By Evarist Baimu Nyaga Mawalla - Home

These clauses in their can only relate to decisions given within the field ofoperation entrusted to the tribunal. They may, according to the width andemphasis of their formulation, help to ascertain the extent of that field, to narrowit or to enlarge it, but unless on is to deny the statutory origin of the tribunal andof its powers, they cannot preclude examination of that extent”44.Those observations equally apply to administrative bodies, and statutory bodies besidesthe tribunals. Even if the decision of that body is within its jurisdiction, the courts areentitled to examine it to see that, it has not broken any law in arriving at that decision.The broad approach is to be preferred because these days the individual citizen often findhimself victimized by the over-zealous officials in the course of discharging theirmultifarious functions. Now the imperative need in a democracy is to subject the powercenters, wherever they may be located to fundamental constitutional or public lawlimitations. One of the fundamental limitations upon governmental and parastatalfunctions is that every action of the executive government which operates to the prejudiceof a person must be informed with reason and should be free from arbitrariness. Thislimitation springs from the very concept of the Rule of Law.This concept of Rule of Law has suffered many definitions and survived varyingperceptions ranging from A.V Dicey in his book The Law of the Constitution (1885) tovarious recent definitions. Yet there is substantial agreement that the basic rationale andthe essential purpose of the Rule of Law is “protection of the individual against arbitraryexercise of power, wherever it is found”. Consequently the government and its variousorgans cannot be left to act arbitrarily but its action must be in conformity with standardsor norms which are not arbitrary, irrational or irrelevant. That is the Rule of Law. Itwould indeed lead to an absurd situation if a tribunal or administrative body, having beengiven a circumscribed area of operation, were entitled of its own motion to extend thatarea by misconstruing the44 At p. 207Limits of its mandate as set out in the stature. An English judge a Mr. Farewell, L.J along time ago in the case of R. vs. ex-parte Morgan45 exclaimed that, thatconstruction would render the aforesaid organ to be autocratic.” And we submit that,that situation should only be possible in a fascist state where law is used as anecessary weapon by the ruling class to “handle” or “deal” with the people.As the then Tanzania Party (TANU) newspaper The Nationalist of 24 th June, 1969once commented in its editorial of what looked like in a bourgeois fascist State. Itsaid:“The bourgeoisie makes its own laws. These laws are both its property and aninstrument for maintaining it in power. This is also perfectly understandable Iterms of the realist of bourgeois societies which necessarily must exist above thepeople.128