northern coastal shores of the capital city provide visual evidence that the members of Tanzania’s political-economic oligarchy no longer feel the need for diffidence about the extent of their personal wealth. And since the owners of these homes, many of which belong to high-ranking political leaders and administrative officials, appear to be widely known among Tanzanians, the opulent walled residences of Oyster Bay and Msasani provide an incontrovertible indicator of the interconnectedness of political power and private accumulation. They also provide compelling evidence of the role of corruption as the link between the two.
Using one of the more powerful images in modern political economy, economists Brian Cooksey and Tim Kelsall have depicted corruption as Tanzania’s tragedy of the commons.32 Their metaphor is apt. Just as pastoralists overpopulate their common grazing lands, Tanzania’s public officials engage in corruption even though they are well aware that it degrades the overall performance of their nation’s economy. The reason is the same: one official’s gain from corrupt activity is greater than his or her share of the collective economic loss. The follow-up question posed by the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom is whether a society generates corrective political mechanisms that address the problem.33 Whereas pastoral and other communities have been able to invent political institutions that enable them to manage common resources for the public good, Tanzania has thus far been unable to do so. The best prospect may lie in the electoral arena where corruption has become the largest single issue. In the 2010 presidential election, the Chadema Party (Party for Democracy and Progress), which campaigned on an anticorruption platform, gained about 27 percent of the presidential vote. Its popularity suggests that corruption, left unaddressed, may prove to be the weakness that finally loosens the CCM’s grasp on power.
In the eternal quest to develop a political economy that differentiates between causes and effects, corruption has a special position: it functions as both. It is an outcome of economic decline because it takes root in falling public sector incomes. However, as corruption transfers income away from government to private consumption, it is also among the causes of poor economic performance, since it helps to perpetuate the budget difficulties that first brought it about.
The Authoritarian Trend
There is less ambiguity about the relationship between corruption and the tendency toward authoritarian rule. By eroding trust in government authority, corruption diminishes the prospects of government legitimacy based on the consent of the governed. In societies such as Tanzania, where corruption affects nearly everyone, it creates an almost adversarial relationship between citizens and the state, forcing government to turn increasingly to coercive mechanisms to maintain itself in power. Its greatest contribution to the authoritarian tendency, however, is to raise the stakes of holding onto political power. Since political office is the key to acquiring wealth, the loss of political power is an assured way of losing it. This anxiety unifies the members of the CCM political oligarchy and, whatever their other differences, fortifies their resolve not to be defeated in general elections.
The statist economic strategy, the spread of corruption, and the emergence and trend toward authoritarian rule went hand-in-hand. The causal connections were painfully apparent. Rural populations who were the overwhelming majority of the society quickly came to resent the imposition of a policy framework that subjected small farmers to deeper and deeper levels of taxation as well as increasing social regimentation. Until the new industries became sufficiently large to employ significant numbers of workers and managers, the social groups in favor of the industrial strategy would be limited and barely organized as a political coalition. The political dilemma of the ISI strategy in countries where the overwhelming majority of the population was smallholder farmers was that the pain of economic loss would be suffered far earlier and by far greater numbers of families than would benefit in the short term from the emerging industrial sector. To resolve this dilemma, governments would need to resort to authoritarian measures to impose the strategy on reluctant majorities.
A steady drift in an authoritarian direction marked Tanzania’s post-independence years. The tendency toward greater and greater state control assumed several different forms. In the legislative realm, it consisted of the continuation of a number of colonial-era laws combined with a set of new laws that gave the Tanzanian government a high degree of coercive authority over the lives of individuals and the activities of civil society associations. Taken as a group, these laws are known as the forty oppressive laws, identified as such in the report of the Presidential Commission on Single Party or Multi-Party System in Tanzania in 1991. This report is commonly referred to as the Report of the Nyalali Commission, after its chair, Chief Justice Nyalali. In its inventory of oppressive legislation, the Nyalali Commission report included such laws as the Preventive Detention Act (1962), the Regions and Regional Commissioners Act (1962), the Collective Punishment Ordinance (1921), and the Resettlement of Offenders Act (1969).34 Under the Preventive Detention Act, anyone suspected of dissident political activity could be imprisoned and held without trial for a specified period. The National Security Act of 1970 gave the Tanzanian police a wide degree of latitude to arrest (without warrant) and to imprison persons suspected of “sabotage.”35
Large parts of the oppressive legal framework fell with special weight on the country’s rural population. The Regions and Regional Commissioners Act, passed the same year, gave Tanzania’s regional commissioners, who represented government authority in the rural areas, the power to use that act, thereby empowering them to become virtual autocrats.36 The Collective Punishment Ordinance, which gave the government the authority to impose collective punishment on the community with which an accused individual was associated, meant that villages and towns could be held hostage to the political behavior of their individual members. Other legal measures further illustrate the Tanzanian government’s determination to impose its economic will on the countryside. The Confiscation of Immovable Property Decree of 1964, for example, permitted