As Tanzania celebrates the 50th anniversary of its independence, LSE’s Dr Elliott Green looks at why the East African country has not achieved economic success in tandem with political stability

Green, Elliott D.

LSE Research Online

21.12.2011Tanzania at 50: Does Nyerere deserve the blame and praise forthe country’s economic failure and political successblogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2011/12/21/tanzania-at-50-does-nyerere-deserve-the-blame-and-praise-for-the-countrys-economic-failure-and-political-success/As Tanzania celebrates the 50th anniversary of its independence, LSE’s Dr Elliott Green looks at why the EastAfrican country has not achieved economic success in tandem with political stability.Fifty years ago this month the country of Tanganyika became independent from the UK under the leadership ofPrime Minister Julius Nyerere, who would become its first President a year later when it became a republic. Therepublic was later subsumed into the state of Tanzania when it merged with Zanzibar in 1964.Nyerere (left) with another independence leader, Kwame NkrumahAlong with similar commemorations elsewhere in Africa, the 50th anniversary celebrations in Dar es Salaam andelsewhere have been met by mixed responses. An article in The Citizen, Tanzania’s biggest English-languagedaily newspaper, was typical in asking why the country remains so poor and ordinary citizens’ ‘dreams andhopes were shattered to smithereens.’Indeed, poverty reduction and general human development in Tanzania has been slow since the late 1970s,even relative to other African countries. For example, its Human Development Index ranking has dropped fromthe 74th percentile (96th out of 130 states) in 1990 to the 81st percentile today (152nd out of 187 states),allowing such countries as Bangladesh, Ghana and Namibia to surpass Tanzania.Tanzania’s lack of economic success has not, however, overshadowed the country’s political successes, namelyits remarkable ability to avoid any of the violent political strife that has affected most of its neighbours. Tanzaniawent from a multi-party democracy to a one-party state and then back again with very little controversy, in partbecause its citizens kept electing leaders from the ruling TANU (now CCM) political party.Despite continuing problems with corruption, Tanzania has nonetheless also avoided the tumultuous ethnicpolitics of most African states (except in Zanzibar). The strong nature of Tanzanian national identity is in factlegendary within Africa: when asked by the Afrobarometer survey whether they identified more with their nationalor ethnic identity, 88% of Tanzanian respondents chose the former, compared to a continent average of 42% andonly 17% in Nigeria .So why has the country been such an economic failure but a political success? Many commentators have1/2attributed both outcomes to Nyerere’s leadership. On the one hand, his efforts at ‘African socialism’ led him toforce peasants into ujamaa (Swahili for ‘familyhood’) villages in the 1970s, which subsequently led to a decline inagricultural production as the state failed to ‘capture’ the peasantry in Goran Hyden’s famous phrase. (Thisperiod is covered well in Chapter 7 of James Scott’s famous book, Seeing Like a State.)On the other hand, however, Nyerere was adept at creating a sense of national identity by making Swahili theofficial language of government, moving the capital from Dar es Salaam to the more central location of Dodoma,and ending the policy of collecting data on ethnic identity in state censuses. In particular, education policyfocussed on teaching nationalism to the youth: in a 1973 form 6 exam which I viewed in the National Library inDar es Salaam, one typical question was, “discipline is a prerequisite of nation building. Comment on this withrespect to Tanzania at present.”Personally I believe that Nyerere receives more blame and praise than he deserves for Tanzania’s current state.(Read more of my thoughts on the subject) As regards economics, Nyerere’s villagisation policies were in largepart a response to the dispersion of citizens in rural Tanzania, often far away from transportation centres andports. It is thus not an accident that other African governments in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Rwanda adoptedsimilar rural policies more recently.Similarly, none of Nyerere’s nation-building policies were unique – those who praise his focus on Swahili as anational language tend to neglect similar efforts in Ethiopia, where Emperor Hailie Selassie declared Amharic asthe national language, or in Somalia, where Siad Barre’s government standardised the Somali script and made itthe sole national language. Needless to say, a single national language did not prevent political fragmentationand civil wars in Ethiopia and Somalia.In the end, Tanzania’s post-colonial successes and failures, as with many other examples in Africa, are less thelegacy of one leader than they are of deeper structural issues. Arguably the reason why Tanzanian nation-building was more successful was due to a lack of inter-regional inequalities.More controversially, it is possible that the lack of industrialisation and economic development more generally isin part responsible for low levels of regional inequality. In other words, Tanzania’s economic failures and politicalsuccesses are tightly linked to each other, in many ways just like economic success and political failure havelong been linked in Côte d’Ivoire.Thus any attempt to summarise the past 50 years of Tanzanian development must come to terms with both itseconomic and political developments, and commemorations should focus less on the influence of Nyerere or anyother one particular leader and more on the broader issues confronted by Nyerere and others in their efforts atpromoting development.2/2

Tanzania at 50: does Nyerere deserve the blame and praise forthe country’s economic failure and political success

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