Читать книгу The Political Economy of Tanzania - Michael F. Lofchie - Страница 9

Chapter 1

Introduction: A Tanzanian Overview

Tanzania has undergone two transformations in the last thirty years. It has transformed its economy from one of state ownership and control to a market-based system. In addition, it has transformed its political system from a constitutionally entrenched single-party system to an openly competitive multiparty system. It has accomplished these transformations peacefully and without major incidents of ethnic violence or civil disruption. Tanzania is conspicuous for what has not taken place there. In a region of the world that has experienced more than its share of political turbulence, including failed states, military coups, local warlords, ethnic cleansing, regional secessions, civil war, severe famine, and dictatorial rule, Tanzania is special because of its sheer normalcy. It has a stable and functioning political system that works: children attend school; civil servants pursue their careers, receive promotions, and retire; the universities admit, teach, and graduate their students; hospitals and clinics provide medical services; bus systems carry workers to and from their jobs; roads are repaired and upgraded; the country’s public utilities, such as telecommunications, water, electricity, and trash disposal operate, though sometimes intermittently; and government ministries carry out their assigned functions on a day-to-day basis. To supplement the services it has difficulty providing, the government offers a hospitable atmosphere for innumerable nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), whose activities supplement the public sector in such differing policy areas as environmental matters, gender equity, human rights, poverty alleviation, housing, and education and health services.

Tanzania has a strong claim to academic attention for its history of civil peace during the first five decades of independence. The Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) or Revolutionary Party, which began life as the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in 1954 and which has now been in power since 1961, has compiled an unbroken record of peaceful governance. With the exception of a brief and unsuccessful army mutiny in January 1964, it has never had a military challenge or any other serious challenge to its leadership. The CCM can make a compelling claim to popular legitimation as the heir of the country’s nationalist movement and as a political party that enjoys widespread popular support across the country’s social and ethnic spectrum. Its record of civil peace has fostered a distinctive climate of public opinion. Tanzanians are aware that their country has managed to avoid the tendencies toward civil strife and failed government that have arisen elsewhere in Africa, and this has created a special sense of pride in being Tanzanian.

Another achievement is Tanzania’s principled role in international affairs. During the 1960s, Tanzania provided sanctuary, support, and diplomatic status for a number of southern African nationalist organizations, committing scarce economic resources to their liberation struggles. Following on its commitment to the principle of self-determination, Tanzania was almost alone in recognizing and assisting Biafra’s struggle for independence from Nigeria. Tanzania also provided a place of sanctuary for a number of African Americans seeking refuge from the racial atmosphere of mid-century United States. In its determined pursuit of the principle of nonalignment in world affairs, Tanzania was prepared to strain the patience of both sides in the global cold war. A Muslim majority country with a Muslim president, Tanzania aligns itself with the United States in the war against terrorism and is a voice of moderation in international affairs.

Tanzania has distinguished itself from numerous African countries in other important respects as well. One important difference has to do with the persistence of the democratic idea. In common with many African countries, Tanzania underwent a change from the multiparty system of the immediate post-independence period toward a more autocratic pattern of authority in the years following. However, there was an important difference. In Tanzania’s case, the changeover took place in a constitutional manner. Tanzanian political leaders sought to validate the change by propounding a democratic theory of single-party rule.¹ They then sought to translate this theory into political reality by creating an elaborate electoral framework whose purpose was to nurture popular participation and candidate competitiveness within the penumbra of single-party government.

The duration, magnitude, and visibility of an electoral process in which voters could choose between two CCM candidates imparted enduring credibility to the democratic idea. Democratic theorists could find much to fault about the way Tanzania practiced single-party democracy. The governing party regulated the country’s election procedures with utmost care. It screened its candidates for their loyalty to the party’s core principles and then imposed tight controls on their campaigns. These required candidates to appear together so that they could be carefully monitored. The party’s electoral rules also forbade candidates from discussing nonsocialist development alternatives and proscribed appeals to ethnicity, religion or race. Party authorities disqualified candidates who violated these rules.

Although Tanzania’s electoral system imposed these limitations on freedom, it would be a mistake to dismiss its early elections as simply a democratic subterfuge. Tanzania held six single-party elections between 1965 and 1990, and the debates between CCM candidates were heavily attended and widely discussed. Voters at the district level were presented with a choice of candidates and took this choice with utmost seriousness. Indeed, to make voting possible for voters who could not read the candidates’ names, each candidate was assigned a distinct symbol, either a hoe or a house. Throughout the period of single-party rule, the Tanzanian government maintained the premise that legitimate authority was based on the rule of law and not the personal rule of an individual or small elite group. Although the major policy decisions were made first within the higher councils of the governing party, often by the president himself, Tanzania upheld the democratic principle by insisting that each decision then had to be drafted into legislation and passed by a parliamentary majority. These practices meant that Tanzanians have always expected their government to obey the rule of law and they have always believed they could legitimately participate in their country’s political process and exert an influence over its legislative branch. In all these ways, the single-party electoral framework kept the democratic idea alive just as it obscured the extent to which it had circumscribed Tanzanians’ actual political rights and freedoms. This fact is the essential starting point for any understanding of how the CCM has been able to remain in power for so long: whatever other mechanisms of control it has employed, its status as a popularly elected government is not in question.

Tanzania shared with other African countries the experience of severe economic decline during the two decades from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. But it differed from other countries in that the governing party sought to explain the country’s economic misfortunes with a theory of development that emphasized the overriding value of social equality. Tanzania’s economic difficulties included a severe agricultural decline that manifested itself, during the mid-1970s, as acute shortages of basic food staples. However, Tanzania averted widespread starvation by importing and distributing hundreds of thousands of tons of food grains. In addition, when the problem of rural impoverishment began to manifest itself in Dar es Salaam, in the presence of growing numbers of homeless refugees from the countryside, the country’s political elite began to explore and then implement alternative economic policies. As conditions began to improve, Tanzanians naturally credited their leaders with the improvement as well as with their flexibility to change.

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 other forms of group identification.

In certain respects, Nyerere’s continuing popularity among Tanzanians is surprising. Anyone present that day would have been aware that Nyerere’s successors and most of his fellow citizens had long since repudiated his economic views. Anyone present would also have been aware that in a futile effort to translate his social vision into economic reality, Nyerere had accepted—and indeed initiated—levels of political repression that contradicted his global image as a gentle, humanistic figure. Many of those attending were convinced that Nyerere’s economic views had directly caused the country’s economic decline and, by most accounts, the majority of Tanzanians had long since accepted the need for the liberal economic reforms that the government put in place after he left the presidency. Remarkably, many of those in attendance were supporters of one or another of Tanzania’s new opposition parties.

Why, then, does Nyerere’s persona continue to have such a powerful effect on Tanzanian political affairs? One reason has to do with Tanzanians’ discontent about the extent of corruption on the part of the current governing elite. Many Tanzanians believe although Nyerere was surrounded by political leaders he knew to be corrupt, he was personally incorruptible. There is an element of invented memory about the way some Tanzanians describe Nyerere, portraying him in almost saintly terms, as a martyr to social ideals that were ultimately shared by very few of those who surrounded him and that, at the end, were opposed by entrenched and powerful members of his own political elite. Many also insist that although Nyerere may have engaged in political repression, he acted out of benign impulses and not as a means of acquiring personal wealth or protecting a corrupt oligarchy. The crowds that gathered along the funeral route were giving silent expression to their disappointment in a generation of political leaders they perceive as lacking in Nyerere’s personal qualities.

Many Tanzanians insist that there were important differences between the ways Nyerere used his presidential powers and the ways his successors and other African heads of state have abused them. Although he held the reins of power for forty years, he did not accumulate vast personal wealth. Nor did he create a family dynasty that sought to convert the presidency into a family possession by passing the mantle of power from one generation to the next. Indeed, Nyerere’s family members and descendants have been singularly unsuccessful in translating the family name into successful pursuit of higher office. By mourning Nyerere, Tanzanians were also affirming their commitment to his belief in a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multireligious Tanzania.

Respect for Nyerere’s memory is a part of the answer to another of the political puzzles of modern Tanzania, namely, how has the CCM been able to maintain high levels of popular support despite high levels of official corruption and despite the fact that a rich and powerful oligarchy dominates the political system? As with each of Tanzania’s political puzzles, a full answer to this question is complex. A complete inventory of explanations must include such factors as the CCM’s extraordinary organizational and fund-raising advantages, which give it a prominent physical presence throughout the country. The CCM also derives popularity from its status as the lineal descendant of the nationalist movement. Owing to its control of the government, the CCM benefits from its ability to provide jobs and other patronage opportunities to countless supporters and their families. But among the many factors that account for the CCM’s popularity has been its ability to identify itself publicly as the party of Nyerere. The party’s branch offices in even the most remote outposts of Tanzania often display two presidential photographs: one, of current Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete; the other, closely alongside, of Nyerere. His image continues to provide a vital element of credibility for a governing party that has become better known for the corruption and cynicism of its top leaders.

There are traces of a generational divide in the way many Tanzanians view Nyerere. Members of the younger generation, who did not suffer the economic hardships of the socialist period and are seeking an alternative to the acquisitive individualism of the market-based economy Tanzania has pursued since the 1980s, often express admiration for Nyerere’s ideas. His emphasis on the need to succeed or fail as a nation provides a basis for criticizing the conspicuous consumption and growing inequality unleashed by the transition to a market economy. Nyerere’s philosophy also provides a basis for condemning the affluent lifestyle of the country’s political-economic oligarchy, which shows little restraint in its willingness to use political power for material gain. Older Tanzanians, on the other hand, have personal memories of the hardships and scarcities of the post-independence decades, and some remember the oppressive measures that accompanied implementation of the socialist economy. They also recall the way the Nyerere administration virtually eliminated civil society organizations they valued, such as the autonomous trade unions, the primary agricultural cooperatives and the rich array of ethnically or religiously organized welfare organizations. As a result, older Tanzanians tend to offer a mixed appraisal of their first president, citing his economic failures and an unfortunate tendency toward obstinate self-righteousness alongside his idealistic vision and personal incorruptibility.

Finally, however, personality-based explanations of complex political and economic phenomena are inadequate. In the lexicon of social science theories, those that emphasize the influence of individual actors take a distant place in explanatory power to those that emphasize such factors as social class, economic interests, or cultural norms. Nyerere’s personal influence is only the starting point but not the end point of an explanation for the key political and economic features of post-independence Tanzania.

Civil Peace in Tanzania

Much of the scholarship on modern Africa takes ethnicity as its point of departure, using ethnic identity as the major variable in explanations of social cleavage and political conflict. Whatever the merits of this approach in viewing other African countries, its applicability to Tanzania is limited. Ethnic theories of African politics do not apply in Tanzania simply because ethnicity plays such a limited role in the political process. In a continent where ethnic identity often provides an important point of entry for understanding a country’s political patterns, Tanzania presents a different reality: much of its stability derives from the low political salience of this factor. Although it is arguably as multi-ethnic and multicultural as any country on the African continent, Tanzania, with approximately 120 distinct ethnic groups, has enjoyed a tradition of ethnic peace that is the envy of many sister nations and an object of global admiration.

This is not to say that Tanzanians are unaware of their ethnic differences or that ethnic differences have not begun to assume a larger place in the country’s political life. It is to say that Tanzania differs from many other African countries in that ethnicity does not provide the principal wedge between the major parties. It does not describe the differences between the supporters of the major political parties, nor does it provide the principal basis of party identification. Furthermore, ethnic appeals do not provide the candidates who use them with an assured political following. Göran Hydén, widely regarded as the most authoritative political scientist writing on contemporary Tanzania, states:

Tanzania is especially intriguing as a case study of democratization because it is one of the few countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have erased tribalism and ethnicity as a factor in politics. Of course, people often elect representatives from their own communities, but appeals to tribal or ethnic values do not work in Tanzanian politics. Candidates have to use other grounds to demonstrate why voters should prefer them to their opponents.⁷

Tanzanians do not organize their political parties based on ethnically defined pools of supporters; they do not form their party preferences based on their perceived grievances with members of other ethnic groups. Many recoil against political leaders or political organizations that do so. Most importantly, Tanzanians do not perceive or describe their political process as one in which ethnic communities are pitted in win-lose adversarial relationships against one another.

The CCM is the best example. In Tanzania’s four multiparty elections since 1995, the CCM candidate for president has regularly received between 60 and 80 percent of the popular vote, and the CCM candidates for the National Assembly have regularly gained about 65 to 70 percent. The CCM is a genuinely national party with a support base that includes Tanzanians from all regions of the country and all ethnicities and religious groups. Much the same is true for the principal opposition party, the Party for Democracy and Progress (Chadema), which also enjoys a multi-ethnic support base. Although the CCM is more popular in some regions of the country than in others, a variation that has an obvious ethnic dimension, ethnic differences do not explain the cleavage between the CCM and the major parties that oppose it.

The tradition of ethnic peace has been foundational. It provided the enabling environment for the long and failed experiment with a statist economy and then set the stage for the country’s peaceful transition to a liberal one. The low visibility of ethnicity has meant that the political arena has been more open to a politics based on the clash of economic interests and ideas detached from ethnic identification. Tanzania, like every other country, has had winners and losers from the political process. However, Tanzanians do not identify their winners and losers in ethnic terms. Although a politico-economic oligarchy governs the country, this oligarchy is conspicuously multi-ethnic, multireligious, and multiregional in social composition. As a result, Tanzanians do not define or describe their oligarchy by using an ethnic terminology, nor do they describe the opposition parties in ethnic terms. The most basic reason is that Tanzania does not have a hegemonic ethnic group that holds a disproportionate share of the nation’s power and wealth.⁸

The atmosphere of ethnic and religious amity that the Tanzanian Government carefully constructed during the period of one-party rule has begun to come under strain during the multiparty era. It would be naïve to suggest that Tanzanian voters are indifferent to ethnicity when casting their votes. The return to multipartyism in the early 1990s brought about a more open political atmosphere and some candidates for public office have sought to take advantage by using religion or ethnicity as a basis for mobilizing electoral support.⁹ But fundamental challenges of interpretation arise. Did the emergence of the strident anti-Asian¹⁰ Democratic Party (DP) during the 1990s signal that the culture of ethnic peace had begun to fray? Or was it more significant that this party has never gained the support of more than a tiny fraction of Tanzanian voters and that most Tanzanians found its leader’s expressions of racial animosity repugnant? Similarly, is the presence of a party of Muslim identity, the Civic United Front (CUF) evidence of the decline of the cultural norms that stressed religious as well as ethnic inclusiveness?¹¹ Or is it more revealing that, in a country where Muslims may constitute a majority of the population, and where there have been serious issues of Muslim access to higher education, the higher reaches of the civil service, and the highest levels of business sector, CUF has never gained the support of more than a small fraction of Tanzanian Muslims?

The answer to these difficult questions is that any appraisal of the current state of civil peace in Tanzania requires careful nuance. The founder-leaders of the Tanzanian nation worked assiduously to create a lasting culture of ethnic, racial, and religious inclusiveness. They were largely but not entirely successful in doing so. The emergence of a more liberal economy beginning in the 1980s and the reemergence of a multiparty system in the early 1990s have placed the culture of inclusiveness under strain.¹² However, the vast majority of Tanzanians continue to be uncomfortable with parties and leaders that seek to capitalize on these sources of division, and there is a broad social preference for a political environment in which ethnic, religious, and racial divisions have low salience. As a result, the culture of civil peace remains largely intact; candidates who seek to gain electoral traction by appealing to ethnic or religious animosities do not generally succeed.

The low visibility of ethnicity in Tanzanian political affairs has its mirror image in the limited importance of ethnic identity in everyday life outside the political realm. It would be misleading to suggest that Tanzanians are unaware of one another’s ethnic backgrounds. However, it is no exaggeration to note that Tanzanians are comfortable in personal, social, and professional relationships that regularly cross ethnic lines. In their personal friendships, at their workplaces in governmental and business offices, in occupational and recreational organizations, and in the host of casual transactions that form the bulk of everyday life, Tanzanians relate to one another as if differences in ethnic identity were of limited importance. In a wide range of social settings, from the membership of the Dar es Salaam Rotary Club to the drivers in the taxi line at major hotels, the Tanzanians present will be a diverse cross section of their society.

The environment of civil peace provides the indispensable beginning for understanding aspects of contemporary Tanzania that are otherwise puzzling. It provides a compelling explanation, for example, why Tanzanians have reacted peaceably to the two greatest challenges of the post-independence period: twenty years of unremitting economic decline between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, and the all-pervasive and seemingly intractable problem of official corruption that emerged during that period and continues to exist. The great puzzle of Tanzania’s protracted economic decline was that it did not result in serious social fractures such as massive anti-government protests, clashes between supporters and opponents of the ruling party, regime instability, or regional secession. The most important basis of civil peace was that Tanzanians had not come to view their political process as one that involved domination by one ethnic group or a coalition of ethnic groups over all others. Since Tanzania does not have a hegemonic ethnic group, there has never been a sense that the political elite pursues economic policies to favor one group of ethnic supporters over others, or to distribute the positive benefits of political power and the negative effects of disempowerment unevenly across the ethnic spectrum.

Tanzania’s atmosphere of civil peace is the product of both a fortuitous inheritance and a set of public policies that the government implemented during the immediate post-independence period. The most important inherited factor has been a common language, Swahili, which is spoken by many Tanzanians as a first language and by practically all Tanzanians as a second language, thus making it possible for Tanzanians to communicate, travel, undertake commerce, and engage in political discourse across ethnic boundaries. Unlike English, which Tanzanians acquire in school as part of the educational curriculum, they acquire Swahili, even in areas where it is not the first language, simply as an aspect of growing up. Tanzania also possesses a national Swahili culture, as evidenced in the countrywide popularity of the Swahili press, Swahili poetry and literature, Swahili humor, and Swahili music.

Geographical factors have also contributed to the atmosphere of civil peace. The most important of these is that throughout the colonial period and during the early post-independence decades, Tanzania was a land-abundant society. With a land area of about 365,000 square miles and a population of just over forty-five million, Tanzania is about one-third the size of India but has only one thirtieth of its population. Vast areas are suitable for intensive agricultural production. The best known of these is the coffee-growing region on the south-facing slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro–Mt. Meru region in north-central Tanzania, an area that has also proved well suited to other high value crops. There are other regions of high value agriculture as well. The Shinyanga Region south of Lake Victoria is an area of intensive cotton cultivation; the Sumbawanga area in the southwestern part of the country is an important area of corn cultivation; and the Mtwara Region in the southeastern region of the country is an important area of cashew nut production. The wide distribution of arable lands means that members of many different ethnic groups are able to participate in high value agriculture, thereby preventing the emergence of a sense that high value agriculture is limited to only one or two fortunate communities.

Land abundance has been critically important. With an independence-era population of just over ten million, distributed over an area that contained many regions with good quality agricultural land, there were no land pressures that caused ethnic groups to compete for this resource. As recently as the 1990s, despite a fourfold population increase since independence, from ten million to nearly forty million, developmentally oriented geographers continued to suggest that Tanzania possessed unsettled areas of agriculturally suitable land.¹³ Although the quality of this land and therefore its suitability for high versus medium value crops varied from one region to the next, Tanzanians did not experience a land environment in which the land needs of one community could only prevail at the expense of others. Although Tanzania today has begun to experience incidents of competition for land, as when agricultural populations begin to encroach on areas that have been the traditional grazing habitat for migratory pastoralists, such problems are still relatively rare.

The regional distribution of the population also contributed to the atmosphere of civil peace. Most of Tanzania’s best land areas are located near the perimeters, along its border with neighboring countries, and not near Dar es Salaam. The dispersed location of quality lands has resulted in a doughnut-shaped population distribution, with significant concentrations near the borders of Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Mozambique and significantly less population density in the center of the country. The ethnic groups that have enjoyed agriculturally based development are at a physical remove from the capital, and this has made it difficult for them to translate their agricultural advantages into commensurate political advantages.

In contrast to numerous African capital cities, Dar es Salaam arose and developed as a multicultural city. It had its earliest beginnings as a commercial center rooted in the Indian Ocean trade in ivory and human beings. Unlike Nairobi, for example, Dar es Salaam is not located in the center of the most fertile agricultural area, and the ethnic group that occupies the region, the Zaramo, has not had the insurmountable double advantage of agrarian prosperity combined with close physical proximity to political power. The slave caravans that fanned out from Dar es Salaam captured their victims from a variety of regions throughout eastern Africa, and some remained behind as a work force in Dar es Salaam and other coastal cities. Over many centuries, Dar es Salaam became a place of residence where Tanzanians of a wide mixture of ethnic groups worked and made their homes. Sociologist Deborah Bryceson has used the term creolization to call attention to its rich mixture of the country’s many cultures and languages. Individual neighborhoods may have ethnic characteristics but no ethnic group dominates the city’s economic, political, or cultural life.¹⁴

Distinctive aspects of Tanzania’s colonial experience further contributed to the low salience of ethnicity. The first thirty years or more of Tanganyika’s colonial experience, from 1885 to 1918, took place under German rule. Unlike the British, who emphasized the importance of traditional authorities as the basic administrative units of colonial government, a practice that hardened ethnic identities, German colonial practice emphasized direct forms of administration that suppressed traditional institutions and cultures. German officials tended to disregard indigenous institutions, which they treated with a mixture of indifference and contempt. They preferred instead to govern through a system of centrally recruited administrators called akidas, whom they then deployed to localities with which they did not have any cultural commonalities. The akida system diffused Swahili throughout Tanzania, since local communities could only communicate with their appointed akidas through a commonly spoken language. It also perfectly exemplified the German refusal to acknowledge or incorporate local forms of organization.¹⁵

By the time Britain assumed colonial jurisdiction over Tanganyika in 1918 through the League of Nations Mandate system, local forms of institutional authority had been so thoroughly squelched that it was often necessary to create these anew before implementing indirect methods of colonial administration. Britain’s determination to administer Tanzania through the indirect rule system made it necessary to ascribe political identity and impose political organization on language communities that did not have a history of political solidarity. Aili Mari Tripp has shown that a number of Tanzania’s largest ethnic groups are of relatively recent colonial creation. Far from having deep historic roots, numerous ethnic groups in Tanzania are the products of Britain’s twentieth-century application of the indirect rule system.¹⁶

Tanzania’s status as a ward of the international community from the end of World War I until its independence in 1961 also contributed to ethnic peace. At the end of the war, Tanganyika became a League of Nations Mandate and after World War II it became a United Nations Trusteeship Territory. International supervision caused British colonial rule in Tanganyika to be less severe than that in most other colonial territories. First, it introduced the assumption of an eventual but timely transition toward national independence. The League of Nations did not permit Britain to develop Tanganyika as a permanent settler colony as it had done in Kenya and Rhodesia. Absent a significant settler presence, Tanzania’s abundant supply of arable land remained in African hands: land alienation did not foster a problem of land scarcity that pitted one ethnic group against another in a life or death struggle over a scarce resource.¹⁷ International supervision also meant that the British government had to treat emerging African nationalist organizations with greater restraint than it showed elsewhere. Britain was less able to employ ethnically based tactics of divide and rule by creating political alliances with favored groups to maintain better control over others. As nationalism in Tanganyika began to take full shape in the late 1950s, it was not riven by internal strains between ethnic communities that felt differently about how they had been treated by colonial administration.

To preserve and build on this inheritance, Nyerere and the TANU government began to implement a set of policies intended to create a cultural climate in which Tanzanians would not organize their political organizations based on separate ethnic identities. The first step was to ban racially or religiously based schools and hospitals. These had to become public institutions open to Tanzanians of all races and religions. In the effort to create a non-ethnic social culture, the government gave its highest priority to educational policy. It changed most of the country’s high schools into boarding schools so that students from diverse regions of the country would live and study together. The government undertook similar efforts with respect to teachers and principals. The goal of educational policy was for each high school to become a microcosm of the nation, where a community of ethnically diverse students would study, play, live, and work together, alongside an equally mixed educational staff.

Following their high school education, Tanzanian students were obliged to participate in a National Service program that continued the process of mingling students of different ethnic groups in common projects in which they worked together building schools, improving roads, and constructing community buildings. Young Tanzanians who joined the military and became members of the Tanzanian People’s Defense Force (TPDF) became absorbed in a non-ethnic environment in which military units comprised soldiers from all regions of the country. Countless older Tanzanians remember their high school and National Service experience as a time when they formed friendships across cultural lines, played together on multicultural sports teams, and participated in multicultural musical and dramatic activities.

Many of the factors that initially gave rise to Tanzania’s atmosphere of civil peace have long since disappeared. German colonialism in Tanganyika ended almost a century ago. The benign effects of international supervision ended with independence, more than fifty years ago. As Tanzania’s economy declined, financial pressures necessarily constrained the scope and scale of the government’s efforts to mingle students of various ethnicities together at the secondary school level. Budgetary constraints gradually made it impossible to move students across different regions of the country, much less to support them in a boarding school environment. To the extent that sparse population helped ameliorate the ethnic tensions that might have arisen from competition over scarce land resources that factor, too, is outdated. Tanzania’s population has more than quadrupled since independence, from about ten million to more than forty-five million people, and population pressures in some areas have begun to trigger scattered incidents of conflict over land between pastoral and agricultural communities, a division that corresponds to an ethnic cleavage. Although the Tanzanian constitution and electoral laws continue to proscribe ethnically based appeals, the freer political atmosphere that has attended the rebirth of multipartyism has opened a wider political space for ethnic expressions. The new political environment has reduced the government’s ability to maintain tight controls over political discourse, including appeals to ethnicity. Perhaps the most consequential change has been the death of Nyerere himself and the loss of the moral force he brought to the idea of a non-ethnic culture for his country.

Why, then, has ethnicity not asserted itself with greater force in Tanzania? A theory of cultural pluralism that emphasizes the importance of inequalities between different ethnic groups provides one answer. Colonial historian John S. Furnivall first developed the idea that ethnicity was a volatile political factor in socioeconomic environments where differing ethnic groups had differing amounts of access to the upper levels of a society, such as the highest positions in government and administration or the business sector.¹⁸ Later cultural pluralists termed this phenomenon “differential incorporation,” a concept that called attention to ethnic frictions that arise when a country’s patterns of economic, social, and political stratification display distinctively ethnic characteristics. Later cultural pluralists also believed that the volatility of stratification along ethnic lines derived from the tendency for people to perceive this form of inequality as relatively permanent.¹⁹

Colonial Tanzania exhibited one important element of this phenomenon. Members of Tanzania’s Asian community—persons of Indo-Pakistani descent—tended to be concentrated at the middle or upper levels of the Tanzanian social structure. They were prominent in Tanzania’s mercantile sector as the owners of the business enterprises that conducted much of the country’s retail trade. During the colonial period, Asians were also a conspicuous presence in Tanzania’s white-collar professions, in the middle levels of the civil service, and in the clerical and managerial levels of major private sector organizations, such as the country’s largest banks, insurance companies, and trading firms. The Asian presence as a predominant middle class seemed to represent a significant barrier to African upward mobility both in the public sector and in the middle levels of these private sector institutions, a goal that was at the heart of the Tanzanian nationalist movement.

At the time of independence, the prominent Asian presence in the middle class gave rise to an intense debate among nationalists over whether their post-independence government should pursue an indigenization policy that would privilege Tanzanians of indigenous descent over those whose family backgrounds traced to different continents.²⁰ Within TANU, Nyerere favored a nonracial policy. A small number of party members favoring a policy of indigenization, however, split off and formed an opposition called the African National Congress (ANC). Nyerere and the nonracialists won the debate between the two groups, ensuring that the government would not use its powers to create preferred social categories based on ethnicity or race.

The success of this policy is at the heart of modern Tanzanian politics. It helps explain why Tanzanians were prepared to accept the failed economic policies the Nyerere Government implemented along with the conjoined problems of repression and corruption. Tanzanians never perceived the Nyerere government’s economic policies as an attempt to confer benefits on favored groups while depriving others. This also explains why Tanzanians have not reacted with greater vehemence to their country’s all-pervasive and seemingly intractable problem of official corruption. Although Tanzanians abhor corruption, they do not perceive it as a pattern of economic transfers that moves wealth from ethnic have-nots to ethnic haves.

The limitations of an ethnically based approach to Tanzanian politics call attention to the need for a different way to understand the country’s post-independence trajectory. Political economy provides it. Regarding the relationship between ethnicity and politics, Tanzania has little in common with other independent African countries. Regarding its post-independence economic trajectory, however, it has almost everything in common.

Political Economy and Tanzanian Development

In the field of political economy, Tanzania attracts attention because of the extended process of economic decline that began immediately after independence and continued for nearly twenty-five years, until the beginning of economic reforms in the mid-1980s. Tanzania’s post-independence policies failed in many respects. The socialist strategy of economic development did not lead to growth; it did not narrow the gap between the country’s urban middle class and the vast majority of the rural poor. It did not prevent the emergence of a privileged political-economic elite. The principal reason for Tanzania’s economic decline lay in its poor choice of economic policies during the post-independence period. This much is unsurprising: poor policies produce poor results. What remains is the need to answer Robert Bates’s enduring question: “Why should reasonable men adopt policies that have harmful consequences for the societies they govern?”²¹ The answer is that Tanzania’s choice of policies derived from a set of ideas about economic development that prevailed throughout the developing world during the generation following World War II. The ideas that had the greatest influence in Tanzania were those of the sub-field of economics its practitioners termed development economics.

Post-independence Tanzania had two distinct economic philosophies, each important in its own way. The first was the socialist humanism of Julius Nyerere, a set of convictions that grew out of his long interest in the mild socialism of the British Fabian society. Nyerere’s ideas attracted global admiration and captured the attention of the Tanzanian people. Because they set forth the normative objectives of Tanzanian development, they attracted the respectful support of his fellow leaders as well as the admiration of students, scholars, and international organizations everywhere. The second set of ideas consisted of the analysis of the development economists. This intellectual framework consisted of a large body of scientific research about how developing countries with agriculturally based economies could best attain rapid economic growth. Although these ideas were less accessible than Nyerere’s because of their arcane terminology and daunting mathematics, they had a great influence on the government’s day-to-day decisions about development policy.

The core of development economics was simple and compelling. The development economists believed that industry, not agriculture, offered the greatest prospect of rapid economic growth. Governments that wanted to attain economic growth should therefore find ways to launch industrial development. The fundamental challenge was how to go about doing so. Their answer was to create a set of infant industries that, until they could stand on their own, would require protection from competition by global industrial giants. The immediate practical question was how to finance these industries. The development economists’ answer was that these industries would require financial support from a variety of sources. One would be foreign public investment, through aid programs that would provide resources for infrastructure and improved public services. The second would be foreign private investment from corporations anxious to do business in a protected environment. The third would be the governments themselves, which would need to impose taxes on the agricultural sector to gain the revenues necessary to provide domestic capital for investment in the new industries. The vast majority of the world’s developing countries adopted this strategy, Tanzania among them.

The development economists believed that their strategy for economic growth would enable developing countries such as Tanzania to transform themselves, within a short period from low-performing agricultural economies to higher-performing ones based on an expanding industrial base. The name they assigned to this strategy was import-substituting industrialization (ISI), and this approach prevailed in regions of the world as diverse as Latin America and South and Southeast Asia as well as in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Although Tanzania gained global acclaim because of the idealistic approach of the founder-president, its development policies during the decades following independence were closer to the framework prescribed by the development economists. The president’s ideas stressed rural development through communal self-help at the local level as a means of improving the socioeconomic conditions of the poorest Tanzanians, the small farmers. In reality, the framework Nyerere’s government adopted imposed higher and higher levels of taxation on smallholder farmers to extract the revenues that provided capital and other subsidies for urban industries. Urban Tanzanians, including industrial workers, technocrats, managers, and economic planners, were the winners; small farmers were the losers. There is no great mystery about why the Tanzanian government adopted this strategy: it was acting the same way as countless other governments throughout Africa and other developing regions.

The ISI model derived influence from the scholarly prestige of the development economists as well as from the contagion effect. The development economists’ ideas gained additional influence from their prominence in the economics curricula of many of the most prestigious universities in North America and Europe. Students from the developing world were routinely channeled into courses on development economics so that they could better assist with the development of their countries. In addition, the ISI intellectual and strategic framework was operative throughout the major development institutions, such as the World Bank and numerous bilateral aid organizations. The influence of the development economists was so great that very few developing countries sought to give a higher priority to agricultural development than to industry. One of the most powerful sources of attraction was the belief that ISI offered a shortened path to industrial prosperity. Western history had taught that an industrial revolution might take several centuries to accomplish and that it would only come about with a high cost in social misery. The development economists sought to demonstrate that their strategy could shorten the timetable of industrialization to a generation or less, and at a far lower human cost.

The intellectual dominance of development economics explains why Tanzanian leaders adopted the ISI approach, but it does not explain why they kept it in place as long as they did, long after its harmful economic effects had become painfully visible. One reason is the absence of a compelling theoretical alternative. In its approach to developing countries, the economics profession did not begin to undergo a major paradigmatic shift until the mid- to late 1970s, some fifteen to twenty years after ISI had been firmly set in place in countries such as Tanzania. The World Bank did not produce an alternative formula for sub-Saharan Africa until the early 1980s, with the publication of its famous report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa.²² That report combined an analysis of the shortcomings of the ISI strategy as it had been applied in Africa and offered in its place an alternative, market-based strategy that emphasized free trade. Even then, its recommendations required several years to become the basis for specific policy recommendations by on-site donor organizations.

The principal reason for the persistence of economically harmful policies, however, was political. A downward economic spiral does not affect all social strata equally, and the political elites of many developing countries were able to insulate themselves from the environment of economic hardship. The economic interest of a country’s political elite is not the same as the social interest of the country as a whole. Tanzania was no exception. Members of the elite were able to enjoy a material lifestyle that contrasted dramatically with the hardships that affected the majority of the population. Through a combination of rent-seeking behavior and legitimate perquisites of power, such as generous fringe benefits and special allowances, members of the Tanzanian elite lived very well. This is the paradox of development first cited by Jonathan Barker in his important early article on Senegal.²³ Barker’s paradox points out that reform often depends on the initiative of a class of political leaders whose self-interest lies in a continuation of the existing system, which provides the basis for their wealth and power. This paradox defines the most challenging questions arising from Tanzania’s process of economic reform: not why it began so slowly but why it began at all and why, when it did, it resulted in a successful transition to a market-based economic system.

The following chapters attempt to show that Tanzania’s program of stateled development fostered the emergence of a powerful and entrenched governing elite. The failure of its economic experiment in socialist development gave rise to the emergence of a larger and larger parallel economy, which grew in the vacuum created by the failures of the official economy. As the state industries and bureaucratic agencies that had responsibility for providing essential goods and services failed in their assigned tasks, the parallel economy began to assume this responsibility. By the time Tanzania began its official reform program, in mid-summer 1986, the parallel sector had attained such large proportions that it was almost as large as the country’s official economy and, by some estimates, even larger. Vast numbers of Tanzanians earned a sizable portion of their income in the parallel economy from which they obtained the goods and services they needed.²⁴ Economic liberalization in Tanzania was not a matter of creating a market economy where none existed. It merely involved setting aside the remnants of an official state economy that most Tanzanians had come to view as an impediment to their most promising economic activities.

The distinctive feature of Tanzania’s parallel economy was the involvement of large numbers of public officials. This was Tanzania’s answer to Barker’s paradox. On the eve of economic reform, many members of the governing elite that presided over a socialist state had become private sector actors in the parallel economy. The economic strategy they adopted is commonly referred to as straddling, a term that describes the tendency of families to diversify their portfolio of activities to cope with conditions of stress. Tanzanians in all occupations sought income wherever they could obtain it. For many public officials, this meant finding ways to supplement their increasingly inadequate official salaries by undertaking private economic pursuits. Many civil servants had small gardens or small farms from which they sold food stuffs. Others raised chickens or goats for sale in the parallel marketplace. Some were more brazen and used their official vehicles as taxis or trucks to provide transportation services. Still others operated small business enterprises producing shoes, furniture, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, clothing, cooking utensils, farm implements, and a host of other goods increasingly unavailable in the official marketplace. Before long, many public officials derived a larger share of their income from their side businesses than from their government salaries, whose purchasing power had shrunk due to the fall in the value of the Tanzanian shilling.

Economic straddling meant that, on the eve of policy reform, many Tanzanians had a blend of economic identities. Some of Tanzania’s most successful entrepreneurs began as public officials, deriving some of their start-up capital and an element of political security from their governmental positions. The parallel economy, however, had important limitations, especially regarding the scale of a family’s informal sector activities. It might be possible to operate a small business selling food items, chickens, or goat meat, but it would be impossible to expand those activities to take over an entire brewery, textile mill, or cigarette factory so long as those enterprises were still official state monopolies. Eliminating the state economy with its numerous monopolistic but unproductive firms represented a pathway for greater wealth, not a constraint. This was the great secret to the success of Tanzania’s liberal reforms. Much of the social pressure that drove privatization came from state officials whose positions in the government afforded them special advantages in the early privatization process.

Corruption played a major role in all these transformations. It originated in the declining purchasing power of public sector salaries and set down its roots in the countless opportunities for bribes afforded by the country’s all-pervasive system of state regulations and controls. Corruption began as an income supplement for hard-pressed public officials seeking to maintain or augment their real incomes. Over time, however, it morphed into something with far greater long-term economic consequences: it became a source of investment capital in the rapidly growing parallel sector, which had arisen in response to the scarcities of goods in official markets. Before long, public officials had become some of the country’s most active participants in the informal marketplace. They were active in all aspects of the private economy: as producers; as providers of services, such as transportation; and as sources of capital investment. Public officials had certain special advantages in becoming entrepreneurs. They had the windfall income of funds afforded by corruption and the advantage of de facto immunity from prosecution provided by their official status. There was a sort of income dynamic: government salaries provided a smaller and smaller share of their income, and the income derived from corruption and investments in parallel market businesses became a larger and larger share of what they earned.

Corruption was Tanzania’s form of early capital accumulation. Although the decreasing purchasing power of public sector salaries was a major reason government officials turned to corruption, there were other factors as well. These included a governing party leadership code that forbade party members serving the government from earning second incomes and constraints on the banking system that increasingly forced the commercial banks to lend almost exclusively to state-owned enterprises. Corruption became a major source of investible wealth. Almost imperceptibly, vast numbers of Tanzanian officials underwent a socioeconomic transformation from government employee to petty capitalist.

No other factor provides as powerful an explanation of the alacrity with which the Tanzanian elite accepted the country’s rapid transition to a market economy during the 1980s. By that time, a sizable proportion of Tanzania’s political elite had become actively engaged in the country’s market economy. For many, their government positions were a mere adjunct to private sector activity. Some could use state-provided benefits, such as government houses and cars, as assets in their private sector activity. For many, a position in the government provided preferred access to foreign exchange, an especially valuable asset in an environment where hard currency was in extremely short supply. For others, it meant the ability to use state authority to leverage a covert partnership with an established private sector enterprise.

For the more successful members of Tanzania’s new class of venture capitalists, the survival of the state economic sector, however encircled by the ubiquitous expansion of gray markets, became a limitation on their entrepreneurial activities. So long as the state was still the official owner of the country’s major industrial firms as well as major services, such as hotels and bus companies, Tanzanian entrepreneurs were unable to invest their capital in these areas. This changed dramatically when the World Bank and other donors began to insist that the government of Tanzania divest itself of ownership in its publicly held enterprises. At that point, the newly forming class of private entrepreneurs had a direct stake in timely implementation of the Bank’s recommendation. When the divestiture process began in the early 1990s, the highest-ranking officials could position themselves and their family members, through various partnerships, to acquire an ownership share at bargain prices.

Tanzanians have long been aware of the problem of official corruption, and it has been the topic of practically daily reporting in the country’s news media as well as the subject of an endless series of government investigations, reports, and studies. It has formed the basis of a widely publicized dialogue between the government of Tanzania and its principal donor organizations. Some of the most prominent agencies of the Tanzanian bureaucracy, such as the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB), are devoted to addressing this problem. Perhaps more important, ordinary Tanzanians experience corruption as a fact of daily life in the form of side payments to government officials for practically every bureaucratic transaction.²⁵ Corruption has been an important cause of the government’s willingness to use repression against its political opposition. Since corrupt gains constitute a major source of wealth for members of the political-economic oligarchy, it raises the stakes of losing political office, thereby encouraging the use of repressive measures to remain in power.

The overriding question is why Tanzania has a politico-economic oligarchy. The blunt answer is that twenty years of a state-based economic strategy that depended upon coercive mechanisms of implementation foreclosed the possibility of Tanzanians developing independent bases of wealth or status outside the jurisdiction of the state. Tanzania’s oligarchy arose within the state apparatus, which continues to provide it with its major source of investible wealth. Tanzanians who have risen to positions of wealth in Tanzania have done so through their connections to the political process. Much of the wealth of the oligarchy especially that derived from corruption continues to be dependent on their ability to exercise influence within the state apparatus. Wealth and power in Tanzania are so inextricably interconnected that it is impossible to have one without the other.

The politico-economic oligarchy is dependent on the state to suppress opposition leaders and parties. The police and security forces of Tanzania routinely harass the leaders and supporters of opposition parties, sometimes violently. The U.S. Department of State has painted a bleak picture of the human rights environment in Tanzania. In a 2010 report, it listed the following abuses:

use of excessive force by military personnel, police and prison guards as well as societal violence, which resulted in deaths and injuries; abuses by Sungosungo, traditional citizens anticrime units; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; lengthy pretrial detention; judicial corruption and inefficiency, particularly in the lower courts; restrictions on freedoms of press and assembly; restrictions on the movement of refugees; official corruption and impunity; societal violence against women and persons with albinism … and discrimination based on sexual orientation.²⁶

The government’s willingness to use its police and security forces to repress opposition activities is a reminder that the Tanzanian oligarchy has a fundamental stake in holding onto public office. It has shown that it is prepared to go to great lengths to do so.

The political alignment that has driven Tanzanian economic policy during most of the past twenty-five years has been a coalition of the political-economic oligarchy acting in concert with donor organizations. The linked processes of economic reform and democratic transition have been accompanied by frustration and misunderstanding on both sides. Much of the frustration misses the point altogether, which is that Tanzania has now become a society in which there are all-too-familiar disparities in wealth between those few Tanzanians who are members of the oligarchy and those who are not.