Bunge-Lenye-Meno-A-Parliament-with-Teeth-for-Tanzania-LAXNNAJ547

The Opposition
Parliamentary candidate in 1995. But my name was rejected by the
CCM Central Committee. They said: “He is not one of us”. That is when
I joined CHADEMA. An effective opposition is not likely to come from
an internal split within CCM, but from ‘breaks’ of this kind.
Parliament and donors
Foreign donors fund 43% of Tanzania’s income. Specifically, they
finance 34% of recurrent expenditure and about 80% of development
spending. This is a huge role and responsibility, and there should be no
argument that they have a role to play in parliamentary reform.
Personally, I believe that in the process of development you need these
partnerships. And partnerships, by their nature, need to be reciprocal.
This is what I have been telling my friends from the diplomatic corps.
A serious concern is that most of the time they sit in Dar es Salaam.
They know their way around the big hotels, but they never go even to
Temeke which is just next door. They don’t know what is happening in
Kinondoni, just next door. They go to those areas in an air-conditioned
vehicle. They think that Tanzania is what you see in the Mövenpick or
the Golden Tulip, our luxury hotels in Dar es Salaam.
Donors regularly come under fire from Tanzanian politicians for
interfering. If you look at what is happening you can understand why:
the politicians who come up with those fiery statements want to cover
up something. If a donor is willing to support our development
programmes, then to a certain extent it’s important that the donor
becomes involved in the supervision – monitoring, policy development,
any specific interventions.
The important point is that these relationships need to be reciprocal,
and that applies also to donors’ relationships with parliament. Any good
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