Fairy tale about Nasa tallying centre in Tanzania fizzles away

During Monday’s solo presidential “debate”, Raila Odinga was asked if it was true Nasa had set up a parallel vote tallying centre in Tanzania.

He got evasive, neither confirming nor denying it outright. It was only on the following day at a campaign rally in Meru that he gave a categorical denial.

For months on end, the media had been awash with tales about “state-of-the-art” Nasa parallel tallying centres: One in Tanzania, another supposedly in Germany.

Not only was there no official clarification from Nasa, it clearly appeared the stories were being fabricated by Nasa officials.

All along, I had a hunch these stories were fake. I am accustomed to a propaganda trick ODM plays on the media of spinning stories of their “heroic” undertakings to make them look invincible. Too bad, few bother to cross-check.

DIPLOMATIC STAKES

Given the obvious diplomatic stakes involved in the Tanzania angle, I had gotten in touch with a Tanzanian colleague who is a former Dar es Salaam bureau chief of The EastAfrican newspaper, and who resides in the Kigamboni neighbourhood where some reports claimed the tallying centre was located.

Our local media, despite having bureaux and correspondents in Tanzania, were not giving much clarity on the matter.

My friend told me he was surprised with these unverified reports he was reading in the Tanzanian media, which were being directly sourced from the Kenyan press.

What made them more alarming was they were coming at a time when Tanzania was having one of those periodic cross-border tiffs with Kenya.

His conclusion? There was evidently nothing much to the stories beyond Kenyan electoral noise.

TALLYING CENTRE

Nonetheless, the noise had reached a level the Tanzanian government could not ignore.

Said an irritated President John Magufuli in an off-the-cuff remark: “If anybody knows where this tallying centre is, he should come and show me.” The earthy manner he put it sounded to me convincing.

Tanzania’s official position was soon communicated by the government spokesman Hassan Abbas: “The attempt to link [Tanzania] with involvement in neighbours’ elections is a mistake beyond reality.”

Foreign Minister Augustine Mahiga added that Tanzania was not siding “with any of the two major camps” involved in the Kenyan elections.

FOREIGN ENTITY

You can bet your last shilling that nothing like a voter tallying centre can be put up by a foreign entity anywhere in Tanzania without the country’s intelligence service knowing about it.

You can be equally certain Kenya’s NIS would be independently in the know from the very start. This would explain why the Kenya government was very relaxed with the stories, because it knew nothing of the sort existed.

In May, in what seriously ruffled Tanzanian feathers, Jubilee’s National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale had publicly accused Magufuli of facilitating Nasa in putting up the tallying centre.

MAGUFULI

I think the accusation was a deliberate act of electioneering propaganda. Nobody in the Executive branch of government openly uttered a word against Tanzania.

But why would Kenya let the issue fester when it had the potential of fraying the ever-touchy relations with Tanzania?

My guess is the Jubilee government was silently exploiting the situation in the hope of poisoning Magufuli’s relationship with Raila, whose side was being linked to the tallying centre story leaks.

I believe that at the highest-level channels between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, both sides knew the whole affair was just hot air.

Besides, Tanzania’s main opposition party Chadema, whose leader recently declared their support for Jubilee, would have loudly gone to town with the tallying centre story and the alleged Magufuli link if it were true. As it were, the party has been quietly dismissive of it too.

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Some things need no belabouring. Nor do they need any spin. Uhuru Kenyatta’s snubbing of the presidential debate was a monumental mistake.

I don’t think the non-appearance had much to do with Raila. Uhuru harbours an irrational disdain for Kenya’s corporate media.

Warigi is a socio-political commentator [email protected]