Tanzania also suffered from sharpening political-economic inequalities as members of the political elite used their positions to assure themselves access to material resources that were unavailable to ordinary citizens. Here, too, there was a critical difference: Tanzania’s effort to have a society of social equals, however porous owing to corruption and malfeasance, represented a constraint on the acquisition and display of wealth by public officials. Tanzania did not experience the blatant forms of conspicuous consumption that have destabilized the political elites of many other African countries.
The severity of Tanzania’s economic difficulties also caused the Tanzanian state to suffer from what has been commonly called “the shrinking writ of governance,” the diminished ability of the central government to extend its authority to more distant regions and districts. But even during Tanzania’s period of deepest economic hardship, when the country’s transportation and communications infrastructures were barely functional, the central government maintained a rural presence. In the most remote districts and localities, tangible symbols of government remained operational: there was usually a district commissioner’s office, a post office, and a primary school. Their physical presence was a signal that the central government continued to function. This helped to prevent the sort of regional lawlessness that has arisen in countries where legitimate forms of authority have all but disappeared from the rural areas.
The Nyerere Factor
Academic discussions of Tanzania inevitably begin—and often end—with an emphasis on the role and impact of the country’s founder-president Julius K. Nyerere, who governed the country for twenty-five years, from independence in December 1961 until the end of 1985. His personal reputation as a humanitarian socialist has given the world its enduring image of Tanzania. Nyerere’s commitment to the formation of a classless society where development would occur based on collective self-reliance, where rural areas would have a primary claim on the government’s resources, and where social equality would prevail over class formation continues to provide the subject matter for countless courses on African politics and presentations at academic conferences. In his writings and speeches, he elaborated a vision of a social order in which public ownership of the society’s productive and financial assets would eliminate the exploitation of one class by another and where participatory decision-making would result in greater attention to the needs of small farmers.2 Although Nyerere stepped down from the presidency nearly thirty years ago, and died fifteen years ago in October 1999, his social idealism continues to be a factor in Tanzanian politics: it provides a counter-culture to the market system that currently prevails.
Scholars of Tanzania who might otherwise agree on very little are practically unanimous in their conviction that Nyerere had a towering influence on Tanzania’s political and economic affairs for a period of almost forty years. Acceptance of this premise is, therefore, the essential starting point for any effort to understand the political-economic trajectory of modern Tanzania. Nyerere’s personal influence was the major force behind practically all the major policy decisions that defined Tanzania’s post-independence political trajectory. The most consequential of these were the decision to adopt a single-party system, which Nyerere announced publicly in 1963, and the decision to adopt a socialist economic framework, which he announced in early 1967. When he formed the Presidential Commission on the formation of a single-party state in 1965, Nyerere made it clear that he had made the basic decision to adopt a one-party system and that the responsibility of the Commission was only to decide what form the single-party state would assume.3 Nyerere’s other personal decisions included the decision to unify Tanganyika and Zanzibar, creating the United Republic of Tanzania in 1964; the decision to extend the socialist framework into the agricultural sector by pursuing collective villagization in 1969; and the decision to relent on that objective and allow resumption of family-based farming in 1975. Close observers fault Nyerere with having caused the rupture in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund in 1979 but credit him with the decision to step down from the presidency in 1985, thereby setting the stage for economic reform. In what may have been his final major contribution, Nyerere used his personal stature to persuade a reluctant people and an even more reluctant governing party to abandon the single-party model he had personally initiated and to allow a resumption of multiparty politics during the early 1990s.4
Even this inventory of policy decisions does not fully encompass Nyerere’s personal impact on post-independence Tanzania. Despite the presence of a highly bureaucratic party-state, Tanzania had a personal style of decisionmaking that thrust routine decisions onto the desk of the president for final resolution. Many of Tanzania’s major policy initiatives, in fact, began as presidential decisions that the National Assembly then had to formalize with legislation. The policy initiatives that have contributed to Tanzania’s distinctively non-ethnic political atmosphere, including the constitutional provisions and electoral regulations that proscribe appeals to ethnicity, race, or religion, also bear the distinctive imprint of a president with a pronounced personal distaste for political organizations or leaders that use these factors as the basis for mobilizing their popular support. It is undoubtedly true, as Daniel Chirot suggests, that “Nyerere would have been less successful if the existing situation had made a few groups think they could gain power by appealing to ethnic identities.”5 However, to the extent that it is possible for a single person to be assigned credit for having an impact on a country’s political culture, Nyerere would have the highest possible claim.
Some of the most puzzling questions concerning post-independence Tanzania are unanswerable without reference to the importance of presidential leadership. One has to do with why the Tanzanian government chose a set of economic policies that had such harmful effects on the economic life of the country and why it then continued to pursue those policies long after these effects had become apparent. A complete answer to these questions involves a complex mix of factors including the vested economic interests of the country’s rent-seeking elite.6 However, the search for answers begins with a powerful president so committed to a socialist economic framework that he was unwilling to allow the implementation of market-based policy initiatives that might compromise it.
Tanzania’s most puzzling political question has to do with the political-economic evolution of its governing party. How did it come about that a socialist party, which had used a variety of authoritarian measures to implement a tightly regimented statist economy, transformed itself, within a remarkably brief period, into the chief sponsor of a market-based economy and a multiparty democracy? A complete answer to this question also requires a mix of factors, including international diplomatic and economic pressures and the growing influence of a Tanzanian intelligentsia with reformist views. However, the necessary point of departure in answering this question was that by the mid-1980s Nyerere had reluctantly concluded that the policy framework he had so painstakingly put in place over a twenty-year period was no longer sustainable.
Nyerere’s influence on Tanzanian politics has long survived him. That this would be so became immediately apparent as his funeral cortege passed through the streets of Dar es Salaam in early November 1999. Firsthand descriptions of the procession, which estimate that nearly a million people lined the streets, convey a powerful image of a nation of Tanzanians joined in their outpouring of grief and respect for the man who was the single most important political figure in their country for more than forty years. That Nyerere’s passing was mourned by Tanzanians of all social strata, regions, ethnicities, and religions seemed to represent the fulfillment of one of his deepest hopes; namely, that Tanzania would become a nation-state in which the idea of national citizenship would take pride of place over