by David Martin in Dar es Salaam
On the second floor of a building on Dar es Salaam’s Samora Machel Avenue immediately above the offices of the Russian airline, Aeroflot, a tiny group of volunteers has been working for months on their vision of a new Tanzania.
The building, like much else in the capital city, has seen better days. Access to the offices can only be obtained after firmly knocking at Room 202 and then being carefully scrutinized by a friendly but wary messenger.
The waiting room gives little away immediately. The ceiling fan, as every novel seems to say, turns lazily.
The walls are almost bare. The settee and chair are for guests, a round table, and straight·backed functional wooden chairs near the kitchen, for workers.
A confusion of books fills the three shelves. There is the collected Encyclopaedia Britannica, a bargain set one senses has rarely been opened. Above them, titles range bizarrely from L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics to John Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy. In between there are works on American politics, Vietnam, Guyana, Tanzania’s rural resettlement policy of “Ujamaa”, and one which begins to provide some clues, The Ghosts of Africa by William Stevenson.
But the first real tip as to the generation of the team which fills this office rests on the top of the book case, a fading picture of Che Guevera, the Bolivian·born Cuban folk hero of the left in the 1960s. It is one of the few reminders of yesteryear.
The real clue is pasted on the bare off.white wall towards the road which vibrates with a cacophony of sound. A large poster bears the picture of Ben Mkapa with “Chagua Mkapa” (Vote Mkapa) in bold black letters in Swahili, set against the pale green colour of Tanzania’s ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM).
Mkapa, dressed in a blue safari suit, beams down benignly from the poster at the assembled visitors and members of his election team who give every appearance of being overwhelmed by the enormity of what they have achieved so far. “How do we go to Jangwani?” the enormous playing fields where Mkapa’s first campaign rally is shortly to be held, one of them asks.
“I don’t know!” replies Ferdinand Ruhinda, the unofficial chair of the campaign team whose personal working offices these used to be. The questioner grunts and says, “Ha. That is a good one.”
Despite this apparent confusion they are all at Jangwani a little later that day. So, too, are scores of thousands of others, a bigger rally than for the Pope, being the nearest one can get to a crowd estimate.and the crowd for the Pope? Enormous!
Nervous policemen with long wooden sticks try to maintain a semblance of order. A brass band strikes up at the least excuse, usually waved lo musical urgency by an unsmiling and pompous party functionary.
A very young woman wearing a hat made from palm leaves leans over the now familiar poster of Mkapa: an older bespectacled man sports a schoolboy cap belying his years. Others in the vast crowd wear caps and T-shirts emblazoned with Mkapa and CCM.
Protected from the beating tropical sun by an awning, a plethora of presidents ·- present and almost certainly future- wait. There is Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Tanzania’s incumbent, and Zanzibar’s President Salim Amour.
On the front row with them is Benjamin William Mkapa. Born in 1938 near Masasi in southern Tanzania, he is Macua by ethnic group, Catholic by religion.
Mkapa brings a wealth of experience to match his presidential aspirations. An Honours English literature
graduate from Uganda’s Makerere University in its more prestigious days, foreign service officer, journalist, Presidential advisor, diplomat, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Information, and today, of Science, Technology and Higher Education.
Now, likely to become Tanzania’s next President on 5 November, he waits pensively, lost in his own thoughts, almost oblivious to the intrusions of those around him and the crowd stretching as far as the eye can see.
Slowly at first, from the extremity of the crowd, a rolling wave of sound erupts and swells.
Very gradually, as police and party officials try vainly to hold back the throng pressing forward to get a closer glimpse, a tiny cavalcade of Landrovers raising a haze of fine dust, inches towards the makeshift podium.
And there in the vehicle is the man the crowd has been waiting to see — and hear. He seems slighter than one remembers, his head now crowned with white hair. In his hand is his distinctive – mystical to many- plain ivory-tipped black mahogany stick.
Julius Kambarage Nyerere retired in 1985 from the Presidency of Tanzania after 24 years on the job. But the past decade has done nothing to diminish the reverence in with most Tanzanians hold him. On the contrary, as the Mwinyi Presidency has faltered, Mwalimu (the Teacher) as Nyerere is known, has grown in stature.
During Mwinyi’s first five-year term, Nyerere, to a large extent, withdrew from politics, spending more time at his home in Butiama in the north of the country. But, during Mwinyi’s second term in office, things began to go seriously wrong.
Nyerere spoke out, first against the Prime Minister and the CCM Secretary-General. Then he accused Mwinyi, a former teacher and Muslim scholar born on Tanzania’s coastal strip, of corruption.
Tribal and religious bigotry emerged and the country’s loss of direction bewildered the neighbours, many of whom had lived in Tanzania during their own liberation struggles and looked to this country for a solidarity and example which no longer existed.
The point that many missed was that Nyerere was simply minoring the mounting anger of the nation’s 27 million people with their government and the CCM. Almost single-handedly, through his blunt public remarks and books in Swahili and English, Our Leadership and the Destiny of Tanzania, Nyerere politically buried
presidential aspirants he, and most others, perceived to be associated with corruption and incompetence.
Tanzanians hung on his every word. A Dar es Salaam newspaper, ignoring such nicecities as copyright, serialized his book in Swahili. Vendors sold photocopies on street comers at inflated prices. The Prime Minister and CCM Secretary-General were forced to resign.
Kijimbo, (Mr Stick) as he became known, only had to raise his wand to electrify the crowd. He did so frequently at Jangwani in a performance bringing back heady memories of the 1960s — the great names of the Shakespearean stage would have been proud.
There was little new in the words. Tanzanians are fiercely and justifiably proud of the esteem their country was once held in, particularly in so far as the liberation struggle in southern Africa was concerned. To that they had collectively contributed.
But today, Nyerere lamented, people left the room for a cigarette when a Tanzanian rose to speak. It was a direct comment on the Mwinyi years, with Nyerere setting the seal on a masterly performance by urging Tanzanians to vote for Mkapa.
Those were the words the crowd had come to hear. For days everyone had waited for Nyerere to unequivocably signpost the way. Now he had done so. The outcome of the Presidential election on 29 October was now in little doubt.
In contrast, Mkapa was more measured, stylistically quite different, but nevertheless deeply serious and committed.
Erroneously, a section of the foreign media, who obviously know him little, have taken to referring to him as uncharismatic, a glib word as easy and meaningless as ideologically left or right
In reality, particularly among friends, he is anything but uncharismatic. Perhaps he is conservative with a definitely lower case c. Certainly, he is a strong Tanzanian nationalist deeply committed to his coun1ry and southern Africa, where he is widely respected.
He holds very definite views on dealing with his country’s multiple malaises, in part rooted in the recent past. in part, in more distant history.
As a Minister and presidential aspirant, his monthly bankable salary, including allowances, is a paltry US$200. One of his close aides, with 25 years in the civil service, banks less than USSSS. Tanzania’s monthly minimum wage is only US$30.
Corruption cannot be rooted out in isolation, Mkapa says. One must deal with the economy as a whole, including the poverty of the people, stretching the spending power of the very little people honestly earn rather than embarking on an inflationary spiral of increasing wages. Difficult talks are in prospect with the unions.
Idealism has never been in short supply in Tanzania and Mkapa will have to clean up the CCM and re-establish party roots in the country as well as the region. But, worryingly, his options are limited when it comes to forming a new, likely down-sized, government.
He must chose the ministers from among the 274 Members of Parliament who will also be elected by their constituencies on 29 October — plus the 36 seats which will be allocated to women by the Electoral Commission on the basis of the number of seats in parliament that each party wins. And, under the constitution, he cannot nominate anyone.
Scouring the list of parliamentary aspirants, it is not easy to see how he can find even 20 or so from among the winners who will combine the acceptable level of experience, clean record and competence which the people and Mkapa’s small team require. Clean government led by a Mr Clean is not an aspiration, it is a demand and one upon which Mkapa`s leadership will be judged. To a large extent, it is this demand which has spawned 12 opposition parties and three other Presidential candidates for Tanzania’s first multi-party election.
Foremost among these, at the start of the campaign, is Augustine Mrema, who is showing signs of having peaked too early, and his party, the National Convention for Construction and Reform (NCCR-Mageuzi), Swahili for change. Mrema, a one-time primary schoolteacher, CCM party functionary and security officer, resigned from Mwinyi’s government last year, citing his abhorrence of corruption.
In part it was Nyerere’s verbal assault on Mwinyi and the CCM which opened the door to Mrema. But Mrema, despite his avowed anti-corruption crusade, disturbs many people, not least the perennially nervous Asian community. His commitment to democracy be questionable and members of his party admit they concerned by the records of some of those close to him.
Mrema will likely win a substantial number of votes in discontented urban areas where there is high unemployment And there are signs that he will appeal to ethnic roots among the Chagga in Kilimanjaro region whilst the other two non·CCM contenders will hope for support from their Sikuma clansfolk in the populous West Lake area.
But after 34 years in power, and despite its very obvious shortcomings, the CCM remains a powerful force with the only genuine national base. Upon that foundation, and bonded by a common language, Tanzanians have the opportunity to rise above the regionalism which has marred recent elections in southern Africa and elsewhere by not voting along ethnic or religious lines.
At the end of it all, Nyerere’s endorsement of Mkapa’s somewhat reluctant aspirations was critical. Others, such as Mrema, sought it end failed. Now they complain that Nyerere should have remained aloof from partisan politics, should have acted like the Father of the Nation.
Back at Mkapa’s very un-presidential house after the J angwani rally, the mood among the small team· is euphoric. They include people who were once among Nyerere’s sternest and most vocal critics. Now they are more mellow, closer to the realities of power. And, whether they like it or not, they, like their candidate, are disciples of Nyerere.
In ones and twos they drift in to analyse the day’s events in that noisy slightly disconcerting way which to the unenlightened sounds like the prelude to a brawl. Pictures peer down from the wall: Mkapa with Ronald Reagan when the former was Ambassador in Washington, with Canada’s Governor General. There is the regulation picture of Mwinyi. And beside it, slightly lower, but ever-dominant, Nyerere.
Mwalimu after the elections is likely to quietly fade away from the Tanzanian political scene, on call if needed, leaving centre stage to Mkapa. Then it will be up to Mkapa and his team, today balder and greying but infinitely wiser and conspicuously committed, to stamp their mark. (SARDC)
