The government further disempowered rural communities by abolishing the administrative and judicial role of traditional chiefs. During the colonial era, many important functions of local administration, including local law enforcement and taxation, had been carried out by government entities termed native authorities. Traditional chiefs, many of them appointed by colonial authorities, presided over these institutions. However, during the late colonial period, traditional chiefs had also begun to act as spokespersons for local communities, communicating rural grievances over agricultural taxes, inadequate educational facilities, discrimination in government employment, and, more generally, the indignities of the colonial experience. After independence, President Nyerere took the position that the native authorities were feudal institutions that had no place in a modernizing democratic society, and the special powers and financial resources assigned to traditional chiefs were eliminated. Whatever the merits of this viewpoint, it is best viewed in its economic context. As the central government began to escalate its levels of taxation and political control over the Tanzanian countryside, traditional chiefs had become active spokespersons for local communities discomfited by the new economic framework.37 Dissolving the authority and special status of these individuals was one of several mechanisms for minimizing local resistance to central government control and heightened agricultural taxes.
The major step in Tanzania’s authoritarian drift was the creation of a constitutionally mandated single-party state in 1965.38 The political imperatives that set this transition in motion are self-evident. The economic measures that the government was beginning to implement created an adversarial relationship between a small urban minority of civil servants and industrial workers and the overwhelming majority of the population, which consisted of smallholder farmers. An open, multiparty democracy, which would empower the rural majority to oppose this policy, would place the ISI strategy at risk. If the party of the rural majority were actually to gain political power, the economic framework that over-taxed farmers to invest in urban industry would quickly come to a halt. The only alternative, other than to abandon the strategy, was to eliminate any possibility of opposition parties that might gain the support of the rural majority.
The Policy Factor
Reduced to its essentials, the most elemental question about these trends can be stated simply: what caused all this? The best place to begin looking for an answer is in the area of policy choice. Robert Bates’s answer to this question centered on the differential influence of urban versus rural interest groups. He theorized that a powerful coalition of urban interests—including industrial workers and civil servants along with businesses attached to the industrial sector—used their political muscle to impose an economic framework that extracted wealth from the rural population to transfer it to the new state-managed urban industries. The concentrated political power of these groups far exceeded that of smallholder farmers, for whom collective action proved especially difficult because they were scattered over vast distances, physically remote from the capital city, and hampered by a scarcity of organizational skills. As a political explanation for the continent-wide pattern of agricultural decline that followed independence, Bates’s theory has dominated discussions of African development. It remains the starting point for any political understanding of Tanzania’s agricultural decline.
On closer reflection, however, it became apparent that Bates’s urban bias thesis had a serious shortcoming. It overstated the influence of urban interest groups relative to their rural counterparts. Bates himself was among the first to point this out. In a 1991 article, published a decade after his book Markets and States, he acknowledged the existence of “discordant facts” that contradicted his earlier depiction of a decisive power imbalance between city and countryside.39 Bates’s discovery of discordant facts applied with special force to Tanzania where interest groups connected to the rural sector were very strong. Export-oriented farmers such as coffee, cotton, and tobacco growers had formed well-organized producer cooperatives, with well-funded apex offices that provided an influential lobbying presence in the capital city. Several of the country’s most powerful trade unions were closely tied to the prosperity of the agricultural sector rather than urban industry. One was the agricultural workers’ union, whose members depended on planting, harvesting, and processing exportable crops. A second was the transportation workers’ union, whose members transported the crops from the agricultural regions to the port cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanga, and Mtwara. The third was the dockworkers’ union, whose members then loaded the country’s agricultural exports onto ships. Taken together, the membership and influence of these unions far outweighed those of workers in the industrial sector. Policies that diminished the well being of export-oriented farmers would inevitably have a similar effect on these workers as well. The farmer-worker coalition, though unusual in that it jointed together employer and employee, constituted a powerful opposition to policies that imposed costs on the agricultural sector.
Bates’s urban bias approach reversed cause and effect. As a matter of historical sequence, urban industrial workers and managers did not become a well-organized political force until state-led industrialization was well underway and until some of the larger publicly owned industries, such as wearing apparel, footwear, brewing, and cigarettes, had grown to the point where they employed a large workforce. In other words, the industrial unions that became a powerful force for the policy bias against agriculture only emerged after the industrialization policy had begun and after the factories that employed large numbers of industrial workers had completed their hiring and begun operations. For Tanzania and a host of other African countries, then, the presence of powerful industrial unions does not explain why the policy of taxing agriculture to fund industries first began. However, it does help explain why this policy remained in place so long after its harmful effects had become visible.
The key question, then, suggests itself: why did Africa’s leaders adopt a set of policies so harmful to the development of their societies? The most persuasive answer is the influence of prevailing economic ideas. During the roughly two-decade period from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, innumerable African governments derived their policy preferences from a subfield of economics known as development economics.40 Tanzania was among these, and its policy choices throughout these two decades reflected the profound influence of this field. The development economists were intellectually joined by their mutual concern with the question of how primarily agricultural societies might best achieve sustained economic growth. They were pessimistic about the growth benefits of free markets as the best economic model for developing countries; they were pessimistic about the possibility that the agricultural sector might provide the basis for broad-gauged growth. In addition, they had doubts about whether free trade would provide sustainable development for countries dependent upon the export of primary commodities. Their economic strategies derived from these views. They believed industry, not agriculture, should have the highest priority; they believed protectionism, not free trade, would help industry to develop; and they believed the best use of the agricultural sector was as a resource base to provide the input needed to create industries.
The most widely discussed basis for the development economists’ agricultural pessimism was the notion of falling terms of trade for agricultural products. Many of these economists believed and tried to show that the prices developing countries received for their agricultural exports would tend to fall relative to the prices of the industrial products and consumer goods they needed to import. To the extent that this was true, rising levels of agricultural exports could only sustain a constant level of imports, and this would cause each producing country to seek to increase its export levels.41 Agricultural exporters would find themselves in a repetitive cycle of diminished well-being because the downward pressure on agricultural prices would cause them to fall relative to the costs of industrial imports. The difficulty in increasing agricultural prices at a pace commensurate with price increases for industrial goods had to do with the ease with which second- and third-party producers could enter global agricultural markets: it was far easier to capitalize and operate a new coffee plantation than a new automobile industry. The validity of this idea continues to be an unresolved topic of discussion among economists.42 But so long as it held intellectual