| After 50 years of false starts, what next? | Send to a friend |
| Friday, 09 December 2011 16:41 |
 Someone somewhere long ago speaking either out of mischief or the gossamer divide between genius and madness said there is order in chaos. Take the social, economic and (in recent years) political chaos that has ruled and reigned unabated in ‘(Cry) My Beloved Country’ Tanzania (1964 to-date) and, before that, Tanganyika (1961-1964). Where, pray, is order worth the epithet in that? That someone could not have had Tanzania in mind when he uttered those words on chaos and order, if you ask me. Today, December 9, 2011, Tanganyika is marking 50 years of Independence from foreign rule. [On April 26, 2012, the country will also mark 48 years of political union with what was the former island Republic of Zanzibar (January 12, April 25, 1964)]. But, frankly, what does the country have to show for it? Look at it this way: After half-a-century of Independence and government by home-grown leaderships “elected” to power quinquennially, Tanzanians remain among the world’s 20 poorest peoples! The economy is said to have been growing at anything between five per cent and seven per cent per annum for years, while the population has been growing at 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent. Today, there are 44m-plus Tanzanian souls with a GDP of $22.6bn at the official exchange rate. About 36 per cent of the people live below the UN poverty line of $2 daily. This is less than what a cow lives on in the EU, Japan and elsewhere in the West. For years now, the Government in Dar has been depending on extraneous handouts and loans to the tune of about 34 per cent to 36 per cent of the national budget. To further cloud the picture, not all the funds pledged by Dar’s development partners are received in full, or on time. This is usually because, more often than not, the Government fails to honour in full and on time the conditionalities attached to the loans and grants by the pledging Governments. Some of the strings are perfectly reasonable and, therefore, understandable. They include adhering to basic human rights and freedoms that are recognised by the comity of nations. The conditionalities require acceptance and application of the hallowed tenets of democracy which, together, lead to general good governance—free and fair regular elections, adherence to the Rule of Law, a corruption-free and clean Government and so on. Isn’t it a matter of great shame then that, 50 years down the Independence Road, Tanzania still fares poorly in almost all the Indices recognised the world over in such areas of the nation’s daily life as (Transparency International’s) Corruption Perception Index? In 2010, Tanzania was ranked Number 116 (along with Guyana, Mongolia, Mali and Ethiopia) out of 178 countries. The lower the number, the less better the corruption perception, where corruption is defined as misuse of public power for private/personal benefit. In the first decade of Independence, Tanzania did itself so proud under founding President Julius Nyerere (1962-85) that the Government treated a contingent of former British colonial administrators to an inspection tour of the country in 1971. They came, they saw, and they marvelled if only out of politeness at what the Nyerere Government had done for its people in 10 years of Independence. But then things went haywire and that negative trend has never stopped, let alone reversed. Practically every social and economic woe that could befall society befell Tanzanians. Not only is the population growing in inverse proportion to dwindling meaningful and sustainable socio-economic development, it is also getting clearer with the passage of time that the country is unlikely to recover and pull itself up by its bootstraps out of the socio-economic backwaters it has been floundering in for more than a generation. In other words, abject poverty is penetrating wider and deeper among the population by the day with nary a hope that the better-life-for-all-Tanzanians that is regularly pledged from presidential election campaign platforms will become a reality anytime soon. I am by no means saying there hasn’t been some socio-economic development in Tanzania after Independence. The point here is that the country should have been doing much, much better than it is 50 years after Independence! This is taking into account the phenomenal wealth real and potential with which Tanzania has been blessed in the form of natural resources, comparative advantages and other endowments. In the event, ordinary Tanzanians are not faring that much better. A matter of great shame, did I say? Things are worse than that. Tanzania has become a country where parents/guardians maim and even bludgeon to death their charges (children, spouses and other dependants) for stealing” morsels of food from the cooking pot, filching a few coins from under the pillow (assuming the family affords such bedding luxury) with which to buy something to fill the tummy and keep hunger pangs at bay for a few hours. About 850,000 youths graduate from learning institutions yearly. These are spewed onto an ever-burgeoning jobs market, with only about five percent of them accessing salaried employment. The rest are either too young to embark on income-earning activities or lack the requisite self-employment skills. It is just not enough to shout from the rooftops that successor governments have built so many health centres, so many schools, enrolled so many students—compared to 50 years ago. In health and education, quality is the name of the game, not mere numbers. About 100,000 Tanzanians die from garden variety malaria yearly. Yet successor governments continue to import credible anti-malarials and mosquito coils—begging for insecticide-treated bednets from the international donor community on the way. Tanzania continues to import matchboxes, wheat, rice, second hand clothing, fruit juices, eggs, meats and so on from you-know-where. It also continues to export jobs that are badly needed by hordes of its youth: Lapidary services to Jaipur, South Africa, London and Israel. Raw cashewnuts, cotton, coffee, logs, skins/hides and so on go to India and elsewhere. When Mwalimu Nyerere promulgated the Arusha Declaration on Socialism and Self-Reliance on February 5, 1967, ordinary Tanzanians hailed that as the desperately-needed vehicle to propel their dreams and hopes to full bloom. Indeed, had the parastatals (formed from private entities nationalised under the Declaration, as well as new ones) survived and prospered, Tanzania would today be a semi-industrialised nation in textiles, lapidary, livestock products, agro-processing, machine-assembly, forestry and fishery products, tools-making, packaging, pharmaceuticals and others. In due course, however, the dreams and hopes were shattered to smithereens. What went wrong, pray? The answer to this is a full thesis in itself, to be told another day. But one sure-fire way to get Tanzania back on the development rails is to entrust the country to benevolent dictatorship for a generation or so. Clearly, Westminster-type democracy has not made Tanzanians better-off socio-economically. Mwalimu Nyerere succeeded that much because he was virtually a benevolent dictator. For remedy, why not try the hair of the dog that bit us then? Let’s hold a referendum on this. Cheers! Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
