Edward Lowassa

Edward Lowassa: The Colossus Who Never Got the Job

In 1995 Julius Nyerere personally struck a young minister from the list of CCM presidential aspirants. The founding father's reasoning was blunt: Edward Lowassa was not then correct material for the presidency, and he had enriched himself too fast. Lowassa spent the next twenty years trying to prove Nyerere wrong — rising to prime minister, falling in a procurement scandal, walking out of the ruling party to lead the opposition, and losing. When he died in 2024 Tanzania declared five days of national mourning for a man who had never been head of state.

A Herder's Son from Monduli

Lowassa was born on 26 August 1953 in Monduli District, Arusha Region, in Maasailand. His father, Ngoyai Lowassa, was a herder who worked part-time for the colonial administration as a *tarish*, a village law enforcer. He went through Monduli Primary School from 1961, sat his primary exam in 1967, attended Arusha Secondary School from 1968 to 1971 and Milambo Secondary School for A-levels in 1972 and 1973. Schoolmates remembered a born leader who mobilised other students and liked to do his job properly — the sort of retrospective testimony that is usually worthless, except that Lowassa's entire subsequent career consisted of mobilising people.

Fine Art, and the Kagera War

He took a BA in fine and performing arts at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1977 and sang in the choir — an unlikely foundation for one of East Africa's most formidable political operators. At university he met Jakaya Kikwete, the friendship that would define both their careers. In 1978 he was conscripted and fought in the Kagera War against Idi Amin's Uganda. He later returned to Britain for an MSc in development studies at the University of Bath in 1984.

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The Group of 55

Elected an MP on a CCM youth ticket in 1985, Lowassa joined the Group of 55, the bloc of young parliamentarians who pushed for political reform and whom the party establishment found genuinely alarming. He was appointed executive director of the Arusha International Conference Centre in 1989, then entered government in 1990 as Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office handling disaster management. The portfolios accumulated: Lands and Human Settlement Development from 1993, State Minister for Environment and Poverty from 1997, and Water and Livestock Development into the mid-2000s. He led Tanzania's delegation to the COP 4 climate summit in Buenos Aires in 1998 and worked the Nile water negotiations. He held the Monduli seat until 2015.

Kingmaker, then King's Deputy

After Nyerere blocked him in 1995, Lowassa played a longer game. He campaigned relentlessly for Kikwete in 2005, and Kikwete took 82 per cent of the vote. The reward came at once: nominated prime minister on 29 December 2005, sworn in the following day, confirmed by parliament 312 votes to 2. That margin is the measure of where he stood. At fifty-two he was the second most powerful man in Tanzania and the obvious successor.

Richmond

It lasted just over two years. After a 2006 drought, the state utility TANESCO contracted the US-registered Richmond Development Company LLC to supply 100 megawatts of emergency power. Richmond arrived late with generators that did not work, and the government paid it more than one hundred thousand dollars a day regardless. A parliamentary select committee found that Lowassa's office had influenced the extension of the contract against TANESCO's advice. On 7 February 2008 he resigned, along with two energy ministers, denying improper involvement and maintaining that political enemies had engineered his fall.

The Long Game That Wasn't

The resignation was meant to be tactical — clear the name, wait, come back in 2015. One analyst's post-mortem is withering: the eight-year gap simply allowed his influence inside the party and government to fade. CCM banned him for a year in 2014 for premature campaigning and extended it into 2015. He launched his campaign anyway in May 2015 on education, poverty, growth and anti-corruption, and on 11 July the Central Committee struck him off the aspirants' list — the second time the party had done this to him, twenty years after the first. He left, denouncing CCM as infested with leaders who are dictators, undemocratic and surrounded with greedy power mongers, joined the opposition CHADEMA, and was named the coalition's presidential candidate on 4 August 2015. He lost that October to John Magufuli. On 1 March 2019 he rejoined CCM, and later reconciled with Magufuli before the president's death in 2021.

Why Edward Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim is about political organisation, and it is narrower than his reputation. Lowassa possessed a rare capacity to build and move a mass following: he was credited with delivering Kikwete's 82 per cent landslide in 2005, he held Monduli for twenty-five years, and in 2015 he was able to carry a substantial personal constituency out of a party that had governed Tanzania since independence and into the opposition — a transfer of loyalty from institution to individual that almost no one else in Tanzanian politics could have attempted. His parliamentary confirmation by 312 votes to 2 and the five days of national mourning at his death both testify to a personal political weight the party could never quite contain. That is real, and it is why an obituary called him a colossus.

The counter-case is severe, and it starts with the most authoritative judgment ever passed on him. Nyerere, in 1995, said Lowassa was not correct material for the presidency and had enriched himself too fast — a verdict from the man whose moral authority defined Tanzanian public life, delivered a decade before the Richmond findings appeared to vindicate it. The scandal itself involved paying over one hundred thousand dollars a day for generators that did not work, with his own office implicated in extending the contract against expert advice. His signature strategic decision, resigning in 2008 to preserve a run in 2015, was straightforwardly wrong and cost him the relevance he was trying to protect. And having denounced CCM as a nest of dictators, he rejoined it four years later, which suggests the denunciation was positioning rather than principle. Nobody consulted here calls Lowassa a genius; they call him a colossus, which is a statement about size, not judgment. He had extraordinary political instincts for gaining power and consistently poor ones for keeping it.

Legacy

Lowassa died on 10 February 2024, aged seventy, of high blood pressure and lung complications, after two years under treatment at the Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute in Dar es Salaam and earlier care in Germany and South Africa. His durable contribution was not a policy but a demonstration: in 2015 he proved that a Tanzanian politician's personal following could be detached from CCM and mobilised against it. He lost the election. The precedent survived him.