By Toby McIntosh
The World Bank and other major donors remain concerned about a Tanzanian law restricting free speech about statistics.
“Our concerns about the amended Statistics Act, which we expressed in our statement of October 2018, still stand,” a Bank spokesman told eyeonglobaltransparency.net March 15.
“Alongside other partners we are continuing the dialogue with the Government of Tanzania on this topic,” he said.
Contending that the amended law violates human rights, the Bank and other donors are reluctant to sustain past levels of financial support for the Tanzanian government. (See eyeonglobaltansparency.net October report.) The statistics law was a key topic at a multi-donor meeting in Tanzania during the week of March 5, Eyeonglobaltransparency was told.
Despite hints from the government that it would use regulations to assuage donors’ concerns, no such actions have developed in the five months after donor objections were raised publicly.
The amendments, passed Sept. 10, 2018, criminalize the dissemination of “any statistical information which is intended to invalidate, distort or discredit official statistics.” Offenses are punishable by a $6,000 fine or a three-year prison sentence.
In its original October statement, the Bank said it was “deeply concerned” about the amendments and called them “out of line with international standards such as the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics and the African Charter on Statistics.” (See Eye article.) The International Monetary Fund has also signaled concerns (See Eye report). A request for further IMF comment is pending, but the IMF Board did not mention the law in its Dec. 6 statement after discussing Tanzania or in another review statement from January.
The Word Bank is holding back about $50 million (Sh112 billion) in support for the National Bureau of Statistics.
The government last year said it would hold consultations on adopting regulations to interpret the amendments to the law. However, no regulations have emerged. Critics of the revised law are doubtful that rules on implementation would counteract the negative impact on human rights.
Regulations Still Under Development, Newspaper Punished
Albina Chuwa, the National Bureau of Statistics Statistician General, in a March 14 interview said the government is “in the process” of developing regulations, but did not elaborate.
“We are expecting quite a significant support from another development partner sourced through Government, Chuwa said in the interview, published in The Citizen. She said, “This support will finance Phase Two of the Tanzania Statistical Master Plan (2019/20 – 2024/25).”
She did not identify the “development partner.”
The timing of The Citizen’s interview with Chuwa is interesting because the newspaper several weeks previous ran afoul of the government by discussing the value of the Tanzanian shilling. The paper was shut down by the government for seven days beginning Feb. 28.
The government’s directive is quoted by Mwananchi, a related newspaper to The Citizen, in a Feb. 27 article (in Swahili translated via Google). The government wrote:
In this case you deliberately wrote false and misleading information the Tanzanian public and that value of Tanzanian Shilling has collapsed compared to the last three years without following the procedure legal and regulatory principles where Tanzania’s financial standards are provided The Central Bank of Tanzania.
Raising other issues, the letter from the Central Bank of Tanzania, says, “The decision to suspend the license is based on the trend and style of information and articles which significantly violates the principles of ethics information on the frequency of information about the Government and the excitement specifies the violation of the license terms.”
A March 14 article in The Economist reported:
Sedition and statistics are two words that crop up with increasing regularity in the utterances of officials loyal to Tanzania’s president, John Magufuli. Last month a usually compliant daily newspaper, the Citizen, had the cheek to mention that the Tanzanian shilling’s value at the unofficial exchange rate had been sliding. Though this was plainly the case, it flouted the country’s bizarre Statistics Act, whereby no figure may be disseminated without verification or publication by the official organs of state. The Citizen was duly closed down for a week. These days Mr Magufuli, known in Swahili as Tingatinga (the Bulldozer), tries to squash anything that gets in his way: “I would like to tell media owners: be careful, watch it.
The international Committee to Protect Journalists objected to the punishment.
Domestic opposition to the amended statistics law continues.
A coalition of civil society organizations under the Policy Forum umbrella in December of 2018 called on the government to amend the Statistics Act saying it interferes with human rights and press freedom.
“In accordance with various international and national legal frameworks, including the National Constitution 1977, we have realised that there are still sections in the amended Statistics Act that need to be revised to make sure that the statistics stakeholders are having freedom to exercise their activities,” Policy Forum chairman Japhet Makongo told journalists, according to an article in The Citizen.
The Citizen in January published an unsigned opinion article by a “legal researcher” defending the amendments.
The Economist article also discusses media and repression and the international backlash against Mugufuli’s policies.
Western donors, who have indulged Tanzania for many decades, at one point paying for more than a quarter of its annual budget, are losing patience. The head of the European Union mission, Roeland van de Geer, had to quit his post late last year. The Danes and the EU have withheld tranches of aid. Mr Magufuli is looking to the Middle East and China for less conditional help.
The president’s pivot to China was described in this December 2108 East African article which quotes World Bank President Jim Yong Kim as saying, “Let me just be very blunt, we are very upset about what’s happening in Tanzania.” Also see this December 2018 overview by Christian Science Monitor.
In a September, 2018, Aidan Eyakuze the Executive Director of the Tanzanian advocacy group Twaweza, wrote an article, entitled, “Tanzania is about to outlaw fact checking: here’s why that’s a problem.” After providing examples, he said:
Statistics are society’s sensors. Independently collected, processed, disseminated and debated, they are vital to the health of a country. We supress, fabricate or ignore them at our peril.
The government’s retaliations against Eyakuze are described in this East African article from February. After publishing the results of poll in 2018 showing that the president’s popularity had fallen, Eyakuze’s passport was confiscated.
The value of good data was highlighted in a February World Bank blog post, “Data for development impact: Why we need to invest in data, people and ideas,” by Bank staffer Haishan Fu, that does not mention Tanzania.
The World Bank Board has delayed consideration of a major education loan to Tanzania because of concerns about the government’s policy of expelling pregnant girls from school, eyeonglobaltransparency.net reported in October. No resolution of that issue has been reported.
November 2018 meetings between Bank officials and the government about both the statistics law and education were inconclusive (See Eye report).
The Bank and the Tanzanian government disagree on the country’s economic outlook.
The Bank in January predicted that 2109 growth will be 6.8 percent. The government estimate is higher, 7.3 percent.
The IMF in January expressed concern about an economic slowdown and has predicted the growth rate at 6.6 per cent in 2019.
