Julius K. Nyerere: No Regrets At Socialism

October 24, 1990

Julius K. Nyerere, who led Tanzania for the first-quarter century of its existence as an independent state, struck an unapologetic note as he said he had no regrets, despite the ramshackle condition in which he leaves his country.

Julius K. Nyerere, the former President of Tanzania, says he has no regrets about his policies.

“If I had my time over again, I would do it much the same way,” said the 68-year-old founding father who is called Mwalimu — Swahili for the teacher — by Tanzanians. He made his comments in an interview while on a recent visit to the United Nations.
A thin, gray-haired man with a ready laugh, Mr. Nyerere has given up his last official position, stepping down in August as chairman of Tanzania’s single, ruling party. Five years earlier, he became one of the handful of African leaders to leave office voluntarily, resigning as President, a post he held since 1962, a year after independence from Britain.
In the years that followed, Mr. Nyerere came to be revered throughout Africa as a nationalist who, along with men like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast and Kenneth D. Kaunda of Zambia, brought an end to colonial rule. They served as the first generation of leaders of independent Africa. Pulling Together
He was also a social engineer who brought his own vision of “African socialism” — he called it “ujamaa,” or pulling together — to his country.
Peasants were regrouped into collective villages; factories and plantations were nationalized; state-run corporations were established; egalitarianism was encouraged; great investments were made in literacy, the accumulation of private wealth was discouraged.
At first, many Western aid donors, particularly in Scandinavia, gave enthusiastic backing to this socialist experiment, pouring an estimated $10 billion into Tanzania over 20 years.
Yet today, as Mr. Nyerere leaves the stage, the country’s largely agricultural economy is in ruins, with its 26 million people eking out their living on a per-capita income of slightly more than $200 a year, one of the lowest in the world.
The World Bank reports that Tanzania’s economy contracted on average by 0.5 percent a year between 1965 and 1988. It notes a 43 percent decline in average personal consumption since 1973 and reports that “food purchases have moved away from meat, dairy products and vegetables toward cheap starches and beans.” A Number of Achievements
To be sure, despite the economic decline, Tanzania can claim some achievements, the work of its gentle and charismatic former leader, an admirer of Rousseau and an intellectual who loved to translate Shakespeare into Swahili.
The country enjoys one of the highest rates of literacy and primary-school enrollment on the continent. It has avoided the civil wars and tribal conflict that plague many other countries. “Tanzanians have more sense of national identity than many other Africans,” Mr. Nyerere said.
But while the former President admits some errors, he argues that his inability to translate a relatively educated populace and a stable society into tangible economic progress is largely the fault of an unsympathetic industrial world.
“What would I have changed if I had my time over again?” he mused. “Not much.”
Mr. Nyerere said socialism did allow the Tanzanian economy to develop in the 1960′s and 70′s. “There was growth and wealth distribution,” he said, and statistics generally support this view.
What knocked Tanzania off course, he said, was “the hostile international environment” of the 1970′s and 80′s, including rising oil prices that “absorbed 60 percent of foreign exchange earnings” and falling revenues from the sale of sisal hemp and coffee, major Tanzanian exports.
Sisal, once the raw material of ropes and mats, was increasingly replaced by synthetics, and the international commodity price of coffee plummeted.
“We used to sell our coffee in London for $:3,000 a ton, now we get $:600,” he said. “How do you fight that?”
Mr. Nyerere rails against the austerity programs that the West is imposing on developing countries these days through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in exchange for loans. As budget deficits are cut in an effort to reduce inflation, he complains that social progress is being reversed and poverty increased as the promised speed-up in economic growth fails to materialize. Not Just in Tanzania
Many of Tanzania’s problems are widespread in Africa, where living standards have fallen for a decade. But some countries, like Kenya or the Ivory Coast, partly bucked the trend with the free-enterprise approach that Mr. Nyerere rejects.
Even this was insufficent to shield them from the pervasive recession on the continent. And today, Mr. Nyerere almost gloats at their discomfort. “Houphouet-Boigny is really bitter with the West,” he said. “He feels capitalism has betrayed him.”
Mr. Nyerere’s sucessor as President, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, signed an agreemeent with the International Monetary Fund, something that Mr. Nyerere could not bring himself to do, and in 1987 began an Economic Recovery Program that is slowly reversing many of Mr. Nyerere’s cherished achievements. Government spending is being cut, the Tanzanian shilling devalued, price controls lifted and foreign investment encouraged. Modest growth has resumed.
Mr. Nyerere remains skeptical. “We’re not earning any more foreign exchange with the World Bank and the I.M.F. running the economy,” he said. “In my day, inflation was 28-30 percent a year. Now it’s 22 percent. I don’t see much success.
“They keep saying you’ve failed. But what’s wrong with urging people to pull together? Did Christianity fail because the world isn’t all Christian?”

President Kikwete: “I Can Turn Tanzania Into Heaven”

Tanzania’s president is waging a war on hunger — and while he’s at it, he wants to modernize his East African nation’s agricultural sector to lift millions of his countrymen out of poverty.
But Jakaya Kikwete’s biggest constraint is a lack of resources.
“If somebody says, ‘What is your wish?’ I’d say, ‘If I got a billion dollars a month in terms of government revenue, I can turn Tanzania into heaven,’” Mr. Kikwete told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview.
He doesn’t have that luxury, so he has turned to the international community for help.

For Jakaya Kikwete, the president of Tanzania, money to advance Africa's agriculture is essential for his and many other African nations. "If we can succeed, we will lift millions and millions of people out of poverty very quickly," he says. (Barbara L. Salisbury/The Washington Times)

Mr. Kikwete, 61, was one of four African leaders invited to attend a summit of the Group of Eight industrialized nations at Camp David last week. The other three were from Ghana, Ethiopia and Benin.
“The overriding message that we brought here is: Assist Africa. Transform its agriculture,” Mr. Kikwete said. “We underscored the fact that indeed there is cause for concern for food security and nutrition security in Africa.”
Africa accounts for about 236 million hungry people, more than one-fourth of the world’s total, according to U.N. statistics.
In Tanzania, malnutrition is the cause of high rates of infant and maternal mortality, and stunted, anemic children.
“There is a problem, and a serious one, that needs a solution,” Mr. Kikwete said.
“And the solution to problems of hunger and nutrition first and foremost is to ensure food security,” he said. “How do you ensure food security and nutrition security? You deal with the agriculture question.”
Between 70 percent and 80 percent of Tanzania’s population lives in rural areas. Agriculture is their mainstay.
Agricultural practices are untouched by modernity. Farmers still use handheld hoes to till the land, are overly dependent on rain to irrigate crops, sow low-yield seeds, and don’t use adequate amounts of fertilizer and pesticides.
Tough neighborhood
“Unfortunately, our agriculture in Africa is characterized by backwardness,” Mr. Kikwete said. “We are not producing enough to meet our own food requirements … and our people are not producing enough to overcome poverty.”
In Tanzania, the challenge is “little application of modern science and technology in agriculture,” he added.
Increasing productivity of Africa’s farms not only would reduce the levels of hunger and malnutrition, it also would increase incomes.
Tanzania is 95 percent food self-sufficient, but it is located in a difficult place.
“Our biggest problem in the country is the neighborhood,” Mr. Kikwete said.
To its north, Kenya has endured three to four years of drought that has forced it to look to Tanzania for food. Parts of Somalia are in the grip of a famine, while South Sudan faces significant food shortages.
The high demand has strained Tanzania’s food supply and pushed domestic prices sky high.
Mr. Kikwete sees in this challenge an opportunity. He has instructed the Ministry of Agriculture to increase production of food, particularly corn and rice, to have enough to feed Tanzanians, as well as export.
His government set up the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania in a part of the country that gets the most rain and has ideal soil and climate conditions. If all goes according to plan, the corridor will create 420,000 jobs and produce an annual income of $1.2 billion.
“If we can succeed, we will lift millions and millions of people out of poverty very quickly,” Mr. Kikwete said.
Agriculture is not high on the list of priorities for most international donors. Two decades ago, they gave $18 billion to Africa for the agriculture sector. That dropped to $3 billion three years ago, and has crept up to about $6 billion today.
Tanzania has turned to the private sector to supplement the international community’s contributions.
The G-8 announced over the weekend a “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition” to accelerate the flow of private capital to African agriculture.
President Obama separately announced that 45 private-sector companies had committed to invest more than $3 billion in agricultural projects and programs that will help millions of small-scale farmers in Africa.
Tanzania has received $698 million from the Millennium Challenge Corp., an independent U.S. foreign-aid agency that helps lead the fight against global poverty. That five-year grant ends next year.
Mr. Kikwete is eager to get a U.S. commitment for a second phase.
International largesse
Under the first phase, roads were built, villages were electrified and water was supplied to two major cities, Morogoro and the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam.
In the second phase, Mr. Kikwete wants to keep the focus on rural electrification and water supply.
“We have expressed the wish, and they have expressed readiness to talk, so let’s see what comes out of the discussions,” he said.
“We are seeing the American side be responsive,” he added.
Daniel Yohannes, CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corp. (MCC), has high praise for the way Tanzania handled the first phase of this grant.
“President Kikwete has been instrumental to the success of Tanzania’s MCC compact,” Mr. Yohannes said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last week.
Despite such praise, Mr. Kikwete knows that the state of the global economy will determine how much money international donors will be willing to offer.
“We accept the reality that we will not get much, and already aid has declined, but we think we may not lose everything,” he said. “We don’t see signs on the part of the U.S. government to abandon the poor.”
Mr. Obama has said the U.S. will keep its commitments to end world hunger.
Tanzania has reason to be optimistic about its future: Large reserves of oil and natural gas were discovered recently.
Mr. Kikwete is determined not to let this potential resource windfall become a liability, as it has done for many other African nations.
“We know in … a number of countries in Africa, these resources … have turned into a curse instead of being something useful,” he said.
“We will try as much as we can to learn from what has gone wrong with some of our friends, and let’s see if we can do better,” he said. “I am hopeful that we will.”