CONSERVATIONISTS ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT TANZANIA’S CCM CANDIDATES’ ENVIRONMENTAL AND CONSERVATION CREDENTIALS
(Posted 13th July 2015)
Tanzania’s ruling party, the CCM, aka Chama Cha Mapinduzi, yesterday announced their candidate for the upcoming presidential elections in October this year. Mr. John Magufuli, Minister of Works in outgoing President Kikwete’s government, was chosen by the party hierarchy over two women contestants, who had made it into the list of the top three presented to the party for endorsement, a blow for Tanzania’s women who had hoped that the curtain would finally come down on this overwhelmingly male dominated society.
As the ruling party’s candidate is Magufuli now the front runner to become Tanzania’s fifth president even though some questions remain what former Prime Minister Lowassa, before the party contest in an undisputed lead but not liked by the party establishment, will do after he was axed and not even made it to the shortlist.
The focus for now however is on Magufuli’s stand on all matters concerning conservation and environment. This follows the two terms of Kikwete whose presidency will end having presided over the worst elephant slaughter in history. Apart from remaining idle and hands off when the sheer magnitude of the poaching crisis emerged several years ago – in fact he pushed out his Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism Amb. Khamis Kagesheki who had dared to compile a list of the three hundred most likely suspects involved in the industrial scale poaching and illicit blood ivory trade, reportedly including top names in the Kikwete administration – did he advocate for hugely controversial projects, which if turned into reality would, among other consequences bring the annual migration of the wildebeest from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara to a catastrophic halt. Other projects besides the Serengeti Highway are the equally controversial uranium mining in the Selous, the planned port in the dead centre of the Coelacanth Marine National Park near Tanga and the destruction of the sole East African breeding ground for the flamingos in the mud flats of Lake Natron. Another such project is expected to alter the face of the Selous Game Reserve, which stripped of elephant during the poaching frenzy is now set to become the site of a hydroelectric power plant at Stiegler’s Gorge, at the very heart of the reserve’s tourism zone. Almost irreversible damage was already done to the forests of the Eastern Ark Mountains, which were due to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site before Kikwete ordered his then natural resources minister to withdraw the application at the last moment, making way for uncontrolled logging and in preparation of mining activities. Clearly outlined as the ‘Corridor of Destruction’, an article written by this correspondent already several years ago, connecting the dots from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria, have such projects overshadowed the Kikwete presidency and lost Tanzania the status as one of the globe’s most revered conservation nations, trampling the legacy of founding father Julius Mwalimu Nyerere into the proverbial dust.
Magufuli will now face close up scrutiny from the local, regional and global conservation fraternity and his history vis a vis voting in parliament on such issues but also his personal statements made in regard of conservation and environmental matters will no doubt all be brought back into the public domain ahead of the start of the campaign.
One of the key issues will be if he will, if elected, alter the course of the present government’s direction in regard of a legal case before the East African Court of Justice – and accept the EAC’s environmental protocol – or if he will pursue the policies of outgoing president Kikwete, who, going by usually well informed sources, almost handpicked Magufuli to succeed him. Watch this space.
