Tanzania’s constitutional reform predicament and the survival of the Tanganyika and Zanzibar Union

Abstract

A Constitution is the most important piece of legislation that any country has. It reflects the history of the nation and mirrors the interests and aspirations of its people with regard to how they wish to be governed. In its simplest form a constitution is the social contract between those who govern and the governed. As such, the making and remaking of a constitution is a societal and national project in which all sectors of society must participate. Tanzania embarked on a Constitutional reform process in 2011. However, the move to write a new Constitution has been a contentious issue in Tanzania especially over the structure of the union. This paper assesses the contextual factors that precipitated Tanzania’s Constitutional reform of 2014 and its implication on the status of the union. It identifies the weaknesses in the methodology used by the Constitutional Review Committee in gathering, processing and interpreting public opinions. Literature on previous constitutional reforms in Tanzania, the data set of Tanzania’s Constitutional Review Committee of 2014 and the special parliament Hansards were content analysed. It has been found that the current constitutional reform in Tanzania has been mostly dominated by partisan interests. Majority of the Tanzanians did not rank the union as the top most important issue in the constitutional review. The process of data collection, analysis and interpretation was marred by serious methodological shortcomings such as excluding the rural population, excluding those who cannot read and write; failure to specify the sampling methodology, the over and under sampling in some regions as well as interviewing the minors. It is recommended that people should be cautious when interpreting data of the 2014 Tanzania’s Constitutional Review Committee and its resultant conclusions.