LONDON – Tanzania has re-invented itself twice – the first time in 1964 after a bloody revolution had overthrown the Omani-descended Sultan who ruled the neighboring spice island of Zanzibar. Tanganyika, as it was then, persuaded the successful African-led rebels to join their island with the mainland, and Tanzania came into being. This union remains precarious because of latent Zanzibari nationalism after too many years of misrule.
The second time was when Julius Nyerere, the founding father of independence, stepped down in 1985 and two successive presidents over the last twenty years have ushered in free market reforms, fundamentally altering the direction of a once moribund socialist economy.
But the legacy of the Zanzibari revolution of 1964 and of Nyerere still hang over the country. Nyerere, who died four years ago, had been a teacher and he became what was in fact Tanzania’s headmaster. He was incorruptible, unpretentious but totally authorative if not authoritarian. His great accomplishment was that he inspired his people to resist the tugs of tribalism and pull together as one people.
Nyerere’s Christian socialist ideology led him to dream of new ways of organizing society, even though there were barely the rudiments of modern structures. Tanzania became riddled with loss making state industries, banks and plantations. His biggest mistake of all was what he called “ujamaa” – a kind of collectivization inspired by the Israeli kibbutz. It was momentous exercise uprooting people whose families had farmed the same scattered plots for hundreds of years. It is not surprising that it totally failed having consumed enormous resources and alienated the aid donors. The country fell into increasing disrepair as the economy plunged downward.
The president today is the unassuming Ben Mkapa, once Nyerere’s press secretary. Later this year he will step down, having completed two terms in office, leaving the country transformed into a possible capitalist success story, but perhaps with Zanzibar’s volatile politics still murmuring and mumbling off shore.
Although Mkapa’s ruling party dominates Tanzanian politics he encourages internal debate and multiple rival candidates in elections. The press is free, although not particularly vigorous. Death sentences have been suspended and thousands of prisoners pardoned whilst he has been in office. Security at his residence is barely visible.
When I asked him what Nyerere would say if he could revisit his country he replied that “he would be uneasy that I have given away too much of what was publicly owned and he would probably be upset that I had built up such a prosperous middle class”.
But no one I talked to, either in the ministries or the villages, wants to unwind the clock. The free market and privatization reforms have not only propelled the country out of its economic lethargy with a handsome growth rate of 6% year upon year and burgeoning tax revenue it has enabled the Mkapa administration to make sure there is a primary school in every village and to start to dramatically expand secondary education and health centers.
When I visited the villages in Iringa eight hours by road from Dar es Salaam I could barely believe my eyes. When I worked here as an agricultural extension agent 40 years ago there used to be in the market place just a few heaps of vegetables. Now there was a cornucopia of produce – courgettes and pineapples, aubergines and guavas, fresh peas being podded and a truckload of fresh cabbages being unloaded. Where once you could only buy maize corn now there were sacks of rice from local paddies and Nile perch from Lake Victoria. There was sunflower oil, brought in from the fields that dazzle the countryside with their yellow flowers among the green maize. And everywhere tomatoes: enormous baskets of them, with a local sauce factory consuming the surplus. All this is quite new, as are the cell phones that reach 90% of the villages in Iringa district, enabling traders and farmers to cut out the middlemen and find the best price on their own.
Can this continue? Tanzanian economists and the president speak of growth rates of 8 or 9%. World Bank and IMF officials are more cautious. But no one thinks that it will fall much below 6% – unless Zanzibar, with its evenly balanced two party struggle, explodes.
After the ruling party has selected its presidential candidate in May, Mkapa says he will spend a good deal of time talking to the militants on both sides in Zanzibar to diffuse the talked-about confrontation at the coming general election in October.
If the country can get past that milestone then we can start to believe that Tanzania, maneuvering at the end of the runway, is ready to get in line for take off.
