By Dan Paget, Lecturer in
Politics, University of Aberdeen
In Tanzania, the political rally is back. Chadema, Tanzania’s leading opposition party, held mass rallies outside the official election campaign for the first time in six and a half years on 21 January 2023.
It could do so because three
weeks earlier, President Samia Hassan lifted
the ban on public rallies. Assassination-attempt survivor and
opposition politician Tundu Lissu returned
to Tanzania on 25 January to take part in them.
The ban on rallies was
introduced in June 2016 by the late President John Magufuli. It became a
central plank of an authoritarian
turn initiated by the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), but
ultimately propelled by Magufuli. The ban, however, appeared to affect only the
opposition – CCM continued to convene rallies with impunity throughout.
Magufuli’s death on 17 March
2021 raised the dual possibilities that the CCM regime might loosen its iron
grip, and that in such a context, the opposition might rebuild. The end of the
ban on rallies has implications for both these possibilities.
I have spent 10 years
researching Chadema’s
grassroots organising and what it calls the struggle for democracy.
I am writing a book on rallies
in Tanzania.
In my view, the unbanning of
rallies will tremendously alter the space in which the opposition has to
operate. However, this doesn’t set Tanzania on any path of democratic reform.
The timing and wider context still leaves the opposition with a big task ahead.
The very real possibility remains that Hassan has unbanned rallies to signal that she plans future democratic reforms – without actually enacting any.
It’s easy to underestimate the
importance of the rally in Tanzania. In much of the global north, political
rallies are things seen on TV and attended by ultra-partisans. But not in
Tanzania.
In 2015, I oversaw the
collection of a nationally
representative survey in Tanzania. It showed that in the last month of the
country’s election campaign, 69% of all people attended rallies. This figure
dwarfs its equivalents in the global north. In the 2016 US campaign, just 7% of people attended
public meetings.
Not only did a large
proportion of Tanzanians attend rallies. They also attended them frequently.
The same survey data showed
that the average person attended seven such rallies in the last month of the
campaign, or just under one every four days.
In Tanzania, the rally is, or
in political campaigning becomes, a medium of mass communication, just as it
does across much of the
global south. Indefinitely banning rallies does to public communication in
Tanzania what indefinitely banning television, or the internet, would do in the
global north.
Tanzania’s ban
on rallies was doubly painful for the opposition. First, it was a ban,
in effect, only on opposition rallies.
Second, the opposition needs
rallies in a way that the ruling party does not. In the shadow of state
coercion, media outlets offer the opposition scarce and hostile coverage. The
rally offers the opposition a way to reach the 73%
of Tanzanians who say they don’t (directly) get news via social media.
The ban on rallies was lifted
for the election campaign in 2020, but the opposition needs rallies between
elections too – this is when they organise.
Chadema leaders and
activists told me that
between 2007 and 2015, they founded party branches across much of Tanzania.
Their work paid off. The survey
data I collected showed that in the 2015 campaign, Chadema’s ground
campaign was so strong that it made at least as many house-to-house visits as
the ruling party, perhaps more.
They achieved this
party-building feat in large part through rallies. Teams of party leaders
toured the country convening rallies. They imparted their messages and
recruited attendees. Follow-up teams organised these new recruits into
branches.
In parallel, lone organisers ran
their own solo party-building initiatives. These local leaders, among them the
2020 presidential candidate Tundu Lissu, held
public meetings in villages. Incrementally, they recruited local activists who
became the leaders of new branches.
Today, though, it’s hard to
know how well these structures have endured. Opposition activists were
subjected to everyday oppression. It peaked during the
violence of the 2020 election, and was designed to demoralise
and demobilise them.
This means that opposition
parties have their work cut out. They have to re-join public debates after
years of censorship, and reorganise and remotivate their supporters all at
once.
This makes the timing of the
end of the ban important.
Chadema’s grassroots
organising for the 2015 election began just months after the 2010 election.
Revoking the ban now, just over two and a half years before the October 2025
election, leaves opposition parties with a greater task than they have faced
before – and less time in which to do it.
Unbanning the rally is perhaps
the most concrete opening of political space that Hassan
has introduced since she was sworn in as president.
Some will be tempted to read
the unbanning of the rally as a sign of things to come. But that would be
unduly optimistic.
It may be
that Hassan plans to enact a wider programme of democratic reforms. Or it may
be that she lifted the ban precisely so that it looks like
that’s her plan.
Ultimately, either reading
could turn out to be right. Interpreting the intentions of the often
inscrutable Hassan is a matter of guesswork. But there are reasons to be
sceptical.
First, the rally ban was part
of an authoritarian architecture. The ban is gone, but the architecture
remains. This leaves the regime with means aplenty to preserve its dominance.
Second, with the exception of
the Magufuli years, the regime has long maintained the appearance of being the
sort that would oversee democratic reforms – while implementing few of them.
The significance of
the rally’s return may not be in what the regime will grant. Instead, it may be
in what the opposition can demand. Chadema used its first rally to call again
for a new constitution.
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