Tanzania's founding father, Julius Nyerere, built schools and health clinics throughout the country in the 1960s and 1970s when the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) described them as "non-productive" expenditure.

Yet today almost every story one reads or hears about the late Tanzanian President contains the obligatory western journalistic line about his "failed socialist experiments". True, some experiments like the cooperative movement, did fail.

His policies of ujamaa or bringing people together so that the State could provide them with schools, clinics, clean water and other essentials is logically unquestionable. But implementation was to prove to be another step.

Providing schools and clinics within easy walking distance of every remote village in the vast countryside, although rarely mentioned, can hardly be described as a failure. Even the World Bank and IMF now, belatedly, admit education and health are essential to productivity.

Many of the schools and clinics may lack basic teaching materials and medicines and the staff may not be well qualified by western standards.

But Nyerere, as he so frequently said, was dragging his country up by the bootlaces after 80 years of British and German neglect. To give only one example, at independence in December 1961 the country had just 400 km of tarred road that connected white communities.

Today an infrastructure exists and the scattered schools Nyerere built in the face of opposition from the World Bank and IMF are the focus as Tanzania strides into the unknown future.

The vibrant and bustling commercial capital of Dar es Salaam, according to the mayor of the city, Kleist Sykes, now has a population of 4.2 million and is growing at the rate of 250,000 people a year. No other city in southern Africa is growing at that pace.

Such growth may be ascribed by some to Tanzanians abandoning their rural roots. However, as we are continuously told, the world is changing and the reality of fluctuating cash crop prices on the international market is that there is an urban drift worldwide.

But, with some 800,000 unemployed, such a growth inevitably leads to political problems for the government, as has been the case in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Urban and peri-urban voters and the unemployed are notoriously less loyal to the government of the day than their rural counterparts and they inevitably flock to opposition parties believing that any change will bring greener grass.

When Nyerere died a little over a year ago, Tanzanians were astounded by the cast of characters at his State funeral, and the praise heaped upon his person and his legacy. These included the former American Secretary of State, Madeline Albright and Marthi Ahtisaari, the President of Finland, whose country then chaired the European Union.

Hitherto Tanzanians had regarded Mwalimu Nyerere first and foremost as a Tanzanian. Secondly, he was a regional leader. Now they had to contend with the fact that he was an international statesman, the like of which had not been acknowledged previously in Africa.

Today Tanzanians recall Nyerere with pride and with much more than lip-service, turning to him beyond the grave for his guidance.

He has left an enduring legacy for Tanzanians. In the 1960s it was common that people from a given area went to a particular bar where they could mingle with their homefolk. Now they simply intermingle with other Tanzanians from all over the country.

Another enduring legacy of Nyerere is the Swahili language that binds the country's 32 million people. It is the world's seventh most spoken language and was once proposed as the lingua franca of Africa.

This commonality of Tanzanians has partly contributed to the country's 40-year history of lack of ethnic conflict that bedevils neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and Burundi, and some others on the continent.

Throughout these 40 years, Tanzania has been at peace, with the exception of the foray into Uganda in 1979 to remove Idi Amin that Tanzanians responded to with astounding commitment and sacrifice.

Nyerere often remarked that for his country to develop, all that it needed was people, land, good policies and good leadership. Generally, he provided the good leadership until he voluntarily stepped down as President in 1985 after leading his country for 24 years.

Thereafter his country has changed with the times. The silver platter expectations of independence have given way to the realization that freedom and work go hand-in-hand, as Mwalimu often remarked.

Benjamin Mkapa is now Tanzania's third President. His two terms in office expire in 2005 and already the guessing has begun as to who will succeed him. It is a somewhat futile game that takes little heed of the economic and political realities that may be prevailing in 2005.

The stiffest challenge facing Tanzanians today is to ensure that whoever succeeds Mkapa carries on building on the foundations of a united nation that he and Nyerere have helped to build.

Today Tanzania is rated by the United Nations as a success story, although 42 percent of its income comes from donors. This is a degree of dependency that Mkapa is unhappy with.

So, as he and Tanzanians look back over the past 40 years, they also look forward. Socialism, not to be confused with the former Soviet Union, and self-reliance has been Tanzania's watchwords since independence and they remain so 40 years on.

With 85 percent of Tanzanians living on the land, the central place of agriculture and mining in the economy remains in little doubt. Independence is Work, as Nyerere's early slogan said, and those who don't break into a sweat will have no place in the sun. (SARDC)

David Martin is the former Deputy Editor of the Tanzanian newspaper, The Standard, and Africa Correspondent of the London Sunday newspaper, The Observer. He is a publisher in Zimbabwe and a Board member of the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC) of which Julius Nyerere was the founding patron.

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