Dar es Salaam. Fishmongers at the Msasani Fish Market in the city think that the current arrangement that electorates have to wait for five years before they vote out an underperforming elected official doesn’t serve their best interests, calling for a mechanism that would allow them to recall their representatives at any time.
They told The Chanzo during a group discussion on November 18, 2024, that constitutional and legal changes must be effected to allow them to exercise such a responsibility directly, or at least the president should be assigned the power to fire elected officials that electorates believe do not serve their interests.
The basis for such an opinion was the cries from many fishmongers that many elected officials care about electorates and their concerns only during elections when they visit people in their areas and beg for votes. However, as soon as they get into office, they forget the electorates and pay no attention to their concerns.
For example, the traders claimed that since they last visited the market for campaigning purposes in the 2020 general elections, neither their Member of Parliament nor their councillor has visited the market to talk to electorates and listen to their issues and concerns.
Unresolved challenges
This has meant that many of the challenges they expected their elected officials to help them resolve remain, affecting their daily incomes and general well-being. These include fewer customers, a challenge emanating from the market being less visible and with little traffic.
Other challenges include dilapidated infrastructure, which makes the market seem like abandoned ruins. Local authorities also impose numerous levies on traders without seeing how those levies improve market services.
Some traders have also equated the marketplace with a dispensary due to the presence of many drug abusers around who do heroin, cocaine and other drugs through injection, a challenge fishmongers allege that law enforcement authorities have not been able to resolve.
“This is no longer a marketplace,” complained Gharib Athuman, a trader at the market. “This has become a dispensary where drug abusers get their injections. It is out of control. We have complained a lot, but authorities show no interest in intervening. Any customer coming here to buy fish will be perturbed, wondering if this was a market or something else.”
Inexcusable behaviour
Fishmongers believe these challenges are directly related to their elected officials abandoning their pledges immediately after election season is over, a behaviour they find totally inexcusable.
They argue that no matter how busy the representatives are, they must visit a place at least once during their five-year mandate. Therefore, they are calling for an arrangement to stop such behaviour.
“Five years are too much to wait,” complained Miraj Omar, a fishmonger at the Msasani Fish Market. “We need to establish an arrangement where, at least after every year, we review the performance of our elected officials, and if we are not pleased, we should be able to recall them. We shouldn’t wait after five years; we’re dying.”
Tanzania currently doesn’t have an arrangement where an electorate can recall their elected officials.
However, this is a very popular demand, and the traders at the Msasani Fish Market just echoed the views of many Tanzanians who presented the suggestion to the Constitutional Review Commission in 2013 during the national constitutional consultations.
This demand was so popular that the commission, chaired by former Prime Minister Joseph Sinde Warioba, accommodated it in its famous Second Draft Constitution, commonly referred to as the Warioba’s Draft.
However, it was subsequently removed from the Proposed Constitution, which was passed by the Constituent Assembly and still awaits a referendum.
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Tanzania wouldn’t be the first and only country in the world to establish and implement an arrangement allowing electorates to recall their elected officials. The arrangement is common in many parliamentary democracies, including neighbouring Kenya, whose 2010 Constitution establishes the right to recall an MP.
Behaving properly
Traders at Msasani Fish Market believe this arrangement will force elected officials to behave properly and to deliver to electorates, knowing that voters don’t have to wait for five years to be able to express their displeasure at the non-performing representatives.
“And if it is too much to have the arrangement for all elected officials, we can at least try it with local officials, like [street and village] chairpersons and councillors,” suggested Mohamed Khamis, another fishmonger at the market.
“We should evaluate them at least annually; we don’t have to wait five years to hold them accountable,” he added.
Asked about the cost implications of such a proposal, an argument the government may use to dismiss it, saying it doesn’t have the money to hold elections every now and then, traders responded that no election might be needed at all, noting that the president can just fire a non-performing representative and appoints another on behalf of the people.
“The president can go around the country, listening to people’s concerns and asking if their representatives deliver,” Mr Omar, who doubles as traders’ chairperson at the market, opined. “If she finds the representative doesn’t deliver, she can fire them and appoint a new one.”
Omar said he personally doesn’t care about the separation of power and is only interested in improving his well-being. He added that if the president can deliver that by whatever means, he’d welcome that.
His fellow fishmongers agreed.
