Tanzania: Making a Graceful Exit

As the father of homespun African socialism, he has been one of the Third World’s most prominent statesmen. But to the more than 20 million people of Tanzania, the nation he founded, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, 63, is best known simply as Mwalimu, Ki-swahili for “teacher.” Although he has failed during his 24 years in power to create the prosperous, egalitarian society that he once envisioned, his policies will continue to shape the country–and the continent–for decades. This month Nyerere is scheduled to become one of the few African rulers ever to relinquish power voluntarily.

Nyerere’s successor is Ali Hassan Mwinyi, 60, former President of Zanzibar, a semiautonomous island off the Tanzanian coast.[*] Mwinyi was nominated to succeed Nyerere last September by the national executive committee of Tanzania’s sole political party, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or Revolutionary Party. He will run unopposed in popular elections scheduled for this week. Meanwhile, in other parts of Africa, voters in the Ivory Coast (pop. 10 million) are expected this week to endorse 80-year-old Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s uncontested bid for a sixth five-year term as President. In Liberia (pop. 2 million), however, opposition politicians continue to allege fraud in the recent balloting that President Samuel K. Doe, a former army sergeant who first came to power in a 1980 coup, says gave him a popular mandate.

Nyerere began his journey to greatness as a boy in the village of Butiama, near Lake Victoria, where he was born into the Zanaki, one of the smallest of Tanzania’s more than 120 tribes. He finished at the top of his class at a British-run school and became the first person in the colony to attend university abroad, in Edinburgh, where, says a long-time observer of Tanzanian affairs, “he was captured by the ideology of the British Labor Party at the time. He is deeply involved in Fabian socialist principles, which he believed he could graft onto the fabric of Tanzanian village life.” A lifelong Roman Catholic, Nyerere was also influenced by the social activism of Africa’s Maryknoll missionaries.

When the British colony gained independence in 1961, Nyerere became Prime Minister and soon set the new nation on a socialist course. In 1967 his Arusha Declaration established ujamaa, the extended family system under which some 13 million peasants were by 1976 resettled, often forcibly, into 8,000 cooperative villages. All crops were to be bought and distributed by the government. At the same time, the country’s major industries were to be nationalized and run by state-owned companies.

The results have been discouraging. Though Tanzanian farmers have traditionally been among Africa’s most productive, the country’s pricing and distribution system is notoriously inefficient. The government has been forced to import food to feed the population of Dar es Salaam, the capital. As a result, ujamaa has been allowed to die a quiet death, and roughly 85% of the population has gone back to subsistence farming. Meanwhile, the nationalized industries are working at only about 20% of capacity. Tanzania’s expensive 1979 military intervention in neighboring Uganda to topple the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin further accelerated the economic decline. Says one international banker: “The place is an economic basket case.”

Yet in many ways, Nyerere managed to improve the lot of his people. He instilled a sense of national pride among the country’s diverse tribal groups, and promoted Ki-swahili as the national language, factors that have contributed to Tanzania’s having what is perhaps the lowest level of tribal strife of any country on the continent. In addition, Tanzania’s 83% literacy rate is among the highest in Africa, health care has been improved, and the government has demonstrated concern for human rights.

For a centralized socialist state, Tanzania has bolstered democratic institutions to a surprising extent. The country’s constitution was amended last year to include, for the first time, a bill of rights guaranteeing fundamental freedoms, to strengthen the 244-seat Parliament and to provide for the direct election of more of its members. The President can still order preventive detention for as long as six months, but the names of those detained must now be published, and the legality of detentions can be challenged in the courts, which are refreshingly independent.

Moreover, Nyerere’s personal integrity and commitment to egalitarian ideals have rarely if ever been seriously questioned. “He is above corruption,” says a political opponent. “He never believed in torture. He never sought power for power’s sake. He is a real man of the people.” Nyerere has abjured personal wealth, and throughout his presidency collected a salary that was lower than that of his Cabinet ministers. The road between the state-house and Nyerere’s modest home in Dar es Salaam’s Msasani district is said to be full of potholes. When asked why he had not ordered it repaired, Nyerere reportedly answered, “Why should I have a good road to go to work on when the rest of the Tanzanians don’t?”

Nyerere’s successor is regarded by Western diplomats in Dar es Salaam as a pragmatic politician who has helped maintain Zanzibar’s tenuous link to the mainland at a time when Tanzania’s pervasive economic problems have caused many Zanzibarians to question the value of that union. A Muslim, Mwinyi is expected to continue Nyerere’s socialist economic policies, despite their mixed results. As for Nyerere, he will retain the important post of party chairman for at least the next two years. He plans to travel extensively throughout Tanzania in an effort to restore the peasants’ somewhat diminished faith in the party and its programs. “It is better to step down while I still have full strength,” he said of his retirement, “in order to be with my fellow Tanzanians to build the country.” –By Hunter R. Clark. Reported by James Wilde/Dar es Salaam