Rutashubanyuma
JF-Expert Member
- Sep 24, 2010
- 219,470
- 911,174
A direct correlation between the size of the cabinet and the institution of presidency remains vague, unresearched and least understood. The larger the size of the cabinet the weaker the appointing authority tends to be because the president is caving in to parliamentary interests that rarely converge with larger issues of executive arm of government to run the nation.
MPs are the ones forming the cabinet, and they owe their allegiance to voters in their constituents. The political survival of the MPs depends on their ability to pull national resources to their respective constituents. We being selfish seldom ask our collective conscious where our MP gets his cake to feed upon our constituent whereby the chances are he ought to have denied other constituents in order to fill our hungry bellies! Out of this, every MP relishes an opportunity to serve as a minister where (s )he will grab the chance to misallocate national resources to his/her respective constituent. Those MPs who are unlucky to get a presidential pat on the back to serve in the cabinet become political orphans and their only way to the high table is to be critical of government policy and its implementation during parliamentary debates hoping to attract attention of fellow MPs masquerading as minister who are now dangling and swirling a morsel of bread and a piece of silver from the presidential high table! Ensuing from this, Ministers are coerced to appoint fellow MPs in the parastatal Board of Directors where the only qualification that matters is how close the individual MP is to the appointing authority! Whether it is placating MPs to serve as R.Cs or D.Cs, the political nepotism that CCM has perfected over five decades seems to have survived all efforts to reform our public service. It has reached a point where CCM owe her ultimate survival upon the politics of affectation than the latter needing CCM for the same survival!
However as more unqualified MPs saturate our public sector the performance of the executive tends to nosedive and the general public blame the executive president for a failure to ameliorate public sector performance. On equal footing since the House is now both an overseer and an implementer of government policy, the constitutional imperatives of checking and balancing the executive arm of the government becomes obsolete and ineffective. Any strong, serious president will persevere to shrug off parliamentarian forays unto executive positions in the government but the degree to which a sitting president cave in into unabashed solicitations from parliamentarians for executive jobs is a confirmatory signature to what extent power has ebbed away from a sitting president and he should be regarded too weak to influence public policy. And Kikwete's recalcitrance to reduce the size of the government in his seven years of uninterrupted administration impeaches him as a much weakened president.
Borrowing from Nyerere's misconception of the rule of law we learn that Nyerere justified his legitimacy on the number of votes he garnered in each subsequent election in comparison to individual MPs! Nyerere would often brag that more voters had tapped him than any individual MP hence he had more legitimacy to govern than the House! While it was true any president will collect more votes than any other MP but since MPs are limited by geographical realities it was futile to make such comparisons in the first place. A logical comparison between the president and the House in reference to legitimacy and hence authority to govern has to be spelt out from collective votes of members of the House relative to what the president has also collected at the ballot box, where a geographical parameter is the same in either scenario. The other source of comparative argument ought to be how much will the institution of presidency needs to draw her legitimacy by allowing the House encroaching to executive authority as a strategy of survival and vice versa. If the executive yields to the House and permit her to allot to herself more executive powers that alone ought to mean the executive has lost her legitimacy to lead, altogether.
Because of the parliamentarian corruption of the executive, the sordidness with which our government runs the public sector has yielded the worst scandals in our history and few in the CCM MPs are willing to address those scams. Historically, when scandals germinate the House cry foul and demand ministerial heads to roll as if by doing that the invisible gods will be appeased and such incredulous comport will cease from the face of the government! But learning from the same history, it is clear that cabinet perennial reshuffles are at best window dressing and at worst misleading the general public something is being done while in reality nothing of substance is being done, at all.
Unless the House is proscribed from running the executive, we ought to expect MPs camouflaged as ministers to repeat all of the past scams and even creating bigger graft storms for the purposes and intents of holding their constituents where the real conflict of interests lie.
