THE new secretariat of Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) has vowed to take stern measures against all corrupt leaders and members within the party in a move aimed at cleansing the party and maintaining the trust of members of the public.

This was said in Dar es Salaam at an event lined up to welcome members of the secretariat who were elected last week at the party's national congress held for three days in Dodoma.

"Moral decay in the party is now clearly visible and all members of the secretariat are concerned about it. We are committed to ending this trend," said the newly appointed CCM Secretary General, Mr Abdulrahman Kinana.

Mr Kinana noted that the major objective of the secretariat and all other leaders in the party was to ensure that principles of ethics prevail in the party and therefore all the leaders are supposed to be clean and ethical. "Our party has more than five million members.

Almost 99 per cent of them are poor people who are ethical and trustworthy. It is only about 0.1 per cent of the members who are tarnishing the image of our party -- making it look corrupt. We are not ready to let this situation continue," he vowed.

The party's newly elected Vice-Chairman (Mainland), Mr Philip Mangula, said that CCM had received complaints in connection with corruption during the previous elections at various levels and that the ruling on all those misdemeanors will be made within six months.

"We are working on the complaints and in case we discover that a leader was elected through corrupt means we will nullify the victory. In this regard we will not fear anyone," he said. Mr Mangula further urged members of the party not to be cheap and allow candidates to buy them as by so doing the party was suffering terribly as many of those using corruption for greed of power are also incompetent.

The party's Chairman, President Jakaya Kikwete, reiterated that it would be very unrealistic to deny the fact that the party's image in the eyes of the public was not good. "The trust that members of the public had on CCM has gone down and this is indisputable.

What we need to do is to look critically where we went wrong and take measures to save our party from deteriorating even further," he said. He called on fellow leaders of the party to act proactively in responding to any allegations being levelled against the party by opposition leaders.