Stakeholders: New Constitution Key for Democracy and Peace stability in Tanzania

Legal and Human Right Centre has on February 2, 2018, organized a one day dialogue session which has brought together stakeholders from various sectors including government institutions, CSOs, political parties, religious institutions, academic institutions and the media. The session took place in Dar es Salaam and was themed “Dialogue on Constitution and Peace Building during Elections” aiming at discussing and suggesting peaceful measures towards improving the existing legal framework and practices.

During the session, the Tanzania Episcopal Conference (TEC) representative Fr. Daniel Dule praised the Legal and Human Rights Centre and other stakeholders who are playing a vital role of bringing people together and build consensus on the matter of national interests. He referred to the session as the best way of sending message to authorities and call for the government authorities to consider using the same forums to bring together people and address their grievances in a nonviolent manner.

He also insisted that in democratic government dialogues promote respect of human dignity and human rights and hence promotes peace and stability. Fr. Dule further appealed to the government to consider responding to the people’s demand of a new constitution by reviving the constitutional making process.

In the same development, Adv. John Seka called for the review of the electoral systems and processes starting from understanding and reforming the legal framework that administer electoral system in the country mainly through new constitutional making process.

Moreover, the representative from Tanzania Center for Democracy (TCD), Prof. Mwesiga Baregu remarked that the country is in constitutional vacuum due to the fact that the present constitution was publicly declared bad when the country announced the new constitution making process. Moving forward, Prof. Baregu called for the government to consider revival of the new constitution making process before the upcoming elections in 2019 and 2020 respectively.