Since President Magufuli came to power in November 2015, much has changed in Tanzanian politics. While the headlines focus on the President’s striking economic interventions and authoritarian tendencies, a somewhat less high-profile political re-ordering is ongoing within the long-time ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). Under previous Presidents, from Mwinyi through to Kikwete, the trend within CCM was towards increased competition across rival patron-client factions and, with it, greater contestation and subversion of CCM’s formal structures and procedure. Magufuli, by contrast, has tried to turn back the clock, pursuing a range of strategies to re-introduce discipline within the ruling party, all the while harkening back to a set of party norms remembered from the era of Tanzania’s founding President, Julius Nyerere. This paper outlines Magufuli’s party management approach, which comprises two inter-related components, one economic and one organisational; the President-cum-Party Chairman is attempting to recentralise control over political finance, thereby limiting the scope for rival patron-client factions to emerge, even as he seeks better to enforce and reform formal party rules. Beyond description, this paper also tries to explain the nature and timing of Magufuli’s interventions. They are certainly surprising in so far as they go against long-running trends in the political economy of CCM; they nevertheless make sense if understood in relation to CCM’s own institutional legacy and the unique political incentives and predispositions of Magufuli himself, whose rise to the top was anything but predictable. Through this explanation, the paper reflects on a broader set of themes to do with the interplay of structure and agency, of path-dependence and contingency underlying authoritarian party trajectories.