Why voters want half of MPs out

[RUCCI]

Twaweza outgoing chief executive officer Rakesh Rajan speaks in Dar es Salaam yersterday during a forum on people's views on political leadership ahead of 2015 elections


If elections were held today, half of the 239 MPs in the current Parliament would lose their seats because of poor performance and failure to keep their election promises, according to a survey conducted by Twaweza.

Twaweza is a 10-year initiative to promote access to information, citizen agency and better service delivery in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.

When asked if they would vote their current MPs back into parliament, according to the survey, almost half of all Tanzanians (47 per cent) said they would not."

According to the survey, education and age of an MP will also be taken seriously by voters in the 2015 General Election.

Tanzania's next General Election is scheduled for October 2015.

The survey says almost all respondents who said they would not vote for their MPs also reported that their MP had fulfilled either a few or none of their promises from the last election.

In this survey, Twaweza's People's Voices, Africa's first nationally representative mobile phone survey, use findings from a study conducted in September 2014, polling 1,445 respondents who were selected randomly.

The findings of the 2014 survey where then compared by findings from two previous years, using the People's Voices baseline survey from October - December 2012 (2,000 respondents) and the 10th call round from October 2013 (1,574 respondents).

During the election campaign, says the survey, MPs campaigned to win votes and often made promises to constituencies, including construction projects such as building or improving roads, building or improving water points, building a hospital and more classrooms in their constituencies.

"These promises generally align well with what citizens identified as the problems facing the country. That is, politicians know what their voters want," according to the 12-page report.

As it were, only 1 out of 8 citizens, equivalent to 12 per cent, report that their MP has implemented their promises fully, 54 per cent said their MP had implemented some of their promises, while 32 per cent said their MP had implemented none, says the survey.

People's Voices asked about the qualities people look for in an MP, and almost three out of four citizens (74 per cent) mentioned that they would look at the candidate's level of education.

Half of those surveyed named the top qualification for the MPs to be a Bachelor's degree at minimum, while the candidate's age was the second most important issue-overtaking other key issues like honesty, trust-worthiness and moral values, according to the survey.

But the proposed new constitution scheduled for a referendum in April, 2015 has set the minimum education requirement for MP to be Standard Seven education or being able to read and write, as opposed to the earlier proposal by Constitutional Review Commission (CRC) which put the minimum education for a lawmaker at Advanced Diploma.

Three out of four of those who mentioned age first said an MP should be 40 years and above.

The survey further shows that there is a growing group of undecided voters, which is much larger than the number of supporters of any individual candidate.

"This suggests that Tanzanians have not made up their minds yet and that any candidate who makes a compelling case and organises support could win, from among current listed or any new candidates," says the survey.

It adds: "Voting patterns tend to follow party preferences. The question therefore is whether personalities will trump party preferences; if so, the election outcomes will too close to call."

The survey concludes that voters know politicians are normaly given to making promises that they fail to keep, signaling that voters will not simply believe whatever promises are made to them during the 2015 campaign.

"Politicians at every level should be challenged to come up with transparent, measurable and credible key policy commitments and lock in future public audits of results achieved," says the survey.

It says the election in 2015 is likely to be among the most tightly contested in Tanzania's history, both at presidential and parliamentary levels, adding that candidates will need to work hard to earn votes, and as such, voters have a better chance than ever before to make their voices heard.

Source:The Citizen

http://www.thecitizen.co.tz/News/Wh...840392/2520688/-/item/1/-/39eh9t/-/index.html