Revisiting the Debate on National Autonomous Development*

Issa G. Shivji Professor of Law Faculty of Law University of [email protected]

Introduction In this so-called era of globalization and global village, it is anachronistic to talk about nationalism, autonomy, and development. Pundits have declared end of history. Development is passé, and autonomy is outdated. We are living in a global village where there is interdependence, where planners and politicians talk about win-win situations, not winners and losers, or worse, exploiters and exploited. The world is interdependent. Nationalism is cultural relativism, at best, or fundamentalism, at worst, while autonomy is a pipe dream. But all fads have their days.

Globalization, or neo-liberalism as we recognise it in Africa, is being questioned, not only ideologically and theoretically but also, politically. In many ways, what happens in Latin America is very often the dress rehearsal for Africa. And Latin America is revolting against neo-liberalism. Nonetheless, the last 25 years of adjustment in Africa have caused havoc. Not only our people continue to wallow in the legendry poverty but also even the self-respect and dignity of the nationalist period have been ridiculed and the gains of the independence period, however modest, have been reversed. But, as I said, there is a backlash. African scholars, at least to the north of Limpopo – I am not sure about this part of Africa since “you people” take your cue from more temperate climes! – are beginning to revisit the nationalist period; are becoming bolder by the day to call globalization by

* Issa Shivji is visiting South Africa as a guest of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Unit for Rural Schooling and Development at the University of Fort Hare. He has also spoken at the Education Policy Unit at the University of Witwatersrand and the Institute for Economic Rsearch on Innovation at the Tshwane University of Technology. 2

its name, . Even a kind of “primary resistance” on the ground is surfacing in ways, which no one could have predicted even five years ago – witness the so-called armed rebellion in the oil states of Nigeria.

It is in this context then that I wish to revisit the discourse on national autonomous development (NAD) and converse with you on how we can develop and deepen this discourse as we enter – hopefully – the period of post-neo-liberalism. First, let me, in broad strokes, recapitulate the development discourse from nationalism to neo-liberalism.

From nationalism to neo-liberalism* The struggle for independence in Africa was primarily an assertion of the humanness of the African people after five centuries of domination and humiliation of the slave trade and colonialism. Amilcar Cabral described it as the process of ‘re-Africanisation of minds’ or ‘rebecoming Africans’. National development became the passion of politicians and the ‘great expectation’ of the people. In the vision of the more articulate nationalist leaders like of Tanzania, the independent state had a double task, that of building the nation and developing the economy. The state in Africa, Nyerere argued, preceded the nation, rather than the other way round. Thus, the national project was from the start, top-down, and statist.

The colonial economy and society were anything but national. In the scramble for Africa, the colonial powers had divided the continent into mini-countries where boundaries cut through cultural, ethnic, and economic affinities. This was made worse by the policy of divide and rule, leaving behind uneven development in an extreme form. Some regions were more developed than others were. Some ethnic groups were labelled martial, providing a recruiting ground for soldiers; others were turned into labour reservoirs; some ethnic groups were characterized as “intelligent” and moderately entrepreneurial as opposed to the rest who were inherently indolent and lazy. All were of course uncivilized, uncultured, undisciplined pagans whose souls needed to be saved and whose skins needed to be thrashed.

* This section is based on my public lecture to Cornell University, September, 2005, titled ‘The Changing Discourse on Development in Africa’. 3

The colonial economy was typically disarticulated, almost tailor-made, for exploitation by colonial capital, linked to the metropolitan trade and capital circuits. Extractive industries like mining predominated. Plantation agriculture existed side by side with subsistence peasant cultivation, all concentrating on one or a couple of crops for export according to the needs of the metropolitan economy. In settler colonies, large-scale alienation of fertile land left the indigenous to eke out a living from scraps of land and still pay taxes to the colonial state while providing labour to the settler farmer.

Entrepreneurship and skilled labour was deliberately discouraged, if not suppressed, by legal edicts and administrative fiat. Instead, where needed to distribute metropolitan goods, build railways and ports, or service the state and the settler town, skills were imported from the Indian subcontinent.

Different colonial powers left behind different forms and traditions of public administration, culture, cuisine, dance and education, elementary as it was, all concentrated in towns. The urban and the rural were literally two countries within one; one alien, modern, a metropolitan transplant barred to the native – while the other stagnating and frozen in the so-called tradition or custom. Neither the modern nor the traditional were organically so. Both were colonial constructs.

No other continent suffered as much destruction of its social fabric through foreign imperial domination as did Africa.

These initial conditions on the eve of independence show that the nationalist project faced a formidable task on the morrow of independence. What is more, the state, which was supposed to carry out the twin tasks of nation-building and economic development, was itself a colonial heritage. The colonial state was a despotic state, a metropolitan police and military outpost, in which powers were concentrated and centralized, and where law was an unmediated instrument of force and where administrative fiat was more a rule, than the rule of law.

The nationalist vision thus called for a revolutionary transformation not only of the economy and society but also the state. A few nationalist visionaries attempted, but none 4

succeeded. The post-independence international context was no more propitious than the colonial was. Independence found Africa in the midst of Cold War and the rising imperial power, the , for whom any assertion of national self-determination was “communism”, to be hounded and destroyed, by force if necessary, by manipulation and deception, if possible. The early story of the gruesome assassination of and the overthrow of ; the continuing story of military coups, assassinations, and resistance to national liberation wars; and the civil strife in Africa, in most of which imperialism had a hand, bear testimony to what the former colonial powers and the rising imperial power could do to retain their collective global hegemony.

It is in the context of these conditions, that African nationalists had to realise their dream of nation-building and economic development and to answer their people’s ‘great expectations’. Invariably, the agency of change was the state since there was virtually no social class that could shoulder the task of national development. Fanon’s characterization of the African middle class, which inherited power at independence as an underdeveloped middle class with the mentality of a businessperson rather than that of a captain of industry, captured the essence of the post-independence ruling class (Fanon 1963).

Nor was foreign capital obliging in spite of various protective laws and incentive schemes put in place by the African governments. Invariably, nationalist politicians turned to the state. African governments of all ideological hues – from capitalist Kenyans through socialist Tanzanians to Marxists of various inclinations– all resorted to the state for their economic programmes. The erstwhile World Bank designed the post- independence economic programmes, contrary to the current propaganda from the West. In effect, it involved intensification of the monoculture agriculture for export; some enclaves of import-substitution industrialization and throwing open of the extractive and resource based industries to transnational corporations.

The public sector expanded rapidly financed, almost exclusively, by draining surpluses from the peasantry. State-run and managed marketing boards became the mechanism of 5

siphoning off surpluses out of the agriculture sector. Much of the surplus found its way to metropolitan economies. The rest supported the state bureaucracy.

The state had to be manned. The colonial bureaucracy was almost exclusively White at the top and immigrant in the middle. The education and health infrastructure had to be expanded, both for pragmatic as well as political reasons. Africanisation of the civil service could not be resisted nor could the basic welfare demands of the population. Provision of basic services by the state also served to legitimise the otherwise authoritarian rule of the political elite. The state bureaucracy grew rapidly.

Nationalism thus resolved itself into various ideologies of developmentalism. ‘We should run while others walk’, politicians declared. The academia was dominated from the North. Modernization, based on Parsonian pattern variables and Rostow’s ‘stages of economic growth’, was the theoretical norm. These “gurus” argued that post- independence economies were typically dual economies. There was the traditional sector, rural, unproductive, backward, lacking entrepreneurial spirit and governed by ascription or the ‘economy of affection’. Development consisted in modernizing the traditional society, or, as Goran Hyden would have it, capturing the uncaptured peasantry (Hyden 1980). Political scientists thus looked for modernizing elites, from modernizing chiefs to modernizing soldiers as political expediency dictated.

The dominance of modernization paradigm was challenged by young academics coming out of post-independence universities. Where there was relatively a freer space, as in Tanzania of the 60s and 70s, intense debates raged between modernizers and radical nationalists calling themselves African socialists or Ujamaaists or Marxists. Taking their cue from and Latin American dependencia school, African progressives placed the history of the development of underdevelopment and the role of imperialism as the process of worldwide accumulation, at the centre of their analysis and understanding. The traditional, they argued, was not quite traditional, nor the modern quite modern; rather both belonged to the system of international which reproduced development in the centres and underdevelopment in the peripheries (Rodney 1972). Development therefore was not a process of changing ‘pattern variables’ or looking for modernizing 6

elites but rather a process of class struggle. Inherited colonial societies called for fundamental transformation or revolutions. Controversies raged around issues of imperialism, class, and state; over identifying the forces of the African revolution and the forces of reaction (Shivji 1976, Tandon 1982).

Meanwhile, the state became both the site of power struggles as well as accumulation. Radical nationalists, who showed any vision of transforming their societies, were routed through military coups or assassinations. A few who survived compromised and became compradors or tolerated imperial arrogance for pragmatic reasons. Everywhere, politics became authoritarian, whether in the form of one-party states or outright military dictatorships. Liberal constitutional orders imposed by the departing colonial states did not survive as the underlying logic of the colonial despotic state reasserted itself (Shivji 1992).

The cold war context and the hegemonic imperatives of imperialism expressed themselves in utter intolerance of any radical nationalist or liberal initiatives. National self-determination and democracy were, and continue to be, the anti-thesis of imperialism.

State positions opened up opportunities for seeking rents. State and bureaucratic bourgeoisies typically exhibited all the vices that Fanon attributed to them. It is a ‘little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it.’ It is incapable of ‘great ideas or of inventiveness’ (ibid. 141) and is ‘already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.’, said Fanon (ibid. 123). Conspicuous consumption at home, a little investment in unproductive activities to make quick profits and a lot of stashing of funds in foreign bank accounts was, and perhaps still is, the typical characteristic of this class. Thus, very little serious domestic private accumulation took place. Local investment that did take place was public, by the state.

During the first one-and-half decade of independence, the African economies showed modest growth rates; modest in comparison to other continents but impressive given the initial conditions at the time of independence. Investment and savings ranged between 15 7

to 20 per cent of the GDP. Primary and secondary school enrolment was expanded. Tertiary education, which in many countries literally did not exist during colonial times, was introduced. Medical and health statistics also showed improvement. However, this growth and development was unsustainable. It was predicated on the reinforcement of colonial foundations.

Growth in agriculture production was based on extensive cultivation rather than a rise in productivity through chemicalization, mechanization and irrigation. It depended heavily on exports of a few primary commodities traded on a hostile and adverse international market. The growth in the manufacturing industry was heavily of the import-substitution type with little internal linkages and dependent on import of intermediary inputs. Investment was largely public while domestic private capital was stashed away in foreign countries. One estimate has it that by 1990, 37 per cent of Africa’s wealth had flown outside the continent. (Mkandawire & Soludo 1999:11) To top it all, foreign capital concentrated in extractive industries, which simply hemorrhaged the economy rather than contribute to its development.

During this period, the developmental state also borrowed heavily whether for productive or prestigious projects. Petro-dollars accumulated by international banks during the 1973 oil crisis were off-loaded in the form of cheap loans to developing countries. By the end of 1970s, cheap loans turned into heavy debt burdens. By this time, the limits of the early growth were also reached and the economic shocks of the late seventies plunged African economies into deep crisis. Numbers fell, growth rates became negative, debt repayments became unsustainable, fiscal imbalances went out of control, and so did inflation. Social services declined, infrastructure deteriorated and one after another, African governments found themselves at the door of IMF and the Paris Club pleading for mercy.

1980s, described by economists as Africa’s ‘lost decade’, was also the transition decade, which marked the beginning of the decline of developmentalism and the rise of neo- liberalism. In 1981, the World Bank published its notorious report, Accelerated Development for Africa: an Agenda for Africa. It was certainly an agenda for Africa set by the erstwhile Bretton Woods institutions with the backing of Western countries, but it 8

had little to do with development, accelerated or otherwise. The report and the subsequent structural adjustment programmes concentrated on stabilization measures: getting rid of budget deficits, bringing down rates of inflation, getting prices right, unleashing the market and liberalising trade. According to the World Bank, the villain of the declining economic performance in Africa was the state, it was corrupt and dictatorial, it had no capacity to manage the economy and allocate resources rationally, it was bloated with bureaucracy, and nepotism was its mode of operation. The BWIs would not bail out the crisis ridden economies unless the governments adopted structural adjustment programmes to get stabilization fundamentals right.

Balancing budgets involved cutting out subsidies to agriculture and social programmes, including education and health. Unleashing the market meant doing away with protection of infant industries and rolling back the state from economic activity. The results of SAPs were devastating, as many studies by researchers have shown. Social indicators like education, medical care, health, nutrition, rates of literacy and life expectancy all declined. Deindustrialization set in. Redundancies followed. In short, even some of the modest achievements of the nationalist or developmentalist period were lost or undermined.

As the international situation changed with the collapse of the , Western imperialist powers regained their ideological initiative (Furedi 1994). The neo-liberal package of marketisation, privatisation, and liberalisation now became the policy for, but not of the African states. Good performers would be praised and rewarded with more aid while the insubordinate and recalcitrant would be parodied and left to their own wit. While aid had always come with strings, now there was no attempt to disguise it. Political conditionalities were added to economic conditionalities. Policy making slipped out of the hands of the African state as Western financed policy consultants in their thousands jetted all over the continent with blue prints of policy on Poverty Reduction Strategies and manuals on good governance on their computers, gobbling up some 4 billion dollars annually. In 1985, to give just one example, foreign experts resident in Equatorial Guinea were paid an amount three times the total government wage bill of the public sector.(Mkandawire & Soludo ibid.:137) 9

National liberation ideologies have been rubbished and national self-determination itself has been declared passé. Africa is told, it has only one choice: either to get integrated fully into the globalized world or be marginalised. The specter of marginalisation haunts African elites. African leaders are left with few options: ‘you are either with globalisation or doomed!’ They have fallen in line one after another even if it means disowning their own nationalist past. Blair’s Commission for Africa, which consisted of prominent Africans including one president and one prime minister, castigates the whole of last three decades, which virtually means the whole of post-independence period, as “lost decades”. The primary responsibility is placed on the African state for bad governance and lack of accountability, totally ignoring the role of imperialism in both the exploitation of African resources and supporting of non-democratic states when it suited their interests. Africans are told they have no capacity to think and African states are told they have no capacity to make correct policies. The Blair Commission for Africa declares with a straight face:

Africa’s history over the last fifty years has been blighted by two areas of weakness. These have been capacity – the ability to design and deliver policies; and accountability – how well a state answers to its people. (p. 14 )( emphasis in the original).

So policy-making, an important aspect of sovereignty, has been wrenched out of the hands of the African state. Two African scholars painfully observe:

A major irony of African development history is that the theories and models employed have largely come from outside the continent. No other region of the world has been so dominated by external ideas and models. (Mkandawire & Soludo ibid.:vii)

All in all, neo-liberalism represents the defeat of the national project and the resurrection of the imperial onslaught. However, it is bound to be short-lived. Its limits are becoming clear as the World Bank gropes for examples of successful SAPs, which shift every five or so years, from the Ghana of the early 1990s, through Uganda of the mid-90s to Tanzania of today. But, even today’s Tanzania, is showing signs of disowning Mkapa’s blatant neo-liberalism, if only rhetorically, as the new ‘populist’ president settles in the seat of power. 10

African scholars, as I said, are beginning to revisit the national project, some with nostalgia others for inspiration (Yieke 2005). Whatever be the case, the African progressive opinion must go beyond the ideologies of nationalism to discourse on different paths of development. One such path is national autonomous development, which I discuss next.

Debates around National Autonomous Development The conceptualization of national autonomous development (NAD) was present, although not always explicit, in the discourses on development during the nationalist period. To facilitate exposition, I will first quickly look at the debates on ‘development of underdevelopment’ and Samir Amin’s delinking theories. I will then take up more concretely the evolution of Tanzania’s policy of ‘socialism and self-reliance’ under the Arusha Declaration of 1967 and its left critique. The discourse and debates of the ‘60s and ‘70s in Tanzania interestingly illustrates the potential and the limits of the concept of national autonomous development (for a review of the debates at the University of Dar es Salaam see Shivji .1990)

Underdevelopment and De-linking The underdevelopment proponents in my view were quite successful in demolishing the modernization paradigms of the early post-independence period. Modernization presented the African economies as dualist or dichotomous: traditional/modern, rural/urban, civil/customary, etc. The underdevelopmentalists showed that what appeared as dual and dichotomous was in fact integrated in a single system of world capitalism. Furthermore, it had developed historically as a relationship between the metropolitan centres and the colonies. Independence by itself did not end this relationship.

The strength of the underdevelopment discourse was to show the historical process of the development of underdevelopment and expose the linkages of the African economy with imperialism. Its weakness lay in its strongly structuralist and economistic bias. It did not quite succeed to bring out the way imperialist relationships were internalised in the social relationships within national societies and therefore failed to discern the processes of the reproduction of underdevelopment. Very often, therefore, underdevelopementalists 11

missed out the politics of imperialism and nationalism thus sounding somewhat abstract and excessively critical.

Its second weakness was that it did not present clearly an alternative model of development. In sum, if one may be allowed to simplify somewhat, the underdevelopment discourse was strong on the history of development of underdevelopment but weak on the politics of the development of development.

Samir Amin’s theorization on de-linking, on the other hand, had a more subtle and nuanced presentation of underdevelopment based on the accumulation model of the centre and the periphery. Amin proposed a four sector analysis: 1) production of the means of production: 2) production of goods for mass consumption: 3) luxury production/consumption: 4) exports. The autocentric model characterizes the centre where the determining interlinkage is between sectors 1) and 2). The extraverted model in which the determining interlinkage is between sectors 3) and 4) governs the periphery. It follows therefore that the alternative path of development would be based on developing the interlinkage between sector 1) and 2) (Amin 1990a, 7-8). The movement from the periphery to the autocentric model is of course a question of concrete history and politics.

Amin’s critiques often caricatured his model of de-linking as autarkic and mechanistic. This is obviously wrong. Amin emphasised that his delinking was not synonymous with autarky; rather the concept of delinking was to convey the idea that external relations must be subordinated to the logic of internal development (Amin 1990b, xii). Again, in his various writings, Amin does paint in broad strokes the class configurations, which reproduce the periphery model while positing class alliances that have the potential for delinking, and moving towards an autocentric model of accumulation. Of necessity, these are abstract and somewhat generalised class characterizations such as compradorial blocs as opposed to national popular blocs, etc. However, Amin’s theorization can be usefully deployed both for critiquing existing processes of underdevelopment and developing alternative paths of development in concrete conditions.*

* For example, I find useful as a guideline Founou-Tchuigoua’s summary of Amin’s five essential conditions of the accumulation process that the local state/ruling class must have control over for national autonomous development. These conditions are: 12

Next, I briefly discuss the Arusha model in Tanzania, which in many ways brings out the critical significance of the elements discussed above.

The Arusha Model On the morrow of independence, Tanzania was a textbook case of a typical colonial economy. The smallholders who produced food for subsistence and cotton, coffee, cashew nuts and tea for export dominated its agriculture. The major plantation crop was sisal whose importance declined in later years. There were hardly any industrial plants beyond a few started after the Second World War. Most capital, intermediate, and consumer goods were imported either directly from outside or via Kenya. The local entrepreneurial class almost exclusively composed of immigrant Indians (or popularly, though wrongly, called Asians in ) were largely involved in commerce. There was hardly any indigenous entrepreneurial class; in any case, the colonial laws on “native credit” had deliberately discouraged its development.

The First Three Year Plan was based on the World Bank’s report, which prescribed modernization of agriculture through improvement and transformation approaches and its further integration into the world capitalist market; attraction and protection of foreign investments and import substitution industrialization.

Foreign investment did not oblige. Capital for the little import-substitution industrialization that did take place came from local Asian businessmen who branched

(1) local control of the reproduction of the labour force, which presupposes that at a first stage state policy ensures that that agriculture develops in such a way as to be capable of producing sufficient food surpluses at prices compatible with the demands of accumulation; (2) local control of the centralization of the surplus, which supposes not only the formal existence of national financial institutions but also their relative autonomy from the flows of transnational capital, guaranteeing national capacity to determine how it is invested; (3) local control of the market (largely in fact reserved for national production, even in the absence of high tariff or other protection) and the complementary capacity to be competitive on the world market, at least selectively; (4) local control of natural resources, which supposes, beyond formal ownership, the nation-state having the capacity to exploit them or keep them in reserve; in that sense the oil countries, which are not, in fact, free ‘to turn off the tap’ do not have this control; (5) finally, local control of technologies in the sense that, whether locally invented or imported, they can be rapidly reproduced without indefinitely relying on importing essential inputs. (Op.cit, 1990b 192-3] 13

out from commerce into industries and multinationals from Kenya who opened subsidiaries in Tanzania to capture the Tanzanian market behind protective tariff walls (see generally Silver 1984). Capital-intensive rural settlements and large-scale ranches opened with USAID aid were a disaster as peasants and nomadic pastoralist reverted to their old ways of smallholder “independence” rather than live as “settlers” controlled by managers (see generally Coulson 1982). We need not go into detail as to the immediate causes of the Arusha Declaration. Suffice it to say that in 1967, the ruling party formally adopted its policy of Socialism and Self-reliance in the famous Arusha declaration (Nyerere 1968). This was the high point of the nationalist period but also the beginning of state authoritarianism and suppression of civil society.

Main pillars and practice of the Arusha Declaration The vision of the Arusha Declaration was woven around the ruling party, TANU’s, ten tenets, or beliefs, which were summed up in the five major elements or pillars of the Arusha Declaration. These were: 1) Public ownership or state control of the major means of production; 2) Self-reliance; 3) Rural development; 4) Democratic participation of the people; and 5) the Leadership Code. Taken together, these elements could be considered as pointing towards some kind of national autonomous development, at least, on the ideological plane. In political practice and economic policy, however, the development of post-Arusha Tanzania betrayed and undermined the very basis of national autonomous development, whether capitalist or socialist.

1) Public ownership was exclusively translated into state ownership and some party zealots extended state ownership even to retail businesses, including butcheries and petrol stations. More significantly, though, the parastatal sector became huge, unwieldy and bureaucratic – some 400 corporations at the peak – as the industrial sector expanded. Although, agriculture was supposed to be given priority, in practice it is the industrial sector, which received more money much of which was in the form of project funds coming through foreign aid and loans. Thus, the industrial sector became a hotchpotch of projects often pushed through by the sales representatives of multinationals without regard to national needs. Thus useful and important projects, which would answer to the needs of building a national economy, like the Friendship Textile Mill, sat side by side, 14

with white elephant projects like the massive Kilimanjaro airport. Worse, since industrial plants were put up project by project, there was no holistic and integrated plan to ensure choice of appropriate technology (for example, labour-intensive vs. capital-intensive); or to ensure upstream and downstream linkages with agriculture and local market respectively. To give just one example: The Friendship Textile Mill was built in 1968 with the help of a generous Chinese loan. A French company, Sodefra, which also took a minority share in the equity, designed the Mwanza Textile Mill (Mwatex) built in 1969. Both Mills were large-scale integrated spinning and weaving mills based on local cotton crop. The capital cost for Mwatex was more than one-and-half times that of Friendship; in 1975 Mwatex produced one-and-half million meters less than Friendship; whereas Friendship employed over 5000 workers, Mwatex employed a little less than 2500, that is half of Friendship’s labour force while at the same time making less profit than Friendship (Coulson 1982, 282).

Most parastatals entered into joint ventures with multinationals and or signed expensive management contracts. Studies showed that there was far more of surplus drained out of the country in the parastatal sector then even in the private sector. ‘In 1973 the older firms generated domestic savings valued at 32 per cent of their capital stock, while the newer firms saved less that 4 per cent. Nearly 80 per cent pf the value added in the older firms was retained within the country, but only 50 per cent of the value added in the more recent firms’ (Coulson 1982, 280-81, see also case studies in Coulson 1979). The parastatals thus became the vehicles for transferring surplus out of the economy (ibid.). The net result was that the industrial development in Tanzania under public ownership turned out to be greater integration into the world capitalist system resulting in deeper imperialist exploitation. The scenario repeated in other sectors as well. This scenario could not be explained simply by the incompetence or ignorance of local management – all of which, no doubt, was there – but the collusion and corruption of local decision- makers and bureaucrats with the multinationals.

2) Self-reliance: The Arusha Declaration proclaimed that the country could not depend on foreign gifts, loans and investments because it was not available, but even if it were available, it would endanger the national independence and the policy to build a socialist society. Yet, in practice, more foreign aid flowed into the country after the Arusha 15

Declaration than before. In the six years before the Arusha Declaration, the country received foreign aid (external loans and grants) amounting to a total of T.shs.588.2 million. In the six years after the Declaration it received total foreign aid of T.shs.1730.3 million, that is three times the pre-Arusha period. 80 per cent of this aid came from the capitalist West including the US-dominated world agencies. 17 per cent of aid came from socialist countries, all of which came after the Arusha declaration, and was almost totally from China (Shivji 1976, 161). Over the 1970s, almost 40 per cent of Tanzania’s public expenditures was covered by external resources. On per capita basis, Tanzania received US$44 in aid in 1982 compared to Mali’s 36 and Malawi’s 24 (Founou-Tchuigoua 1990b, 203). Thus in spite of its declaration on self-reliance, the country became far more dependent after the Arusha Declaration than before.

3) Rural development: The Arusha Declaration somewhat obliquely recognises that the basis of Tanzania’s development should be agriculture. The later paper on ‘Socialism and Rural Development’ (September 1967, Nyerere 1968, 337) more explicitly sets out how rural Tanzania should be organised to ensure the building of socialism. Arguing that the traditional African society was based on the principles of working and sharing together and living as a community, the paper argues for organising rural production on communal basis in Ujamaa villages. The paper recognises the limits of traditional community, particularly in respect of gender inequality and poverty, both of which should be overcome in rural Tanzania that aspires to be socialist.

The paper also recognises the beginnings of rural differentiation particularly in the areas growing cash crops for the market. Calling this ‘capitalist agriculture’, the paper quite explicitly portrays the rich peasant or kulak economy in a negative light.

The small-scale capitalist agriculture we now have is not really a danger; but our feet are on the wrong path, and if we continue to encourage or even help the development of agricultural capitalism, we shall never become a socialist state. On the contrary, we shall be continuing the break-up of the traditional concepts of human equality based on sharing all the necessities of life and on a universal obligation to work. This characterization of rich peasant economy was later to develop into hostility towards rich peasants who were condemned as mabepari (capitalists) and makabaila (feudalists). 16

Thus, for example, the maize farmers of Ismani in Iringa , the wheat farmers of Basotu in Hanang and Karatu were subjected to the so-called “land reform” during the villagisation era. The irony of it all was that these “exploiters” were replaced, say, in the case of Basotu wheat farmers, by large scale prairie farming under the bureaucratic management of the agriculture parastatal NAFCO (National Food and Agricultural Organisation) assisted by Canadian aid. Just as in the case of industries, the rural development projects too were heavily dependent on project financing from Western, including World Bank, aid. In fact, the whole country was shared out among Western donors in the so-called Rural Integrated Programmes (or RIPs).

Rationalised and ideologised by the policy on rural socialism, the earlier experiments in village settlement were now transformed into creation of Ujamaa villages, which was to be done by persuasion. Again, ironically, for various political reasons, some of the experiments in ‘rural ujamaa’ initiated from the bottom, predating the Arusha Declaration were banned. The whole project became, like much else, top-down and statist. The gradualism and persuasion of the Arusha Declaration was soon given up as the party stalwarts became impatient. The party decided that living in villages was no longer voluntary; that peasants had no choice but to move to what were called development villages. Between 1972 and1974, the Government mounted a big operation as over 9 million rural inhabitants were resettled in some 8000 villages planned by town planners (URT 1994). Paramilitary forces used considerable force and the population went through a lot of suffering. Under the guise of bringing people together so that they could be given services, all kinds of irrational bureaucratic decisions were made without consulting the peasants themselves who knew their terrain and environment better. The villagisation only accelerated the crisis of export-oriented monoculture agriculture based on hand hoe economy. By the end of 1970s, the economy entered its worst crisis. Politically too the state began to lose its legitimacy.

4) Democratic participation: The Arusha Declaration describes Tanzanian socialism as democratic in a lofty language, which no one could default. The practice was anything but democratic. By 1967, the country was already a de jure one-party state. Just a year before it became one-party, it had abolished autonomous trade unions and replaced them with a state-trade union. Following the 1971 Mwongozo, or party guidelines, which 17

decried arrogant management, workers organised themselves spontaneously in wild cat strikes and take-over of factories. The state dealt with it with high-handed force using the notorious Field Force Unit. In his May Day speech of 1974, Nyerere bitterly condemned the workers movement, which demoralized the working class. This was a clear signal that the Tanzanian state would not tolerate any bottom-up or independent movement or expression of even official ideology.

In 1972, under a misguided programme called decentralization, planned and executed by an American multinational, the local government system was abolished. The central government bureaucracy was brought closer to the people. The decentralization was utterly bureaucratic and there was virtually nothing about it, which could be described as democratic or participatory (Mushi 1978).

In 1975 the party was declared supreme; in 1976 the semi-independent co-operatives were abolished to be replaced by state run crop authorities and by 1978 the last autonomous student body at the University of Dar es Salaam was banned and a country- wide student organisation under the hegemony of the party was established. Thus, the civil society was statised. Organisational hegemony was one of the ugly faces of Ujamaa politics, which disarmed the people, and thus, when neo-liberalism struck, there was no organised force to resist it; rather the intelligentsia uncritically swung to the world of spurious NGOs and praises of civil society without regard to its contradictions (see generally Shivji 1986).

In sum, given Nyerere’s own personal integrity and the credentials of a ‘bourgeois democrat’, as he described himself once, the polity could not be described as dictatorial, but it was certainly top-down, bureaucratic, oppressive, and authoritarian.

5) The Leadership Code: Together with the Arusha Declaration came the Leadership Code which barred a party or government leader from indulging in capitalist practices – owning a house for rental, having more than one income, or directorship in private companies or employing labour. Thus, unlike many other African countries, the independence elite could not openly use the state for private accumulation. Formally, the ratio between highest and lowest income earners in the public sector did decrease yet this is not to say that the state bureaucracy was angelic. It did indulge in conspicuous 18

consumption and with the wearing down of the initial Arusha euphoria and the expansion of the parastatal sector, corruption set in. The extent of private accumulation and aspirations became clear only in the mid ‘80s when the former “socialist” bureaucracy was first to trumpet and embrace capitalist practices. In the early 1980s, when the then prime minister Sokoine, launched his drive against economic saboteurs, it is rumoured that he sent a list of saboteurs in the cabinet to Nyerere. 80 per cent of the Cabinet was on it. On seeing the list, Mwalimu exclaimed, How will I run the state if I were to dismiss all these?

Summing up the Arusha Model In sum, the Arusha Model had the various ideological elements pointing towards and having the potential for a national autonomous development. But its main author, ideologue and political leader did not have either the theory or politics consonant with NAD. The only political leader under Nyerere who had some kind of a vision of NAD was the late Sokoine who became prime minister in the early 1980s, at the time of deep economic and political crisis (Shivji 1993). However, he did not live long to concretize his vision. He was killed in a car accident.

There was some credible critique of the Arusha Model from the Left on the University Campus deriving its premises from the underdevelopment, delinking, and Marxist debates of the time. They posited a model of a nationally integrated economy with interlinkage between the agriculture and the industrial sectors on the one hand, and between producer goods and light industries producing for mass consumption, on the other (Shivji 1976). Within the Government, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, a veteran Zanzibari Marxist, similarly expounded ideas of nationally integrated economy. In his characteristic journalistic style, borrowing from the Chinese model, Babu expounded what he called seven great relationships, in each case identifying what he called the ‘key link’, thus:

• between town and country, key link = the country; • between agriculture and industry, key link = agriculture; • between heavy and light industry, key link = heavy industry; • between producer goods and consumer goods, key link = producer goods; • between food crops and industrial raw materials, key link = food crops; 19

• between mass goods and luxury goods, key link = mass goods; • between internal and international markets, key link = internal markets. While identifying the key links, Babu urged planned and proportional development of the components. However, Babu did not have Nyerere’s ear and in any case, he was dropped from the cabinet in 1972, and soon after detained without trial for six years by Nyerere at the behest of Zanzibaris who accused him of involvement in Karume’s assassination.

The intellectual Left critique on the Campus did not have much influence either. It was miniscule and had no links with the people or influence to carry any weight. In any case, Nyerere had little regard for his own intellectuals.* His theoreticians, if you like, were the expatriate ‘left’ intellectuals, self-identified as democratic socialists.** They were much more policy advisers, rather than theoreticians of Ujamaa. Their limits were also the limits of the Arusha Model to which I now turn.

From the standpoint of NAD, I shall point out four problems of the Arusha Model at a general and theoretical level. First, the Arusha model and Nyerere himself had absolutely no inkling about the need and process of ‘delinking’ from the world capitalist system or imperialism. As a nationalist, Nyerere’s ideological rhetoric often sounded anti- imperialist but its implications in terms of the path of development were never clear nor appreciated. It is not surprising therefore that the Ujamaa ‘experiment’ was heavily underwritten by finance from the Western world, including the World Bank.

Secondly, the practice of the Arusha Declaration reinforced the extraverted colonial economy with its industrial and agriculture sectors tied vertically to the economies of the centre rather than integrated internally. Both the villagisation programme and the import substitution or export-oriented industrial strategy, at least in the initial period, was a continuation from the late colonial period.

* For example, Justinian Rweyemamu, a brilliant Tanzanian economist who wrote Underdevelopment and Industrialization in Tanzania: A Study of Perverse Capitalist Industrial Development (1973) was at some point appointed Mwalimu Nyerere’s personal assistant but found difficult to reach Mwalimu past his personal secretary, the Fabian, Ms. Joan Wicken. ** In a book edited by Mwansanu and Pratt, Pratt listed the democratic socialists as including ‘Reginal Green, Goran Hyden, Helge Kjekshus, Bismarck Mwansasu, Jon Moris, Samuel Mushi, Cuthbert Omari, Cranford Pratt, Knud-Erik Svensden, and of course, Julius Nyerere.’ Among these there were no doubt some fine critical scholars like Kjekshus and Mushi and Pratt himself but their theoretical limits never allowed them to diagnose the problems of the Arusha Model (Mwansau & Pratt, eds., 1979, 233fn.3) 20

Thirdly, the whole development strategy had no deep understanding of the character and mode of accumulation necessary for NAD in the Tanzanian conditions. For instance, the hostility to rich peasant who could have provided the nucleus for ‘accumulation from below’ was utterly misconceived. Much later in the 1990s, the Presidential Land Commission, which I had the honour to chair, tried to develop an alternative path of development based on the model of ‘accumulation from below’. It argued that the social agency for such an accumulation would be the rich peasant producing mainly food for the local market and raw materials for industry, thus propelling the development of a nationally integrated economy. The Commission observed:

…[T]he Commission recognises that there are forces within the peasant and pastoral communities capable of generating, accumulating and reinvesting capital in the rural sector. These forces develop spontaneously as a result of differentiation in the smallholder economy. In the literature, they are often described as ‘rich peasants’ or kulaks. We distinguish them from capitalist farmers. Unlike the latter, the former are not simply managers and supervisors but continue to work on their land. In the past, they were identified as ‘real exploiters’ and thus stifled and suppressed. We believe that at this stage of our development they are one possible agency of accumulation from below or a national agrarian and pastoral development, albeit capitalist. There is some chance that such type of development would be organic and integral to our society, national and democratic in character and sustainable in the long run. We hasten to add that there is no guarantee that the rich peasantry would necessarily lead towards nationalist development for that depends on larger macroeconomic and social environment, both domestic as well as international, the investigation of which is beyond the Commission’s terms of reference. (URT 1994, 138) Fourthly, the whole Arusha process was a top-down, statist, and authoritarian project. Understandably, it had no conception of the class character of the project although the Arusha Declaration projected the vision of a classless society where there is no ‘exploitation of man by man’. In effect, therefore, workers and peasants, in whose name the Declaration was proclaimed were not part of the ruling bloc. Rather, the objective process set in train was one of compradorial state capitalism with the local bureaucratic 21

bourgeoisie as the ruling class. No doubt, Nyerere’s radical nationalism allowed him to be relatively independent in his foreign policy. His personal integrity and popularity helped to suppress some of the outrageous ambitions of the bureaucracy. No doubt, in the area of social services – education, health, water, etc.,- Nyerere’s regime scored some successes. But these were not integrated in a model of accumulation whereby education and health would not be simply considered services but necessary investment towards NAD. Thus, these achievements could not be sustained and were actually reversed in the 1980s. With neo-liberalism, the state disowned its responsibility to educate, cloth, maintain and care for its people. .

Conclusion This is a subject, which cannot be concluded. My aim has been to restart a conversation on alternative paths of development as neo-liberalism begins to wear down. Of recent, African intellectuals are returning to the nationalist project (Yieke 2005). This must not be left at simply ideological and political levels. We must return to the debates on the alternative paths of development. In this regard, I think the concept of NAD is a fruitful point of departure. Of course, we need to deepen and develop it along several dimensions. I will tentatively mention three, all at the level of political discourse, because ultimately, development strategy is a question of politics.

Firstly, we need to develop a deep understanding of the politics of the state and the politics of the people. In each of our concrete conditions, we need to move away from the generalised characterizations of the ruling blocs as compradorial, and forces of resistance as ‘national popular’, to more concrete and nuanced understanding of the class configurations in our societies. At a certain level, of course, generalizations are useful but they have to be concretized, socially, historically and politically.

At a lower order of political discourse of change and transformation, I am suggesting we need to explore several shifts as compared to the discourse of the post-independence period:

• from political party to social movement;

• from vanguardist-insurrection to mass struggles; 22

• from ideological struggles to insurrection of ideas;

• from top-down liberal democracy at the level of the state, to bottom-up popular democracy at the level of the village; and so on.

Secondly, we need to revisit the Pan-Africanism of the immediate pre-independence period and bring it back to the centre stage of the African discourse. I have done this elsewhere and will not go into details (Shivji 2005b). Suffice it to say that, while well- resourced individual African countries can mount credible development initiatives, they cannot individually resist the imperialist political assault. The Pan-Africanism that we need to resurrect therefore is political Pan-Africanism at the continental level, which transcends regionalism, whether economic or political. Only thus can Africa resist present day imperialism called globalization. In short, the nationalism of the present era is Pan-Africanism.

Thirdly, there is no way Africa can seriously develop and maintain its independence unless it clearly and unambiguously disengages from imperialism. And, I believe, the shifting hegemonies at the world level is perhaps creating a relative space for Africa which needs to be carefully utilized. The recent move to greater independence from the superpower in Latin America is an interesting pre-cursor worth learning from.

Finally, we, the African intellectuals, need to re-examine our own roles. Are we going to be politician-intellectuals or neutral scholars serving the state and imperialism, in one case consciously, in the other ignorantly? Or are we going to be public intellectuals, political enough to give expression to the hopes and fears of the masses, but intellectual enough to keep distance from power-mongering?

As Africa emerges from the rude neo-liberal diversion, it needs a critical mass of Pan- Africanist public intellectuals who would spark the ‘insurrection of ideas’ towards the struggle against new form of imperialism called globalization. This time around, the struggle is not so much to ‘re-become Africans’ (to use Cabral’s phrase in relation to the nationalist movement) but rather to resist being de-Africanized.

***

23

Selected bibliography Adedeji, A., ed. 1993, Africa within the World: Beyond Dispossession and Dependence, : Zed books. Amara, H. A. & Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua eds. 1990, African Agriculture: The Critical Choices, London: Zed/UNU. Amin, S., 1990a, ‘The Agricultural Revolution and Industrialization,’ in Amara, H. A. & Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua eds. 1990, African Agriculture: The Critical Choices, op.cit. Amin, S. 1990b, ‘Preface to Azzam Mahjoub ed. Adjustment or Delinking? Op.cit. Cabral, A., 1980, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, London: Heinemann. Coulson, A., 1979, African Socialism in Practice: The Tanzanian Experience, London: Spokesman. Coulson A., 1982, Tanzania: A Political Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanon, F., 1963, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin. Founou-Tchuigoua, B. 1990a, ‘Food Self-sufficiency: Crisis of the Collective Ideology’, in Amara, H. A. & Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua eds. 1990, African Agriculture: The Critical Choices, op. cit. Founou-Tchuigoua, B. 1990b, ‘Agricultural Development without Delinking: Lessons to be Drawn’, in Amara, H. A. & Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua eds. 1990, African Agriculture: The Critical Choices. Furedi, F., 1994, The New Ideology of Imperialism, London: Pluto. Campbell, H., & H. Stein, eds., 1991, The IMF and Tanzania, Harare: SAPES. Himmelstrand, U. et. al. eds., 1994, African Perspectives on Development, London: James Currey. Hyden, G., 1980, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry, Berkely & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Legum, L., 1965, Pan-Africanism: A short political guide, (Revised edition) London: Pall Mall Press. Luthuli, A. et. al, 1964, Africa’s Freedom, London: Unwin Books. Mahjoub, A. (ed.) 1990, Adjustment or De-linking? The African Experience, London: Zed/UNU. Mkandawire, T. & C. C. Soludo, eds., 1999, Our Continent, Our Future”: African perspectives on structural adjustment, Dakar: CODESRIA. Mushi, S. S. 1978, ‘Popular Participation and Regional Development Planning: The Politics of Decentralized Administration’, Tanzania Notes and Records 83, 63-97. Mwansasu, B., & Cranford Pratt eds., 1979, Towards Socialism in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House) 24

Nyerere, J. K., 1967, Freedom and Unity: a selection from writings and speeches, Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press. Nyerere, J. K. 1968, Freedom and Socialism, London: OUP. Othman, H. ed. 2001, Babu: I Saw the Future and it Works (Dar es Salaam: E&D) Rodney, W. 1972, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House. Shivji, I. G. 1976, Class Struggles in Tanzania, London: Heinemann. Shivji, I. G. ed. 1986, The State and the Working People, Dakar: CODESRIA. Shivji, I. G. 1990, ‘Tanzania: The Debate on Delinking’, in Mahjoub, A. ed. Adjustment or De-linking? The African Experience op.cit. Shivji, I. G., ed. 1991 State and Constitutionalism: An African Debate on Democracy, Harare: SAPES. Shivji, I. G. 1993, National Autonomous Development in the Thought of Edward Moringe Sokoine , Second Sokoine Memorial Lecture Change, Nov./Dec., 1993. Shivji, I. G., 2001, ‘Babu: A Man of Continental Vision’, in Othman ed. 2001, Babu: I Saw the Future and it Works, op.cit. Shivji, I. G. 2005a, ‘The Rise, the Fall and the Insurrection of Nationalism in Africa’, in Felicia Arudo Yieke ed. op.cit. Shivji, I. G. 2005b, Pan-Africanism or Imperialism? Unity and Struggle Towards a New Democratic Africa, Billy Dudley Memorial Lecture Series No. 2 (Nigerian Political Science Association) Silver, M.S., 1984, The Growth of Manufacturing Industry in Tanzania: An Economic History (Boulder and London: West View Press) Tandon, Y., 1982, University of Dar es Salaam: debate on class, state & imperialism, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House. United Republic of Tanzania, 1994, Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters, vol.1, (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies) Yieke, F. A. ed. 2005, East Africa: In Search of National and Regional Renewal, Dakar: CODESRIA.