Abstract - Tara Mulqueen

Tanzania has long been hailed for its profound political stability among African nations. The dominant, neo-liberal analysis of this stability cites the absence of corruption, relative freedom of elections and economic reform as primary factors. Ignoring even the most recent and public instances of large-scale corruption, the neo-liberal argument mistakenly conflates political stability with state functionality. Based upon two years of field work, including participant observation, more than forty interviews, and work with a number of local non-governmental organizations, this paper argues that political stability in Tanzania is a result of the depoliticization of local needs and aspirations, the inability of the state to penetrate local communities and the power of “ordinary” Tanzanians to effectively evade the state. After decades of limited service delivery and inadequate provision of social infrastructure, ordinary Tanzanians do not look to the state to meet their aspirations for material improvement. Instead, these expectations fall on citizens themselves as well as non-governmental organizations, and material deficiencies are often tolerated despite aspirations for improvement. In addition, subsistence agriculture and informal economies are dominant in Tanzania, allowing citizens to meet their daily needs without engaging with the state. Finally, ordinary Tanzanians use nationalistic rhetoric in public dialogue to mask their dissatisfaction and steadily increasing knowledge of corruption in the state, while in private fully articulating their discontents. As such, they effectively contribute to the maintenance of a weak state in order to keep it at a distance and preserve their day-to-day livelihoods. Taken together, these factors comprise the politics of getting by and foster a political stability predicated not on state functionality but on state weakness and the power of local communities.

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