Five MPs “shake up the Parliament.” That is how Mwananchi, a leading Swahili newspaper in Tanzania assessed the ongoing 19th parliamentary session. Conspicuous by his absence among the big five is Zitto Kabwe. The fiery politician vacated his seat on 20 March 2015 after losing a case against the leading opposition party, CHADEMA, in the High Court of Tanzania.

This is not the first time that a crisis within a party has been resolved in the courtroom instead of the boardroom. After the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1992, the then leading opposition party, NCCR, fielded arguably the then most popular politician, Augustine Mrema, as their presidential candidate in the 1995 elections. Having defected from the ruling party, CCM, after disagreeing with its leaders publicly, he almost defeated them.

However, two years down the line the very same boardroom that invited Mrema to the new party was attempting to remove him through the courtroom. This is how Tanzanian Affairs documented it: “The main conflict at the meeting [in Tanga] was between the 30-member Central Committee which largely supported [Mabere] Marando, and wanted to remove Mrema from office and the much larger Executive Committee which supported Mrema. The Marando faction then attempted to gain ascendancy by bringing in the law. Mrema was relying on his wide popularity. Marando appealed to the High Court to bar Mrema from acting as chairman and from access to the party building and from party funds. He suggested that Mrema should form his own party. But on May 16 the High Court dismissed Marando’s application because it had been improperly drawn. The constitution of the party apparently makes it almost impossible to remove leaders.”

Surprisingly, since 2010 Marando has been a key member of CHADEMA and one of its prominent legal experts. Since the other leading lawyers, Tundu Lissu and Peter Kibatala, took a lead in the case whose outcome resulted in the stripping of Zitto’s membership, it is too early to speculate about the legal roles, if any, of Marando or the other lawyer, Professor Abdallah Safari. This will become clearer if they also quit the party.

What is clear is that a worrying precedent had been set. In as much as one may agree that it is a constitutional right to seek justice in the courtroom, democracy is not served well when political parties fail to resolve their problems in the boardroom. A party ought to have fair mechanisms for ensuring that things do not get to this point. Professor Kitila Mkumbo,one of the (then) brains behind CHADEMA, aptly captured the situation: “Zitto appealed through the party meetings but the leaders of the party refused to submit his appeal to relevant authorities. Where did you want him to go then if not to the court?”

Let us recall this attempt at resolving the then NCCR’s crisis in order to get a glimpse of why the courtroom is – and should always indeed be – the very last resort. “On May 28 and 21 [the then] Registrar of Political Parties George Liundi tried hard, during lengthy meetings, to bring the two factions together but failed.” Did CHADEMA and Zitto’s ‘faction’ go that far?

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