Jittery times as Tanzania tightens grip on its civil society ahead of General Elections

On the evening of January 24, 2012, Mr Bruno Mwambene was weeding his small farm in Tazara, a small, windswept rural town in Mbeya, Tanzania, when he saw two police officers assaulting a motorcycle rider.

Mr Mwambene, the deputy district chairperson for the Human Rights National Association of Mbozi District, immediately rushed to the scene to check what the commotion was all about.

While there, he said in a statement, a call came on his mobile phone, and as he reached for the handset, one of the police officers turned around and asked him why he was photographing them.

Before he could answer, the police officers descended upon him with kicks and blows and then confiscated his phone.

A few days later, the badly bruised activist was charged in court with the criminal offence of assaulting a police officer, and, after a protracted court battle, was earlier this year jailed for four years.

Tanzania’s fledgling civil society erupted in a chorus of protest, arguing that Mr Mwambene had been convicted unlawfully, and that the state was punishing him for doing his civil duty well.

By last week, Mr Mwambene was still serving his four-year term despite the outcry. His case illustrates the thorny, often grouchy relationship between the state and civil society in Tanzania.

Mr Boka Lyamuya, a lawyer working with the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders’ Coalition, and who is representing Mr Mwambene in his appeal case, says this is not an isolated incident, and that the landscape is getting more and more challenging for civil society groups in Tanzania.

“It is hard, really, to understand what is happening,” says Mr Lyamuya. “There are many more such cases involving both individuals and organisations that are reported across the country, and that has us reasonably worried.”

The trend is getting increasingly worrying as Tanzania, which still runs — for better or for worse — on socialist hangovers from the Julius Nyerere era, inches closer to a constitutional referendum next year, when the country is also expected to hold a General Election.
STEALTH CAMPAIGN

Civil society and the opposition have rejected amendments to the first draft of the proposed Constitution, saying that the new document does not capture the wishes of the majority, including the establishment of a three-tier federal government that gives Zanzibar considerable political autonomy.

The ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi sees this two-pronged opposition to the proposed Constitution as yet another attempt to derail its initiatives, and has thus started a stealth campaign to reign in civil society.

The Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition (THRDC), in a 2013 report, warns that, because of the competitive political environment in areas with strong multiparty democracy, many actors, including the international community, predict that Tanzania will “increasingly experience most subtle forms of human rights violations” before next year’s elections.

“The most affected groups will be political activists, human rights defenders, journalists and whoever is presumed a threat to the current regime,” warns THRDC.

Power struggles between the ruling class and the opposition are seen as a major threat to the independence of civil society organisations in Tanzania.

In a survey of such organisations last year, for instance, the THRDC sought to know what was the biggest challenge to the movement; over 75 per cent of those surveyed cited political influences as their number one problem.

Some organisations said they had been branded anti-state agents of Western powers, supporters of opposition parties, or money-minded trouble-mongers. Others said they had been suspiciously targeted for administrative measures, including being ordered to provide extensive financial information, activity reports, and lists of donors and contractors.

And then, in September this year, the Office of the Prime Minister issued a directive under the Non-Governmental Organisations Act to all civil society organisations to, among others, submit their annual budgetary estimates, list of activities planned for every quarter, and the regions in which such activities were planned.

While this was presented as a legal requirement, says Mr Patrick Kinemo, the head of programmes at Sikika, an organisation that agitates for “quality health services for all Tanzanians”, the timing was suspect.

“Many people see a connection between this directive and the referendum,” says Mr Kinemo. His comments are echoed by Mr Pasience Mlowe, the research programme officer at the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC), the biggest civil society organisation in Tanzania.

“Unfortunately,” says Mr Mlowe, “many people still do not understand the difference between civil society and the opposition. Because the bulk of our work entails monitoring and evaluating state projects, we are often accused of being some sort of an undercover opposition movement, and that is quite misleading.”

NO CONFIDENCE

However, civil society organisations still enjoy considerable freedoms in Tanzania compared to other East African Countries. As a result, there has been a marked increase in the number of CSOs in the country, rising from 224 in 1993 to 8,116 by September last year, according to the Tanzania Human Rights Report of 2013.
But, as the state tightens its grip on them, many are changing their registration particulars from non-governmental organisations to limited companies. One such organisation is Sikika, which, coincidentally, was recently banned from carrying out any monitoring and evaluation activities in the Kondoa region of Dodoma.
Its executive director, Mr Irenei Kiria, has worked tirelessly over the years to build the profile of the organisation, and to do that, he has ensured that he has deep footprints in at least 10 districts in Tanzania.
The ban from Kondoa, therefore, came as a huge surprise to him and his team, even though, curiously, he admits he half-expected it.

In 2012, his team had filed a report with the local administration that questioned expenditures and accused the local leadership of embezzling funds. Shortly thereafter, a motion of no confidence against the local council chairman, informed by the findings of the committee, failed to sail through. It was a small victory for the chairman, but it opened a wide rift between him and Sikika.

All went quiet until earlier this year, when Sikika went back to carry out yet another social accountability monitoring programme in Kondoa. The organisation boasts an open approach to its activities, and to achieve that, it allows its grassroots team to decide who will be part of the monitoring unit.

What the team in Dar es Salaam did not know was that its ground force in Kondoa had been infiltrated by two local councillors suspected to be henchmen of the beleaguered council chair. Its open approach had come to bite it as the councillors engineered an implosion of the monitoring and evaluation team.

As the rest of the officials prepared to file a report on their findings, the councillors wrote to the local governing council alleging that Sikika had been using abusive language in the course of its operations in Kondoa, that its officials had defamed the local leadership as being illiterate, and that it had fabricated accusations against the council.

On July 31 this year, as the rest of Tanzania celebrated President Jakaya Kikwete’s crowning — by The Voice Magazine Achievers Award committee in The Netherlands — as the 2014 African winner of the Icon of Democracy Award, Mr Emmanuel Mvungi, the deputy managing director of the Kondoa district council, sat down to write to Sikika, informing them that they had been found culpable of “trying to undermine the peace and progress of Kondoa”, and that, as a result, their activities there had been banned indefinitely.

Mr Kiria immediately sought the intervention of the Prime Minister’s office in the matter, and Mr Denis Bandisa, writing on behalf of the Premier, promised in an August 28, 2014 letter to have the matter resolved “as soon as possible” and “within the limits of the law”.

The promised action, however, is yet to come, and Mr Patrick Kinemo, the head of programmes at Sikika, two weeks ago told this writer they would seek “a judicial review of the ban” if nothing happens in the coming days.

Asked whether Sikika would have been deregistered rather than handed a ban from one region had it not been listed as a limited company, Mr Kinemo took a deep breath, stared blankly around his small office within the Sikika complex in Kinondoni, Dar es Salaam, and then, as if speaking to himself, said: “Probably… probably…. I’m not sure, but it’s possible.”

Many CSOs in Tanzania have been accused of failing to meet accountability requirements, which Mr Kineno attributes to poor administrative structures and lack of qualified human resource.

The situation is so bad that, earlier this year, President Kikwete asked the Ministry of Community Development, Gender and Children to devise mechanisms to monitor resources dished out to

NGOs as most of the funds channelled through such organisations did not reach the intended beneficiaries.
Mr Kikwete had been listening to a speech by the Minister for Community Development, Gender and Children, Ms Sophia Simba, on a code of conduct the ministry had developed for NGOs when he stopped her mid-sentence to raise the issue of accountability, which has been a common denominator in the criticisms levelled against NGOs, not only in Tanzania, but across East Africa.

“We don’t want to interfere in their operations,” Mr Kikwete clarified, “but we are concerned that there are huge resources channelled through them that do not reach the intended beneficiaries.

Some NGOs have turned out to be schemes of profiteering rather than helping those in need of the assistance.”

Mr Marcel Katemba, the director of NGOs in the ministry, says it is hard to take the organisations to task as “in most cases they receive resources directly from donors”, which makes it hard for his office to trace their usage.

Mr Katemba also says that some NGOs register with other state organs, including the Registration, Insolvency and Trusteeship Agency (Rita), as well as the Business Registration and Licensing Authority (Brela), which makes it difficult for his office to oversee their operations.
RUTHLESS
However, where the state fails in the hide-and-seek game, it compensates by being ruthless when it has reason to believe an organisation is playing truant. In April this year, for instance, the government deregistered the Sisi Kwa Sisi Foundation, accusing it of promoting deviant behaviour by campaigning for gay and lesbian rights.

It is such powers — vested in ministers by the Societies Act and the Non-Governmental Organisations Act — that have Mr Mlowe of the Legal and Human Rights Centre concerned. He says such clout creates an environment of mistrust between civil society and the state, which often translates into bans or outright cancellations of licences, as happened to Sisi Kwa Sisi.

In other instances, state actions are not that direct, but the bite still retains its sting. The Legal and Human Rights Centre, for instance, has been running civil society advocacy campaigns in mainstream media since 1998. This year, the LHRC partnered with ITV, one of Tanzania’s leading television stations, to air a series of debates on the proposed new Constitution.

A few shows later, Members of Parliament raised questions about the intentions of LHRC, and particularly those of its executive director, Dr Helen Kijo Bisimba, whom they accused of having ulterior political motives. Shortly afterwards, ITV informed LHRC that they would not be airing their constitutional debates any more.

“Nobody is saying it, but a culture of oppression is creeping upon us,” says Mr Mlowe, the programmes officer at LHRC. “Unfortunately, most civil society organisations in Tanzania do not notice it, either because of their own inherent incompetence, or because they have been compromised by state organs.”

The mistrust against civil society, however, is not universal or some sort of unwritten state policy, says Mr Marcel Katemba, the director of NGOs at the Ministry of Community Development, Gender and Children.

“We view civil society organisations as important tools for driving national development.... We have a good rapport with all local and international NGOs and we expect that to continue,” he says.

Mr Katemba says civil society organisations with well co-ordinated programmes receive regular state support, including funding, “as part of the government’s mission for development”.

The growth of the sector in recent years has, however, spawned a new breed of NGOs that do not comply with the law, he says, adding that despite the fact that every CSO is required to have a constitution to guide its activities, some have deviated from their stated purpose, “and when that happens, we either warn them or ban them”.

“Remember Sisi Kwa Sisi?” he asks, referring to the organisation deregistered earlier in the year for supposedly promoting gay rights.