Election Day

Well, Sunday was election day here in Tanzania (Halloween is not really a big deal here). Although a lot of outsiders wrote off the result as a foregone conclusion, there was definitely a lot of excitement on the ground, as the opposition parties seemed to stand a better chance than usual to unseat the Party of the Revolution (CCM), which has basically been in power since independence almost 50 years ago.

The Economist had a rather shoddy effort in reporting on this one, which was a big disappointment for me (they looked at one particular village and seemed to extrapolate the conditions to the whole country) and even more infuriatingly, I couldn't comment on the article (the CAPTCHA that they had told me I was wrong 30 times, which leads me to believe that it's bad software). One of the most striking features in Arusha (I want to offer the disclaimer that my election analysis certainly is not valid beyond Arusha and even here is a tiny snap-shot) was that many of the supporters of the Party for Democracy and Development (ChaDeMa) featured a lot of people who had supported CCM at the last election in 2005 when Benjamin Mkapa was leading the party and had great things to say about him. They had become rather jaded in the last 5 years under the leadership of Jakaya Kikwete and were eager for change.

Yesterday was a bit hectic in town, and I couldn't fully understand what was going on, but it seemed like they were delaying release of the results and finally released a tally showing that ChaDeMa had won by a healthy margin. After that, vehicles were driving up and down the road honking in celebration and shouting slogans. They are still awaiting results in several other major areas, and it seems like the uncertainty may continue for a few more days. I don't have a sense whether the outcome is in question, or if it's simply a question of how big CCM's majority is (they seemed to have the tables tilted in their favor throughout the election), but it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.

Oh, and I mailed in my absentee ballot today (the last day I could postmark it). For any of you who were eligible to vote and couldn't, I submit that you should put a higher value on your role in democracy. I admit that I'm pretty lucky to be registered in a county that agreed to email me my ballot (I still had to send it via the postal system) but that luck is balanced out by the poor quality of candidates on that ballot.