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22 October 1999 Vol 40 No 21 AFRICA CONFIDENTIAL BURUNDI 2 TANZANIA Losing a peacemaker After Mwalimu When Tanzanians stop mourning their Pan-African hero, they will The loss on 14 October of Julius Nyerere as mediator coincided with have to work hard to keep the peace he left them an escalation of the civil war. As Saddened by the death of their founding President, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, in London on 14 more than 15,000 Burundian refugees are driven into Tanzania, October, Tanzanians face a difficult run-up to the elections due next year without his steadying the search for a new mediator is influence on the political stage. With Nyerere's death too will come far more strident calls to redefine proving problematic. Zanzibar’s relationship with the mainland (AC Vol 40 Nos 10 & 11), which Mwalimu had said, perhaps prophetically, would happen only over his ‘dead body’. President Benjamin Mkapa already looks more vulnerable in his bid for the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi’s endorsement of him NIGERIA 3 as its flagbearer for another five-year term. Certainly, it was Nyerere’s backing that clinched the Cleaning up oil CCM nomination for Mkapa in 1995 and then helped him fight off opposition challengers such as Augustine Mrema. Nyerere squashed the populist Mrema’s campaign by following him around the Recent high-level visitors to Abuja country and making better speeches to the wananchi. have left apparently convinced that President Obasanjo is reversing Nyerere’s climb to colossus status in Tanzania started with his appointment as Chief Minister, 20 years of corruption and then Prime Minister, under colonial rule. He took up the presidency in 1962, a year after mismanagement in Nigeria's oil Independence; when he laid it down in 1986, he went on running both the ruling CCM (‘Revolutionary’) industry, the heart of its economy. party he had founded and, in many ways, the country. His two successors, Ali Hassan Mwinyi and Mkapa, owed him their jobs. However, Nyerere was only the third post-Independence African leader BOTSWANA 4 to step down voluntarily. Like his friend Nelson Mandela, Mwalimu had a natural political style. Also like Mandela, his moral certainties and inflexibility would sometimes infuriate his colleagues. All his own work Belatedly sometimes, Mwalimu was prepared to admit his errors. President Festus Mogae has gained a clear mandate to govern Ujamaa and its allies in his own right. His Botswana The two gravest of these are seen as his ujamaa economic strategy and his handling of the union with Democratic Party won its eighth Zanzibar - although there is a credible case for the defence in both cases. Ujamaa, strongly backed successive victory in the 17 by the then World Bank President, Robert McNamara, and successive Scandinavian governments, October elections. was one of Africa’s boldest experiments in social engineering. Almost 70 per cent of Tanzanians were prodded from traditional lands into state-run communal villages. After huge social investment, ANGOLA I 5 underwritten by foreign aid rather than agricultural production, more than 80 per cent of Tanzanians were literate (in Kiswahili) and at first health indicators improved sharply. Battle of Bailundo Yet ujamaa failed utterly in its economic goals. Small farmers hugely resented the heavy hand After months of struggle, of the state. Nyerere was a great admirer of China’s Chairman Mao Zedong (returning to Tanzania government forces have finally with what were to become his trademark Mao suits after a visit to Beijing in the mid-1960s) but was ousted UNITA forces from their much less taken with Mao’s successor, Deng Xiao Ping. Nyerere persevered with Maoist headquarters in the central economics, even after Deng’s liberalisation of agriculture had vastly improved living standards in highland town of Bailundo. China’s rural areas. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, Tanzania’s economy shrunk by almost half a percentage point a year. ANGOLA II 6 By the time he resigned the presidency in 1986, Nyerere had admitted some of his economic mistakes, even as he argued how much the terms of trade had moved against African farmers. By Bailing in 1992, he reluctantly backed Mwinyi’s Zanzibar declaration, which effectively dumped ujamaa and Western powers are pressing the ushered in free-market economics. Nyerere constantly denounced corruption but the corrupt did IMF and World Bank to help the well under the interventionist ujamaa system. And since 1995, he strongly backed Mkapa’s anti- Angolan government even if its graft campaign. reforms are limited so far. Unlike his neighbours, Nyerere kept the peace in his country, at least on the mainland. Zanzibar, potentially richer, was his Achilles heel. In 1964, after a bloody uprising, the islands were POINTERS 8 incorporated in the Union with Tanganyika on terms which puzzled many and satisfied nobody. For those Zanzibaris who suffered under Sheikh Abeid Karume’s subsequent dictatorship on the Ghana, Congo- islands, Nyerere’s refusal to act against this brutal autocrat was an unforgivable political mistake. Brazza & Senegal With their own government, parliament and ethnic politics, the 800,000 islanders complain of clumsy mainland domination. Many of the 30 million mainlanders resent Zanzibar’s disproportionate Saudi white knight; danse representation. In 1993, the Union parliament unanimously called for a mainland house to match macabre; and Au secours! 22 October 1999 Africa Confidential Vol 40 No 21 Zanzibar’s: as CCM’s elder statesman, Nyerere overruled the elected de la Démocratie (FDD), led by ‘Colonel’ Jean-Bosco members. Many now fear for the Union’s future. Ndayikengurukiyé, which split from its political wing, the Conseil Zanzibar President Salmin Amour, whose stolen election in National pour la Défense de la Démocratie (CNDD), under 1995 provoked the present crisis, appears to be planning a third (and Léonard Nyangoma. The Dar es Salaam paper The Guardian unconstitutional) term. Reports from Zanzibar suggest that Justice estimates that the FDD’s total strength is 10,000 men, of whom Minister Idd Pandu Hassan is trying to organise a secret ballot in some (trained by the Zimbabwean army) are fighting on President the House of Representatives to facilitate another term for Amour. Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s side in Congo-Kinshasa. A Brussels- Amnesty International is sounding alarms about arrest warrants based group of European non-governmental organisations, the being issued for the Civic United Front leader, Seif Sharriff Hamad, Concertation Chrétienne pour l’Afrique Centrale (CCAC), puts and his allies. All this could further undermine the Commonwealth- the FDD’s strength much higher, at 20,000 guerrillas, operating sponsored agreement between the CUF and CCM parties, in June. mainly in Bujumbura Rural and including 6,000 with Kabila’s Although all the CUF MPs have taken up their seats in parliament forces. after a four year boycott, Amour has not yet appointed an additional The CCAC believes that, since the FDD fell out with the Tanzania- two CUF MPs, as stipulated in the Commonwealth deal. backed CNDD, the CNDD’s Nyangoma has been helped to build up The silver-tongued Mwalimu, a Catholic who adopted a Muslim a new force by the Tanzanian army, which is now training and teacher’s title, was a star on the internationalist circuit and a serious equipping 1,000 of his men. The Forces Nationales de Libération Pan-Africanist. Tanzania’s contribution to Southern Africa’s de Kabora Kossan (FNL) were formerly the armed wing of the liberation struggle was significant enough, in terms of material and Parti pour la Libération du Peuple Hutu (Palipehutu) but are no moral support, to make it an honorary front-line state, despite its longer recognised by Palipehutu’s leader, Etienne Karatasi, now geographical distance from the then front-line. Nyerere, whose exiled in Denmark. The CCAC reckons the FNL has 200-300 protege Salim Ahmed Salim is Secretary General of the Organisation men, mainly in the western provinces of Cibitoké and Bubanza. of African Unity, often lost patience with the regional body’s Some 500-700 fighters in the Forces Armées Populaires (FAP), powerlessness. Appalled by Idi Amin Dada’s brutal dictatorship in the armed wing of Joseph Karumba’s Front de Libération National neighbouring Uganda, Nyerere in 1979 sent 45,000 Tanzanian (Frolina), operate mainly in southern Burundi. Major Pierre troops to topple it. Among the militants involved in that operation Buyoya’s government often blamed Nyerere for the failure of the were Uganda’s current President, Yoweri Museveni, and Rwanda’s Arusha talks, saying it was willing to talk directly to the rebels. Vice-President, Paul Kagamé, who have since taken Nyerere’s Discreet preliminary discussions have been mediated by interventionist doctrine much further. Ndayikengurukiyé’s cousin, Augustin Nzodjibwami, who leads Frodebu’s internal wing; Nzodjibwami favours Buyoya and is opposed to Frodebu’s official leader, Jean Minani. The FDD, BURUNDI though, bluntly refuses to join the Arusha talks. The blockage which the government blamed on Nyerere may soon start looking like a mere excuse for delay. Buyoya’s team has Losing a peacemaker obtained its interim objective, the lifting of trade sanctions, and is in no hurry to talk about the heart of the matter - power-sharing. The mediator died just when his services Anyway, nobody seriously expected the Arusha peace talks to have were most needed real results before December, the date hoped for by donor countries The loss of Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere on 14 October coincided disappointed by the lack of progress. The last round, in September, with a serious worsening of Burundi’s internal conflict. Since 18 showed little progress on power-sharing or on key issues such as August, when they made several raids on the capital, Bujumbura, the transition to democracy or the composition of the army.