20101030
Daily News

Dar Es Salaam — PRESIDENT Jakaya Kikwete walks with his head high, his chest thrust forward, the gait of a proud man who has made significant achievements. The president may as well walk taller on Sunday as the nation he has led for the past five years goes to the polls.

"We shall win by a landslide," he said the other day as he talked to the electronic medium in Dar es Salaam on Friday. There is little doubt the president will win with a decisive margin. More than ever before, the opposition looks fractured and less aggressive.

Augustine Lyatonga Mrema, opposition leader of Tanzania Labour Party (TLP) obliquely recently supported the president by saying that those who say the ruling party has done or achieved nothing were hypocrites and were not being realistic.

Mrema, as leader of the most powerful opposition party in the country in the early 90s, National Convention for Construction and Reform-Mageuzi (NCCR-Mageuzi), was once a stalwart politician to reckon with.

Some of his fellow opposition leaders have admitted in public that they cannot beat the ruling CCM of president Kikwete, but 'we must give them a stiff challenge and worry them enough lest they forget to do their duty to the people," said Civic United Front Tanzania Mainland Chairman, Prof Ibrahim Haruna Lipumba in one of his campaigns recently.

One opposition party has joined hands with Kikwete in style. Fahmi Nassor Dovutwa who is United People's Democratic Party has pulled out of the race on account of some electoral irregularity and thrown all his weight behind Kikwete.

And so with an opposition that is less confident and more divided with some of the leaders pulling out and calling upon their supporters to cast their votes for the ruling CCM, Kikwete is not blowing his trumpet when he says he is going to win the election today. He is declaring something many people expect and so is blowing the national trumpet.

The president cannot be said to be bold for nothing. Behind him there is a notable success in many areas. Communication has improved substantially in the country.

"The number of handset users has increased to 16,000,000 from a total of 3,542,563 in 2005 and 300,237 in the year 2000," a declaration of his party's performance in the 5-year period since 2005 to 2010 says.

Handsets are not only fashionable. In the present-day global village being in the know is the fashion. The CCM document enumerates areas where the president's government has made significant achievements. One of them is the health sector. Small pox has killed many children in the country mostly because of either lack of the vaccine or the distance to the vaccination centre.

The government has reduced for the people that millage to life by increasing the number of centres from 2,954 in 2005 to 4, 535 this year. His government has also provided services for the public in a manner that has portrayed his as a man of the people. It has given the disabled priority and established a programme to train them to give them equal opportunity in economic endeavours.

A total of 2,500 of disabled people have qualified from training for entrepreneurship. The government has fought hard the problem of water shortage in various parts of the country. If piped water can't reach a society, wells have been dug.

In collaboration with TASAF, other private organizations and donors, the government in that period dug 583 dams and 21 deep wells for various municipalities. In Monduli District alone, the government with the help of African Development Bank, has constructed 25 dams.

Others which existed before but were moribund, were repaired. One of the biggest water project in the 5-year period is the Lake Victoria-Shinyanga-Kahama Water Project. The project presently caters for 450,000 people but has the capacity to cater for 1,000,000 people by 2015. Such a project is bound to make the life of communities better and promote the effort of the nation to improve education.

By extension, women particularly will benefit as they, social member whose task is to fetch water for the family, are the ones who are hardest hit with water shortage. The girl child will have more time to go school. And so, JK, as he is popularly known, walks to the poll booth with a less thirsty nation behind his back.