M.P.s fall but Nyerere carries on
By
GWYNNE DYER
in London
By a curious coincidence, the end of October saw almost simultaneous parliamentary elections in the two countries whose Governments have become the leading symbols of Third World socialism in their respective hemispheres: Jamaica and Tanzania. In both cases, the voters rejected the incumbent members of Parliament by a landslide. But only Jamaica’s Government resigned. On October 27, seven million Tanzanian voters trooped off to the polls, and exercised their democratic right to “throw the rascals out” with such enthusiasm that around 60 per cent of the 111 M.P.s (all of whom belong to the ruling party) lost their seats. But the President, Dr Julius Nyerere, who was unopposed as always, was elected to a fifth five-year term of office. Since it is President Nyerere, not the tame and powerless Parliament, that- runs Tanzania, nothing important is going to change because of the election.
This will come as a great relief to the ideological warriors of both Right and Left, for Tanzania and its nonidentical tw’in, Kenya, have gradually been elevated in to living stereotypes of the two competing development models, socialist and capitalist, for all of Africa. Political pundits, propagandists and other pen-pushers would
have been desolated if they were deprived of those marvellously useful short-hand symbols, capitalist Kenya and socialist Tanzania. The two countries are a matched set: roughly similar in size, population and resources, located side by side, and both gaining independence from Britain at the same time. But Kenya’s President Jomo Kenyatta chose a robustly capitalist route after independence (a policy preserved by his successor, President Daniel Arap Moi), while Tanzania's President Nyerere became a sort of secular saint to the African and world Left. In the eyes of outside observers, Kenya and Tanzania became gigantic open-air laboratories for an experimental comparison of the virtues of liberal capitalism and “African socialism.” E.ven the two countries themselves have gradually fallen victim to the competitive fever, and all the shared institutions they inherited from the British — jointly owned railways, airline, university system and so on — have since been split up amidst angry mutual recriminations.
Kenya displays all the virtues and faults to be expected in a. rampantly capitalist under-developed country: a plethora of consumer goods, booming cities, and a free flow of people, money and ideas, but also limited government services, a neg-
lected countryside, and no safety net to (catch) those who can't stand the pace. Plus a vast gap between rich and poor — and. of course, corruption everywhere.
Tanzania is a mirrorimage, just what you would expect of a devoutly socialist underdeveloped country: shortages of everything, glum, shabby cities, and an army of bureaucrats incompetently attempting to plan every aspect of daily life: but also a serious attempt to bring government sendees to the people, a concentration of attention and effort on the villages, and a guarantee that nobody will sink below a certain level of (widely shared) poverty. Plus a constant drizzle of hypocritical and s e 1 f-congrqtulatory lies which seek to fill up the moat that inevitably gapes between the high aspiration of Dr Nyerere’s “African socialism” and the unprepossessing reality — and, of course, corruption everywhere.
Nevertheless, President Nyerere perseveres, and in truth his accomplishments are not negligible. Tanzania’s average growth rate per capita in the period 1960-78 was 2.7 per cent, compared to Kenya’s 2.2 per cent. The general standard of health, education and nutrition of the average Tanzanian peasant farmer is at least equal to that of his Kenyan counterpart. So why did well
over half of Tanzania’s M.P.s lose their seats in this election? ,j The short answer to that question is that Tanzanians are utterly fed up with the arbitrary behaviour, the incompetence, and the growing corruption of the vastly swollen bureaucracy which has been created to impose Dr Nyerere’s vision of a socialist Tanzania. But it is also the wrong question to ask.
The question we should be asking is: why is Dr Nyerere still president of Tanzania today, after more than half the sitting members of Parliament were defeated in an election? After all, Jamaica's Prime Minister, Mr Michael Manley, the closest thing to a Caribbean Nyerere in his importance as a symbol of socialist “self-reliance” in the Third World, honourably resigned after losing his majority in the Jamaican elections of October 30. The difference is that Jamaica is a real democracy, and Mr Manley is a democrat, whereas Tanzania (like Kenya) is a one-party State, and Dr Nyerere is a despot (though a benevolent one). Tanzanian voters are allowed to blow off a little steam from time to time in parliamentary elections, but the main lines of policy are rigidly imposed from above. It doesn’t matter how many Tanzanian M.P.s lose their seats in these elections, because their victorious opponents were also chosen by the ruling Party of the Rev-
elution. In any case, real power in Tanzania rests not with Parliament but with the Central Committee of the Party, whose 42 members are almost all appointed, either directly or indirectly, by Dr Nyerere himself. What Dr Nyerere wants. Dr Nyerere gets. In this case
it is "African socialism’' at almost any cost, but If It were Seventh Day Adventism or transcendental meditation, the system would obev him and seek to impose that instead. Certainly nobody seems to ask the ordinary Tanzanians what they want.
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