by Phyllis Johnson
This is the second in a four-part series on the forthcoming presidential and parliamentary elections in Tanzania.
Tanzania, having played a key role in the liberation of southern Africa, now holds one of the keys to future stability of the region.
The campaign is drawing to a close for Tanzania’s first multi-party elections later this month, and the decisions to be made by some 8 million registered voters will determine not only how their country is governed but what example it sets for neighbouring states.
This vast country on the east African coast was the first of 12 Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states to gain independence, in 1961, as Tanganyika, and united with Zanzibar in 1964 to become the United Republic of Tanzania.
Led by a visionary who believed that the independence of one country was incomplete without the independence of others -· and that apartheid must end — Tanzania played a vanguard role in the struggle for independence, hosting and supporting exiles horn almost all countries in the region, and playing midwife to emerging political parties.
Individual Tanzanians contributed goods, services or shillings to the liberation struggles, in a highly politicized country led by the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), later Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), and Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere.
Through its tenacious support for the freedom of nations, at an incalculable cost, Tanzania provided moral and political leadership to the region.
One by one, the other SADC countries gained their independence – beginning with Malawi and Zambia in 1964 through to Namibia in 1990. Finally, the democratic elections in South Africa brought an end to institutionalized apartheid in 1994.
At Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as President of South Africa, a senior SADC official said he didn’t really believe this was happening until he stood in Pretoria – and saw Julius Nyerere was there with him.
After Nyerere stepped down as President of Tanzania in 1985, and as chairman of CCM in 1990, leadership fell into decay, under Ali Hassan Mwinyi, amid serious corruption charges, and Tanzania’s voice in the region was quiet.
It is a country which was long a model of stability in those turbulent times, unified by one language (Swahili), one party and one leader, despite an ethnic and religious mosaic. One Tanzanian who matured during the Nyerere era, lamented many years later that now one must know whether neighbours and friends were Christians or Muslims, and, he said, that information was not considered necessary before.
As Tanzanians go to the polls on 29 October, they will choose a President from among four candidates including two former cabinet ministers, and members of parliament from a plethora of political parties. The choices have more to do with leadership and social issues than economic, for none of the presidential contenders is expected to row back on the programme of economic structural adjustment, though at least one — CCM candidate Benjamin Mkapa -· would temper it with strengthening of social support systems.
What type of leadership Tanzanian voters choose will determine the future of the region around them as well as the way forward for Tanzania. Will it be a return to the strong leadership of the post-independence period, or a continuation of the weak, indecisive leadership of more recent years?
In the interim, the region has changed.
As the guns fell silent in 1993 on Tanzania’s southern border, in Mozambique, after the South
African-backed civil war, refugees began pouring across its north-western boundary from Rwanda and Burundi. The Presidents of those two countries were killed in a mysterious plane crash after the Burundi President, Melchoir Ndadaye, emerged victorious in multi-party elections.
Now, the flames in tiny Rwanda are fanned from across the border in Zaire, as armed “refugees” cross to and from safe havens. President Mobutu has threatened mass repatriation of over one million refugees.
Uganda after initiating war in Rwanda – with tacit support of its colonial power against that of the latter in what could be called “the war of the languages” – has also gone on a war footing in the north, where relations are strained across a porous border with Sudan.
In Kenya, the uncertainty grows with incidents of violence in the west of the country, near the Ugandan border, between supporters and opponents of President Daniel Arap Moi.
Zambia is in an unstable situation leading up to next year’s national elections, with the weak leadership of the present under President Frederick Chiluba being challenged by the leadership of the past under former President Kenneth Kaunda. In western province. Lozi loyalists pressing for more autonomy, have begun to address their king, the Litunga, as President.
And Malawi is quietly trying to emerge from the legacy of former President Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, in the face of extreme poverty and tight economic constraints.
Tanzania remains, within its borders, a stable, highly politicized and determined nation. But what will be its response to the aftermath of multi-party elections? And what kind of leadership will it have then? The region’s enemies are no longer apartheid or the destabilization perpetrated in its defence, but poverty, ethnic and religious division, international gun-running, crime and drugs, instability and famine.
Tanzania’s neighbours are expecting it to resume a substantive role, after the elections, in growing SADC efforts to combat these problems and work toward cohesive regional development. Tanzania is approaching a moment in history which may be as critical as that during which Nyerere addressed the transitional Legislative Assembly in 1959, in which he stressed Tanganyika’s desire for peaceful constitutional progress in the region.
“I have said before elsewhere that we, the people of Tanganyika, would like to light a candle and put it on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro which would shine beyond our borders giving hope where there was despair, love where there was hate and dignity where there was before only humiliation.”(SARDC)
