By Evarist Baimu Nyaga Mawalla - Home

the expiry of 180 days, there was no subject matter which would have been asubject of information or communication by the Registrar.Section 8(4) of the Political Parties Act provides as follows…“The provisional registration of every party shall lapse and everyregistration certificate shall cease to be of any effect at the expiry of one hundredand eighty days from the date of one hundred and eighty days from the date ofsuch provisional registration.”Mr. Salula argument must be rejected for two reasons. The provisional registration of thesecond appellant may have lapsed and the provisional registration certificate ceased to beof any effect at the end of the day when application for full registration was made, butthere were still alive and very much in existence, is the human agents, i.e. the officebearers who physically filed the applications under Regulation 4(1) of the PoliticalParties (Registration) Regulations G.N. 111/92.These are the two people to whom information should have been sent by the Registrar ofhis intention to refuse granting full registration and to hear them it they so wished. Afterall it is the two human agents, the office bearers, who were directly affected by theRegistrar’s decision.The second reason is that in Minc. Civil Application No. 42/93 filed in the HighCourt at Dar es Salaam, the first appellant had applied for the extension of the party’sprovisional registration until the party’s application for full registration is determined bythe Registrar of Political Parties. The High Court (Samatta, J.K.) granted the applicationand made the following order.“The provisional registration of the Democratic Party and the certificate of thatregistration are, in law, still in force and will lapse and expire respectively on the date theparty’s application for full registration will be granted or refused and that the party’sleaders, servants and agents are, pending the determination by the Registrar of PoliticalParties of the party’s application for full registration, entitled in law to conduct politicalaffairs in the country in terms of their party’s provisional registration.”Samatta, J.K. made this order following his interpretation of Section 8(4) of the PoliticalParties Act to which he added words in order give the Sub – section what he called arational meaning and to avoid an obvious absurdity in the meaning carried by the literalwords used by the legislature.The state did not appeal against this interpretation of Section 8(4) by the learned JajiKiongozi. We therefore must take that interpretation to be the law currently obtaining. Inthe light of this order by the High Court, the second appellant was very much still inbusiness at the time the second respondent was making his decision not to grant fullregistration to the second appellant.252