Spiced with tear-gas

Zanzibar

Nov 3rd 2005 ZANZIBAR
From The Economist print edition

An election in Zanzibar, Tanzania's main island, is violently disputed

WITH Tanzania's mainland elections postponed until December 18th following the death of a vice-presidential candidate, only the semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar went ahead with its vote as planned on October 30th. Polling day was peaceful enough. But the announcement two days later that the ruling Party of the Revolution (better known by its Swahili initials, CCM) had yet again swept the board in presidential and parliamentary elections was greeted by riots and the reported deaths of five opposition people at the hands of the security forces, as the outcome was fiercely rejected by the opposition Civic United Front (CUF).

Official results returned the incumbent president, the CCM's Amani Karume, son of Zanzibar's first president, with 53% of the vote. The CUF's Seif Sharif Hamad had 46%. The CCM also won 30 of the 50 seats in Zanzibar's parliament. Earlier, the CUF had declared itself a narrow winner in the presidential race and a solid winner in the parliamentary one. The CCM, it said, had rigged the voting register and falsified results at polling stations.

It is an article of faith among CUF supporters that the Zanzibar elections in 1995 and 2000 were also stolen by the CCM. Probably they were. And despite a larger presence of international observers, the CCM was at it again this time round. Less educated CUF supporters were bullied or simply turned away. Some militiamen voted several times. The CCM allegedly bought votes (for about $110, said some recipients) and spent liberally on posters, rallies, and free T-shirts, whereas CUF supporters paid for their own gear. One CCM tactic, witnessed by The Economist in a village called Fujoni, was to have registered boys as voters months ago, then whisk them through the polling stations to vote CCM when observers were not looking.

Just how many dodgy votes the CCM grabbed is impossible to say. Why it did so, with Tanzania's economy and reputation on the up, is easier to understand: it rules Zanzibar as it does mainland Tanzania as a one-party state. The rhetoric and faded black-and-white photos in the CCM's island headquarters still hark back to the revolutionary struggle for independence. Yet that brand of austere African socialism promoted by the late Julius Nyerere, independent Tanzania's founding father, never caught on in Muslim Zanzibar, with its historic ties of trade and kinship to Arabia.

But the CCM's apparatchiks remain. The party controls government appointments on the islands and favours its supporters in the regulated export of cloves, a spice used in making toothpaste and chewing gum. The CCM has improved the provision of water, electricity and rural roads. Tourism is quite well handled and is heading up-market. Even so, Zanzibar is much poorer than it should be. Not enough is made of its spice industry (pepper, cinnamon and vanilla, as well as cloves). Fishing is still unmodernised.

Western diplomats tended to deride the vote in private but endorse it publicly, arguing that it is more important to keep mainland Tanzania stable, with its 36m people, than to fret over the threat of more violence in Zanzibar and its nearby fellow island of Pemba, with their 1m people. Besides, if the CCM is monolithic and heavy-handed, the CUF is an odd coalition of Zanzibar's present underclass and its former Arab-oriented overlords. It has convinced most observers that it is not an Islamist party, but there are doubts whether it could propel Zanzibar forward if it gained power; some of its lieutenants have made cavalier economic promises.

Will the CUF now be able to control its own? Despite its laudable appeals for non-violent protests, “Zanzibar Liberation Front” slogans have been provocatively daubed on the exquisitely distressed alleys of Zanzibar Town's Stonetown district—and may be seen by CUF hotheads as a call to armed struggle. Some people fear that, without more economic development and a lighter governing hand than CCM politicians are used to, it might come to that.

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