Chapter Six: Tanzania Since The Sixties

Life in Tanzania Today and Since The Sixties

Author: John Ndembwike

Paperbak: 168 pages

Publisher: Continental Press (31 May 2010)

ISBN-10: 998793224X

ISBN-13: 9789987932245

Chapter Six:

Tanzania Since The Sixties

TANZANIA has come a long way since the sixties, politically and economically.

Tanganyika won independence on 9 December 1961. Only three years and four months later, it united with Zanzibar on 26 April 1964 to form Tanzania. A new nation was born.

The new nation was simply called the Union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. It was renamed the United Republic of Tanzania on 29 October the same year.

Justs three months before the two countries united, a revolution took place in Zanzibar in which the Arab rulers were overthrown by the black African majority who had been denied a role in the government on the basis of majority rule.

Some Arabs, especially of the Umma Party led by Abdulrahman Mohammed Babu, also supported the revolution which was also an uprising against exploitation of the masses regardless of race. Otherwise Arabs like Babu would not have supported the revolution.

The revolution took place on 12 January 1964.

Only a week later, on 19 January, soldiers in the army of Tanganyika mutinied. The mutiny in Tanganyika was followed by mutinies by solders in Kenya and Uganda within three days.

The main demands by the soldiers was an increase in salary and the replacement of British army officers by African ones. But there was speculation that other forces were behind the mutiny who wanted to overthrow the government, especially in Tanganyika.

President Nyerere appealed for help from Britain to put down the mutiny and the former colonial power responded positively. The British soldiers quelled the mutiny in Tanganyika and did the same in both Kenya and Uganda.

Not long after the mutiny, Nyerere called an urgent meeting of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and asked his colleagues in the organisation to provide troops while Tanganyika rebuilt its army.

Nyerere was anxious to replace British troops with African ones and Nigeria offered to sends troops to Tanganyika to provide defence and security while the country was rebuilding its army.

All that happened in 1964. Then in the following year, another major change took place in Tanzania.

Since independence in 1961, Tanzania was legally a multi-party state. But for all practical purposes, it was a one-party state. There were no opposition parties in the country after the party which led the country to independence won overwhelmingly at the polls in 1962 in which Nyerere was elected president.

Then in 1965, a law was passed making Tanzania a one-party state.

It was the beginning of a major political rift between President Nyerere and Oscar Kambona, the second most influential leader in the country after Nyerere himself.

Kambona was opposed to one-party rule because he felt the country would degenerate into a dictatorship. He felt that it would be impossible to change leadership democratically and introduce changes under such a system.

Kambona lost and Tanzania officially became a one-party state.

It was a period when other African countries were undergoing the same changes, marking the beginning of what came to be the institutionalisation of life presidencies in most of the countries on the continent, with leaders perpetuating themselves in office

Professor Haroub Othman, a Zanzibari who taught for many years at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, addressed the subject in a lecture at the Pan-African Forum on the Commonwealth Principles on the Accountability of and Relationship Between the Three Branches of Government which was organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya, from 4 – 6 April. 2005. Published in The East African, Nairobi, Kenya, on 18 April 2005, his lecture was entitled “The Imperial Presidency and Africa's False Start:”

“Recently, I was reading a book written by Dutch diplomat Roel Van Der Veen, titled What Went Wrong with Africa. I was reminded of a book written 30 years earlier by the French agronomist Rene Dumont, titled False Start in Africa.

To understand what has gone wrong on this continent, we have to admit that we did make a false start.

The struggles for independence were also for democracy, development, human rights and ethical governance. All the independence and liberation movements said they were committed to democracy and enshrined in their constitutions the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In fact, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was enshrined in the now defunct Organisation of African Unity's Charter.

But once independence was attained, the first victim was democracy. To develop, we were told, we had to sacrifice the luxury of democracy. To fight imaginary enemies, we were required to forgo human rights.

Starting from Ghana in 1961, most African countries passed Preventive Detention Acts. In fact, Ghana copied theirs from apartheid South Africa, which promulgated such an Act in 1959. Ironically, the first victim of the act was Timothy Adamafio, the man who introduced the Bill in the Ghana parliament.

The scenario was repeated in Kenya, where Jaramogi Oginga Odinga who, as vice president and Minister of Home Affairs had introduced the Bill, became its victim.

In the then Tanganyika, Oscar Kambona, who was the Home Affairs Minister and therefore the person who sent the Bill to the National Assembly, was lucky to be able to flee to London before his arrest under the Act.

But Orton Chirwa was not so lucky. As Justice Minister and Attorney General, he sent to parliament a Bill establishing traditional courts in Malawi, where the accused were not entitled to defence lawyers.

When President Banda’s security agents kidnapped him, his wife and son in Zambia and took them back to Malawi, they were tried in a traditional court and sentenced to death. Orton Chirwa died in jail.

African countries made the first mistake when, in 1963, they condoned the overthrow of an elected government in Togo and the assassination of President Olympio. After that, they could only watch as several military coups and assassinations of political leaders took place.

The continent's hope that inde-pendence would bring a better life were dashed by mismanagement and misdirection of resources. There were grandiose projects that had no relationship to circumstances and programmes that were of no direct benefit to the people.

There was heavy borrowing and, instead of investing financial resources in productive areas, the young democracies went on a shopping spree.

Africans have been living in the South - the Third World - as if they were citizens of the North - the developed world.

The economic, social and political crises that we face are of our own making, and only we can lift ourselves out of this quagmire. It is no use hoping that the West will come in with a Marshall Plan to rescue us.

It is in the self-interest of Western Europe to help Eastern Europe and North Africa; otherwise millions in those areas will want to cross over to Western Europe. It is understandable when Japan invests in southeast Asia to stall a tide of Vietnamese boat people. But what is the self-interest of Europe in helping Africa south of the Sahara? Can we, in our small canoes, sail to Fortress Europe?

What can be done then? We must realise that development and democracy must go together. They are sides of the same coin. Democratic development therefore entails the following: ethical governance; observance and promotion and protection of human rights.

When we talk of human rights, we include the rights of women, children, workers, the disabled, ethnic and linguistic minorities and most importantly, the right to life, livelihood, education, health and peace; full enjoyment of national resources and their equitable distribution; the rule of law and accountability, transparency and constitutionalism.

Those who talk of a second liberation definitely have a point. We need to rethink our structures of governance, redefine our priorities and inculcate into our societies new values and ethics. The spirit of patriotism and solidarity that was there in the first years of independence must be rekindled.

We need to look into the following and see if we can develop a common pattern in Commonwealth Africa, if not the whole continent:

* The enormous powers of the president must be reduced. What we have created is an imperial presidency. The president is the head of state, head of government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He appoints ministers, ambassadors, regional and district governors, permanent secretaries, directors of departments and vice chancellors of public universities. Under the Preventive Detention Act, he can jail citizens without trial, and he can also allow a death penalty to be carried out.

* Either we have a legislature fully elected under a proportional representation system, or we have a combination of a proportional representation system and a first-past-the-post system. The legislature must represent the diversity of the population in their ideological, political beliefs, cultural, ethnic, linguistic composition, gender balance and class differences.

* The courts must be accessible, especially to the poor and the disadvantaged in society. Our courts are overwhelmed, and hundreds of people languish in jails waiting for their case to be determined

* Provision of legal aid to the poor must be compulsory in our legal systems.

We need to go back to the drawing board and look critically at the Lagos Plan of Action and the African Common Market idea and also come up with alternatives to structural adjustment programmes, ERPs and other IMF and World Bank edicts.

Last year, the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) came up with election guidelines for the region. Before that, it had also passed a resolution that member-countries would not recognise any government that comes to power through unconstitutional means.

West Africa, through ECOWAS, also produced a similar resolution and its application was very effective in the recent presidential succession episode in Togo. These efforts must be supported and strengthened.

The African Union (AU) at its last summit in Addis Ababa agreed to the establishment of an African Court of Human Rights. Though no host country has been identified, we must exert our pressure on the AU to put the court in place soon.” – (Haroub Othman, “The Imperial Presidency and Africa's False Start,” in The East African, Nairobi, Kenya, 18 April 2005).

After the one-party system was introduced in Tanzania, the ruling party gained even more power. The power it wielded was derived from the constitution which made no distinction between the government and the ruling party or between the party and the state. They all became one.

The government also had the legal mandate invoked under the Preventive Detention Act to detain anyone indefinitely it considered to be a security risk; a mandate which had broad interpretation to include political opponents of the government. If the government wanted to detain them, it could do so and simply say they are a threat to national security.

What the Detention Act did more than anything else was to silence political opponents without necessarily throwing them into jail. There were those who were detained but probably not as many as some people claim. But the true number will never be known, although President Nyerere rarely invoked this law, despite professions to the contrary by his critics.

Many government critics simply decided to shut up to avoid detention if they were to be targeted by the government and considered to be a security threat.

Then less than two years after the one-party state was instituted and the Detention Act passed, another major change took place in the country. That was in 1967.

The year 1967 marked a turning point in the history of the country. In February that year, the Arusha Declaration was adopted by the ruling party as the country's political and economic blueprint with the intention of transforming Tanzania into a socialist state.

The most prominent opponent of the Arusha Declaration and its socialist policies was Oscar Kambona. He left Tanzania in July the same year the Declaration was adopted and went into self-imposed exile in Britain. He did not return to Tanzania until 1992 when multiparty democracy was introduced. He founded one of the opposition parties but did not get the kind of support he expected to get and faded into oblivion. He died of a stroke in a hospital in London in November 1997.

About three years after he fled to London in 1967, he was charged with treason for trying to overthrow the government. The trial took place in 1970 and was presided by Tanzania's Chief Justice Philip Telfer Georges from Trinidad. The prosecution was led by Attorney-General Mark Bomani, a Tanzanian, and by Senior State Attorney Nathaniel King, also a Trinidadian like the chief justice.

Damning evidence was presented against the conspirators. And according to Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Documents 1970– 1971:

“"The central prosecution witness was Potlako K. Leballo, a founder of the Pan-African Congress (Pan-Africanist Congress) of South Africa (PAC), which had its exile headquarters in Dar es Salaam.

The state maintained that seven defendants attempted to enlist Leballo in the plot but that he informed government officials and only appeared to go along with the plot in order to assist in capturing the conspirators.

Leballo testified that he frequently met with Kambona in London and that Kambona had shown him a cache of $500,000 and told him that he could "get more where that came from" by contacting a U.S. Information Service "friend" in London (New York Times, 19 July 1970, 12).

Leballo further testified that Kambona had an agreement with the South African foreign minister, Hilgard Muller, that South Africa would support the coup." - (Colin Legum, and John Drysdale, eds., Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Documents 1970 – 1971, pp. 170 - 71. See also Oscar Kambona in Jacqueline Audrey Kalley, Elna Schoeman, and Lydia Eve Andor, Southern African Political History: A Chronology of Key Political Events, Greenwood, 1999, p. 594).

The coup was to take place in October 1969. It was masterminded by Kambona from London where he continued to denounce President Nyerere and what he considered to be Nyerere's misguided policies including socialism enunciated in the Arusha Declaration.

Under the Declaration, all the major means of production and other assets were to be nationalised.

But no major changes took place right away after the Decalration was adopted in 1967 or in the following two years between 1967 and 1969.

It was not until 1970 that some of the most dramatic changes took place when buildings were nationalised, sending shock waves across the country especially among the owners of those buildings and throughout the business community.

There were some reports that some people had heart attacks when they heard that their buildings had been nationalised.

Most of the nationalised buildings were owned by Tanzanians of Asian origin, known as Indians in Tanzania. And many – if not most – of them interpreted this as a hostile move against them.

They saw nationalisation of their property as a racial attack, although the motive was purely economic and political: to put the government in full charge of the assets, including buildings, in the country.

The Arusha Declaration also prohibited leaders – an interpretation which included ordinary civil servants and those who had finished secondary school and had jobs – from owning more than one house, besides the one in which they lived. It also forbade them from renting out houses and from having two jobs or earning more than salary. Doing so was considered to be double-dipping and exploitation of the masses.

Most of those who came under the axe were black Africans – not Indians or Tanzanians of Asian origin – since they're the ones who constituted the bulk of the civil service and occupied other leadership positions in the country.

Therefore it was clearly not a racist move by the government. The Arusha Declaration affected everybody, mostly black Tanzanians, since they constitute the vast majority of the population. It is also black Tanzanians who constitute the vast majority of the workers in all sectors of the economy and across the spectrum including political office.

One of the immediate results of all this was the departure of Tanzanians of Asian origin in large numbers. They felt the conditions were unbearable and sought better living conditions in Britain, Canada and other countries where they thought they would be able to thrive economically instead of being strangled by the government's tight grip on them in the name of socialism.

A significant number of black Tanzanians also started leaving the country.

But only a few of them could afford to do so. The majority stayed and had no intention of leaving.

The masses applauded the move by the government. They saw it as a genuine attempt by the government to help them by stopping the people who were exploiting them from continuing with their exploitation.

What encouraged the masses and other people was that when all these socialist measures were being implemented in the early 1970s, the economy of the country was pretty good. There were no shortages. Items were available in shops. Prices were reasonable. Jobs were also available in many areas. And the living standard was reasonable.

There was no reason to believe or suspect that socialist policies were destroying the economy as critics of these policies contended from the beginning.

But things began to change, especially from the late seventies.