By Amb Emmanuel Mwamba
The Path to Autocracy and Dictatorship
1. Take advantage of the Free and Fair Elections. Once elected, this must be the last free and fair elections ever held. The dictator ensures that no one else gets elected or gets the power they have just ammassed. They take over the election body. This is to ensure that the only elections that should take place are a sham election that guarantees their win.
2. The dictator should frequently exceed the realms of executive power, act outside the law, and act outside the Constitution to get his way and bar or disadvantage opponents.
3. The dictator takes or grabs competing power from other authorities and claim it for himself. Paralyse Parliament and neuter or make complicit the Judicary since the Dictator will not follow the law or his actions must not be stopped or make the Judiciary make orders that cannot be enforced.
4. The dictator goes after the media. He neutralise s and demonises credible media so that nobody trusts the legitimate media. Then, the dictator creates his own pr takes over media that act as echo chambers that tell his only side of the story. The only truth that is told is the dictator’s facts and which he calls “Truth.” Even when it has the word “truth” in it, it’s false.
5. The dictator guts the government and the civil service. No one should do the work that Democracy is supposed to protect.
He Fires all competent people in key positions, accuse them of being loyal to the previous government. Hires only your loyalists, partu members, tribesmates, and family members that in turn, hire only their kind that will not question your work or do what he has to do. Break the civil service, let it look like people do not need it but need only the leader.
6. Weaponise Law Enforcement Agencies. Arrest, detain, and torture the Opposition and Critics of the Dictator. Give similar punishment to human rights defenders and those who are defending the Opposition or Critics or speaking for them. Unleash tax authorities on businesses that the dictator thinks are sympathetic to them. Refuse to pay outsanding payments due to them and NOT give them new government business or contracts.
7. Find people or parties to blame for all that is wrong. The dictator blames them for corruption, debt, poverty, diseases, and unemployment and all society’s problems.
8. Militarise state response and any democratic challenge to the regime must be brutal. Outlaw gatherings. Break up any gathering, protests, picketing, or demonstrations with brutality to instill fear and deter future government.
9. Incentivise and reward state and private violence. Don’t punish police officers or police units that beat, abduct, kill, or disappear people. Call whoever questions this as complicit to the perceived or trumped up charges and crimes of the suspects and if possible punish them too.
10. Now that the people live in fear, left poor, the Dictator repeats the cycle and conducts sham elections to obtain a very thin veneer of international legitimacy from a community of nations and so that gis country is not suspended from bodies such as the United Nations.
That was your late father who almost messed up this country for 7yrs.You really thought you are wining bakawalala,thieves.As for you,got used eating free money for doing nothing.It will never happen again Muamba.You messed up.Its time for you to retire and watch from the outside or go home in Tanzania and start farming