Freeman Mbowe
With a very great people, Tanzania is an extraordinarily beautiful country in East Africa. It is most famous for some of the planet's last great wildlife populations, including the magnificent Serengeti savanna and Gombe, the forest home of the chimps made famous by ecologist Jane Goodall. In the Great Rift Valley sits the Olduvai Gorge, home of some our first ancestors almost two million years ago. It is a sublime place.
Largely an agrarian land, two-thirds of Tanzania's people are employed in agriculture. Since independence from the Brits in 1961, Tanzania has basically been ruled by one political party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), Party of the Revolution. The party was headed for a long time by founder Julius Nyerere, a former school teacher, independence leader, and quite an interesting fellow. He called himself an African Socialist. During the Cold War, he was one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, officially taking no side in the immensely wasteful US and Soviet military-fest.
In the late 1980s, Nyerere thought better of CCM’s one party rule, calling for a multi-party system. Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (Chadema), the Party of Democracy and Development, was one of the new parties formed. Over two decades, CHADEMA became the second largest party in Tanzania, at one point holding almost a third of government seats, and in 2015 a legitimate contender for the presidency. The main force for making CHADEMA a successful political actor is businessman and democrat Freeman Mbowe. Always with a smile and a joke, Freeman is a very beautiful, exceptionally smart political strategist. He's dedicated the last few decades of his life to peacefully developing democracy in Tanzania, meeting extraordinary success until a half-dozen years ago.
In 2015, after fitfully allowing the growth of a multi-party system, and now facing actual loss of power, CCM thought the better of it. On election night, the government arrested almost two-hundred, mostly student members of CHADEMA, who had established three phone centers where election workers could call in election results from polling places around the country, a standard election practice anywhere. The centers would provide a second count, instead of relying solely on the numbers provided by the government, which proved to be much less than reliable. CCM knew what they were doing, their final vote tally keeping them in power was fraudulent at best.
After their scare in 2015, CCM cracked down hard on CHADEMA, taking away the right of assembly and organizing, without which there can be no democracy. They destroyed the economic lives, arrested, and killed CHADEMA members. Tindu Lissu, who would be CHADEMA's presidential candidate in 2020, was “Godfathered” in 2017. As a Member of Parliament, in the capital of Dodoma, the car he was sitting in was bullet riddled, sixteen bullets finding their way into him. He survived, standing for the presidency three years later. In times of a world filled with infinite political spinelessness, the people of CHADEMA are a courageous, courageous lot.
In the 2020 elections, if they can be called that, CHADEMA was stripped of almost all their offices. Tanzania is once again a one party state. But that wasn't enough, last summer they arrested Mbowe on trumped up charges of “cybercrimes” and “terrorism.” He sits in jail with his two co-defendants, a kangaroo court slowly conducts a farce. To keep power, CCM lays waste to valuable humanity, it is the greatest argument against them continuing to hold power.
A GoFundMe page has recently been set up to help pay Freeman's and his co-defendants’ defense, it'd be the best political money you ever gave.