President Jakaya Kikwete's leadership has continued to be attacked by leaders from various quarters of the country.

"We are meeting for this conference at the time when it is obvious that the country is suffering from lack of leadership.

The situation is so bad that some CCM leaders have started to speak openly about it," said the CUF national chairman, Prof Ibrahim Lipumba. He was opening a meeting of the party's leadership council in Dar es Salaam yesterday.

He said the state of politics in the country would be one of 13 agendas that the party leaders would deliberate on during the two-day meeting.

He told delegates attending the conference that as the President continues to spend billions of shillings of taxpayers' money for his trips, poor Tanzanians continue to live in abject poverty and, in some cases, dying of hunger.

He said grand corruption has gone untouched even for insistences which had enough evidence. He mentioned the British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) on the radar scandal as an example.

He said the conference will also deliberate on the way the civic election was conducted. "Rules in this election were full of faults resulting in bending democratic principles in the country," he said.

He said the rules were also against agreements reached upon by political parties last February on how the election should be conducted. As a result, he said, many citizens were denied of an opportunity to contest for leadership positons.

He added that as this happened to opposition parties, their counterparts from the ruling party CCM were allowed to contest on similar rules that disqualified those from the opposition.

The conference is also expected to receive and adopt a report on the agreements reached at the meeting of the CUF secretary general, Maalim Seif Shariff Hamad and Zanzibar President Amani Abeid Karume.

Their meeting resulted in CUF softening its stance and recognising the Zanzibar leader.