Remembering Nyerere: Road to hell is paved with good intentions

I’m not entirely sure what to make of those tears now. Maybe it was grief, maybe it was the weight of losing a national symbol. But I was a product of my time. And Nyerere was a giant.

I still think he is. In a line-up of shockingly average leaders who followed him, he was a towering intellect. Nyerere wasn’t just a politician; he was a philosopher-king.

He translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili, debated world leaders on their own terms, and articulated a unique African vision with a clarity that still resonates.

He was also a genuine patriot—not just in words, but in action. He voluntarily stepped down from power, something unheard of in post-colonial Africa.

He championed Kiswahili as a unifying national language, turning it into a tool of inclusion. And he famously lived modestly – even as president.

But this year, I find myself wishing Nyerere was still here. I would have moved heaven and earth to get an audience with him, to sit down and ask: “Mzee, what do you think of the Tanzania you founded?” Because honestly, the nation feels unwell. It’s in pain—stifled, stagnant, and socially fragmented. We desperately need a leader of Nyerere’s moral gravity and intellect to help steer us through this.

And yet, we must also confront an uncomfortable truth: It was his weaknesses, his specific failures as a leader that paved the road to our current predicament.

Take his rigid subscription to ideology. Nyerere embraced leftist doctrines with near-religious fervour. He wasn’t just a socialist; he was a subscriber to every idealistic notion that leftist intellectuals propagated in the 60s and 70s.

He took the ujamaa ideal and forced an entire economy into that mould, vilifying the very concept of individual profit as greed. We never learned pragmatism.

So, while our counterparts were asking, “What policy will make our people richer and our nation stronger?” we were asking, “Is this policy ideologically pure?” Even now, we are still stuck with practices that don’t make the country work.

Then there’s Nyerere’s complex relationship with democracy. On one hand, he was a man of the people: he lived and listened to them. On the other hand, he was the man who decided for the people.

He banned opposition parties in 1965, creating a one-party state under the guise of national unity. He muzzled the alternative press. He didn’t open the nation up to political pluralism until he was well out of power, leaving a system already rigged for the incumbents.

If I had to boil it all down, Nyerere’s fundamental flaw was his misunderstanding of human nature. He was an idealist: he believed that if you put people in an ujamaa village, they would work hard for the collective good. He believed that if you appointed leaders, they would use their powers for the benefit of all.

He created a system where the key to power wasn’t competence or accountability, but the ability to pay lip service to his ideals. But the ujamaa villages became sites of coercion, not cooperation. And the people who were singing “ujamaa” with him seamlessly transitioned into capitalists.

This is the tragic fallacy of Utopian leftism—they believe people are inherently good and will act with good intentions. But consider Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where the pursuit of an agrarian communist utopia led to the killing fields.

Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and the ongoing struggles in Cuba and North Korea. Over 100 million people died because of systems built on such “good intentions.”

Nyerere himself was aware of the danger. He once said, “The constitution gives the president so much power that if I chose to be a dictator, I could.” But he never reformed the constitution to limit those powers. He trusted future leaders to be as virtuous as he imagined himself to be.

What a fatal mistake.

Human beings aren’t good people: there is wickedness in our hearts. If you don’t set effective checks and balances, people will use their power to make fellow citizens subjects.

People will weaponise their positions, their tribes, their religions, or their races against others. We’ve all seen it, haven’t we?

Today, as nations debate governance models—Western liberal democracy versus China’s authoritarian capitalism—I say this: follow the path proven to provide long-term stability and dignity. If a path suppresses people’s political, individual, economic, and social rights, it is a dead end.

Research and history are unequivocal on this. Without the bedrock of democracy and accountable institutions, the buildings we erect are merely houses of cards.

Nyerere should have known that. And maybe, if he were here today, he’d admit it.

Charles Makakala is a Technology and Management Consultant based in Dar es Salaam