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Post-EPA crisis: Time to dust up Leadership Code?
2008-02-11 08:52:45
By Ani Jozen
Elation was being noticed from various quarters at the start of this month after President Jakaya Kikwete made an end of month speech in which he raised worries about parliamentarians and cabinet ministers ``serving two masters.``
He suggested that they choose between politics and business, and appeared to indicate that measures would be taken to ensure that such choice is made, or enforced if it exists within the law.
Sentiments of elation arose from relief that this would tame corruption.
This move would serve as an example in a class of politics as to how one rides with the wave if a crisis of legitimacy is setting in, to appeal to base sentiments of the crowd, the sort of things they like to hear.
The utility of this suggestion stems less from its technical efficacy nor indeed in its political plausibility as workable orientation of political recruitment, but elsewhere.
It is in suggesting that rich people around the president would start losing influence, and economic policy undergo radical change.
What those who are expressing satisfaction, beaming with hope at this announcement is that it begins from the end, while the same measures failed when they began from the beginning.
Mwalimu put up the Arusha Declaration in 1967, whose key element was the Leadership Code, to try and separate jostling for property with political loyalties, as it bred with it seeds of tribalism.
Who obtains credit from Karadha, and who is the manager, were the sort of queries that Mwalimu sought to circumspect.
At that time Mwalimu was seeking to uplift an ethical orientation from zero, as the group of civil servants that took office as Africanization set in did not have properties anyway.
Additionally, the salaries they were getting, up to the first oil price shock of October 1973, tended to be sufficient for their needs, including housing either in Oysterbay or in city centre flats, etc.
Subsequently the gap between expectations of the standard of living of a senior official and salary widened; so did ethics.
Seeking to introduce a measure of the Leadership Code, trying to make some harum scarum separation of enterprise and political office or, what is nearly identical with it, top level bureaucratic positions, is unfeasible.
For it amounts to starting at the end, that those who are eligible to office are also capable of acquisition of a minimum of property, and are tied up with some workable businesses.
Like everyone else they need to obtain tenders with the government or its innumerable agencies, and it is pointless to think they can drop the business, or the pursuit of tenders.
Yet this is the point of elation of some people especially in academic circles, whether or not this would be reflecting a sociological feature that academics are less inclined to go into business.
That much isn`t exactly true, though academics habitually have room for sloppy ways of life that avoids businesses like counting farm harvests, animal yield over a period of time, sales of milk or fruit, etc.
They are available as expert auxiliaries to whatever project there is; they don't have to touch mud... Applied to the political leadership as it is, or as some say, the `elite,` all idea of separating politics and business looks, to say the least, amusing.
The pudding (if not perhaps the proof) of its falsity is the vain effort by the central government to crack the whip on local governments not to arrange tenders within the councils, for trader-councillors.
The point is that this was the reason they contested, and removing that motivation would make their engagement in that electoral exercise rather pointless.
At the same time, political recruitment has become competitive, and nearly everyone who aspires to some elective post has to use resources to enable people meet and list his qualities, etc.
What sort of environment favours such inclination to talk positively about an aspirant isn`t simply because everyone knows the `problems` an area faces, etc but who all of us are most inclined to obey.
Electoral aspiration exercises one`s aura or psychological authority; its representative aspect is entirely secondary.
In any case, what the president's remarks amounted to, was in a sense to separate political office from one form of rent, while retaining another.
Bureaucrats (top officials) get rent from decision-making, as a form of thanksgiving, or assurance against worries relating to possibly negative decisions - what is called `bribe.`
This is an irrational sort of rent but it is inseparable from exercise of public office so long as worries persist - and cultural norms or societal divides which facilitate rental disposition.
What the president was trying to control is actually the more rational form of rent, that one stands a better chance of enabling some sort of business to succeed because he holds office.
By the time one retires it is necessary that the business would be standing on its two feet, or several businesses, as there is no possible use of office to stabilize it in case of need.
Saying one skips business up to retirement is to abandon business.
The point is that no political capacity exists for a Leadership Code that can be put up and credibly effected.
The remarks thus lulled the public to sleep about the sort of formal controls or accountability structures which ensure that things like the EPA scam do not recur.
EPA issues can be linked with a Leadership Code only on the basis of a suggestion that leaders have companies, so they sought easy BoT funds; is that credible?
A suggestion even came up that those who have businesses should place them under the Administrator General for the period that they are in Parliament, or in cabinet.
That means a business should be frozen when an individual takes up politics, a proposition which makes sense only in a co\untry where the government can nationalize property at will.
An idea of that sort leads to hide and seek games of which leader owns what - as has been the case since former president Benjamin Mkapa announced his pre-presidency properties.
It ignites property instability, capital flight and bank runs as outflows start in various branches of foreign capital.
It is clear that any checking of property requires that banks be susceptible to responding to official queries on account details - back to Securitate.
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