Residual Legislatures: The Cases of Tanzania and Zambia

The Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 1977, Pages 235-249

  Tordoff, William ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0005881005     PISSN: 03063631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14662047708447291     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. The Minister was Munukayumbwa Sipalo, then in charge of Agriculture. National Assembly Debates, 5 March 1968, 603.
2. For further details see William Tordoff, Government and Politics in Tanzania (Nairobi, 1967), ch. I.
3. Helge Kjekshus, ‘Socialism and Participation: Some Concluding Remarks’, in Socialism and Participation, 375.
4. For further details see William Tordoff and Robert Molteno, ‘Parliament’, in William Tordoff (ed), Politics in Zambia (Manchester, 1974), ch. 6.
5. Mwanakatwe served as a backbencher until May 1976 when he was made Minister of Finance. In this section, I have drawn heavily upon Baylies and Szeftel, ‘Control and Participation’. Their paper supplements information contained in Cherry Gertzel, ‘Dissent and Authority in the One Party State: Parliament, Party and President in the Zambian One Party Participatory Democracy’ (unpublished paper, kindly made available to me by Dr Gertzel).
6. Julius K. Nyerere, ‘One Party System’, 2 Spearhead (Dar es Salaam, January, 13 1963)
7. See also William Tordoff and Ali A. Mazrui, ‘The Left and the Super-Left in Tanzania’, 10 The Journal of Modern African Studies (1972)
8. H. U. E. Thoden van Velzen and J. J. Sterkenburg, ‘Stirrings in the Tanzanian National Assembly’ and ‘The Party Supreme’, reproduced from Kroniek van Africa (1968, 1969), in L. Cliffe and J. S. Saul, (eds), Socialism in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam Vol. 1, 1972)
9. Robin Brooke-Smith, ‘Types of Opposition - The Tanzanian Experience, 1961-74’ (Unpublished MSc Dissertation, University of Bristol, 1976). 14. The reply of Mr. Edward Sokoine, the Prime Minister, is illuminating for our subsequent discussion of Kjekshus’s reconciliation theory. Such statements (he is reported to have said) ‘reduced the role of the National Assembly from its advisory capacity to a court of law’, Daily News (Dar es Salaam), 16 July 1977.
10. Quoted in Brooke-Smith, ‘Types of Opposition’, 109.
11. William Tordoff, ‘Tanzania’, in H. V. Hodson (ed), The Annual Register: World Events in 1973 (London, 1974), 255.
12. ‘Some Concluding Remarks’, 367.
13. Kjekshus, ‘Perspectives on the Second Parliament’, 73–75.
14. Legislation to establish the one-party state was passed in December 1972, but the constitution of the Second Republic was not enacted until August 1973. ANC Members were allowed to remain sitting in the Assembly (as independents) until Parliament was dissolved in October 1973.
15. See Tordoff and Molteno, ‘Parliament’, for further details.
16. I have drawn heavily in this section on Dr Gertzel’s paper, ‘Dissent and Authority in the One Party State’.
17. ‘The Watershed Speech’: President Kaunda’s Address to the UNIP National Council, 30 June 1975.
18. See William Tordoff, ‘Zambia: The Politics of Disengagement’, 76 African Affairs (January, 1977).
19. Times of Zambia, 6 February 1976, quoted in Gertzel, ‘Dissent and Authority in the One Party State’.
20. These included bills on legislative drafting, fishing licence fees and compensation for detainees. See Times of Zambia, 17 February 1974, and Sunday Times of Zambia, 11 August 1974.
21. See Cherry Gertzel, The Politics of Independent Kenya (London, 1970), ch. 5, esp. 137–138. In Zambia, the UNIP Central Committee has always been a more important organ than the National Council; today, it can overrule the Cabinet and its members take precedence over Cabinet Ministers. Constitutionally, only the President, the Secretary-General of UNIP, and the Prime Minister can be members of both the Central Committee and the Cabinet.
22. For a discussion of the Arusha Declaration of January 1967, see Tordoff and Mazrui, ‘The Left and the Super-Left’, esp 433–5.
23. Baylies and Szeftel, ‘Control and Participation'.
24. In checking administrative abuse, Parliament is assisted by the ‘Ombudsman’, a device adopted by both countries. See Helge Kjekshus, ‘The Ombudsman in the Tanzanian One-Party System’ 1 The African Review (Dar es Salaam, 1971), Robert Martin, ‘The Ombudsman in Zambia’, 15 The Journal of Modern African Studies (1977).
25. See Kjekshus, ‘Perspectives on the Second Parliament’, 63.
26. Cranford Pratt rightly draws attention to this tendency in The Critical Phase in Tanzania, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, 1976), ch. 7 and passim. However, who will check the President himself? This is a pertinent question in both Tanzania and Zambia.
27. See Kjekshus, ‘Perspectives on the Second Parliament’, 91. However, as was noted above, MPs in Zambia’s current Parliament have been more assiduous in promoting the interests of their constituents than under the First Republic.
28. This was the Public Officers (Eligibility for Election as Constituency Members) Act, 1972, discussed by Kjekshus in ‘Some Concluding Remarks’, 375–376. See also his perceptive comments on the wider issues raised by the relaxation of the incompatibility rules in ‘Perspectives on the Second Parliament’, 81ff.
29. See Kjekshus, ‘Perspectives on the Second Parliament’, 80–81.
30. J. R. Finucane, Rural Development and Bureaucracy in Tanzania: The Case of Mwanza Region (Uppsala, 1974). Zambian evidence points in the same direction.
31. Report of the Presidential Commission on the Establishment of a Democratic One Party State (Dar es Salaam, 1965), 16.
32. quoted 50. In March 1974 Mr Mainza Chona (then Prime Minister) told MPs that, while Parliament was legally supreme, ‘the National Council of the Party is politically supreme to this House [sic]. It is and should be the source of major policy decisions and programmes’. But Arthur Wina’s view (July 1974) was that ‘. in my parliamentary experience nothing that comes before this House is subject to the authority outside it except in the case of financial Bills. other than that this Party House is independent of any influence from any quarter.’ Parl. Deb., 14 March 1974, 2923–6, and 30 July 1974, in Gertzel, ‘Dissent and Authority in the One State’. 311.
33. Kjekshus, Perspectives on the Second Parliament, 81.
34. Baylies and Szeftel, ‘Control and Participation’.
35. See Kjekshus, ‘Perspectives on the Second Parliament’, 81., esp. 89: ‘In the Second Parliament, several MPs simultaneously served in full-time jobs in parastatal institutions, as members or chairmen of Government boards, or councils, in the Party bureaucracy or in Party-affiliated organizations’.