A new document produced by Mkombozi serves as a manual for educators delivering Non-Formal Education (NFE) in Tanzania. Mkombozi is a child-focussed agency based in the north of the country. The authors argue that the Mkombozi NFE principles and practice would be applicable in a schools based context and would be of value to the Tanzanian education system.

While the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a "bright idea", the "hidden agenda" of western countries makes it impossible for African states like Tanzania to achieve the goals, expounds actor Rashid Mkwinda. He is one of the people whose thoughts IPS canvassed in the streets of Dar es Salaam in a series of random interviews about the MDGs.

The Indian government has increased its annual quota for scholarships offered to Tanzanians to 100 to help with vocational training in the east African country. The increase was announced by the Dar es Salaam-based Indian High Commission in a press statement available on Thursday.

Chronic or recent infection with the genital herpes virus (HSV-2) increases the risk of acquiring HIV more than four- and five-fold, respectively, according to research undertaken amongst high-risk women in Tanzania and published online ahead of print in the May 1st issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Tanzania Gender Networking Programme has issued a strong statement condemning profit hungry companies that came to Africa to reap profits from our natural resources such as water.

A new report by the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) looks at the options and challenges faced with regard to connectivity in Tanzania and gives an overview of types of connectivity available. Although rural connectivity is feasible in all areas of Tanzania, there are several challenges: The issue of last mile infrastructure, the cost of service, the ‘appropriateness’ of the type of services available and the support and sustainability of the service.

Tanzanian authorities are disturbed by the increasing number of teachers killed by HIV/AIDS. According to the latest report, between 1996 and 2006, 193 teachers died of HIV and AIDS-related diseases in the country's south-western district of Mbeya alone.

The number of tuberculosis cases in Tanzania has risen from 39,000 a decade ago to 64,200 in 2005, a trend blamed on high HIV/AIDS prevalence, the Health Minister, David Mwakyusa, said on Thursday. "Research conducted in many parts of the country by the Ministry of Health between 2003 and 2004 established that HIV/AIDS contributes to increased TB cases by about 60 percent," the minister said.

The standoff between the Zanzibar government and the Union parliament over the operations of the Tanzania Human Rights and Good Governance Commission has ended. Commission vice chairman Mohamed Ramia last week said it will start operations on the Isles this month.

Tens of thousands of residents of northwestern Tanzania who speak the Kinyarwanda language have been deported to neighbouring Rwanda in the past nine months after they allegedly refused to acquire resident permits or become naturalised Tanzanians, officials said.

The number of people helped by UNHCR to return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from Tanzania has hit the 25,000 mark. The UNHCR-assisted return programme for Congolese refugees in Tanzania began in October 2005, and as UNHCR reports, the challenges of sustainable reintegration are becoming greater as more and more people opt to return home.

Just more than a year after Jakaya Kikwete was elected president of Tanzania his name was mentioned in the halls at the Africa Union (AU) summit in January in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as the possible new chairperson of the AU. As IPS reports, the fact that Kikwete's name was mentioned made delegates take note of the progress Tanzania has made under his leadership , not least towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The Bishop of Central Tanganyika, the Rt Revd Godfrey Mdimi Mhogolo, has said that the issue of homosexuality was not fundamental to the Christian faith. “We share the sufferings and hurts of the people we serve...We also work for the hope of glory in trying to transform the lives of our people, regardless of their colour, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and social status”, he added.

The number of refugees in United Nations camps in northwestern Tanzania has dropped from 350, 590 in 2005 to 287,061 in 2006, below the 300,000 mark. The number of refugee camps in the country is also expected to soon decrease from 11 to eight. Yacoub el-Hillo, United Nations High Commission for Refugees country representative to Tanzania, has attributed the decrease of refugees to voluntary repatriation thanks to improvement of political situations in the origin countries of refugees.

The government of Tanzania's semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar will not lift a ban imposed in 2005 on poultry imports, despite pressure from poultry farmers and retailers, the island's Chief Minister, Shamsi Vuai Nahodha, said on Thursday. The ban will remain in force indefinitely," Nahodha said in a statement issued in the capital, Stone Town.

HakiElimu is one of the leading CSOs in Tanzania. Our vision is to realize public education and debate that enhances citizen agency, fosters creativity and critical thinking, and advances human rights and democracy. For more information visit or google ‘HakiElimu’. For more information on this position, visit the website.

The Guardian reports that BAE Systems, the UK's biggest arms supplier secretly paid a $12m commission into a Swiss account belonging to a well-connected local middleman, in a deal which led to Tanzania buying a controversial military radar system.

The head of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki Moon, picked Tanzania's Foreign Minister as the first woman UN Deputy Secretary General on Friday. Asha-Rose Migiro takes over the post previously occupied by Britain's Sir Mark Malloch Brown.

President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete came to power on a populist vote. Wamachinga, the semi-employed and unemployed youth of Dar es Salaam symbolized his populist support. He promised them one million jobs.

Kikwete’s first task was to convert his populist support into a popular support. Populism is fragile; it is ambivalent and can go in either direction, progressive or reactionary. In a country like Tanzania with over 12,000 villages, in which live some 80 per cent of the population, mostly smallholder peasants, converting populism to popularity means establishing a close rapport with village communities.

Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere did have such rapport but it was top-down, paternalistic. Mwalimu did not see peasants as an agency for change; peasants could not bring about change, rather he saw change being brought to them. Edward Moringe Sokoine had a developmental conception of the village. Sokoine saw the village as a harbinger of self-reliant, national development and the peasant (a rich peasant?) as an agency of change. Whatever the differences, there was one fundamental thing common to them. Both men were persons of unimpeachable personal integrity, which endeared them to the masses and strengthened them against pressures from local reactionary and foreign imperialist forces.

A fourth phase president who would make a difference would have had to combine the popular rapport of a Kambarage with the sober developmental vision of a Moringe. We therefore needed a JMK. In his first year, I envisioned President Kikwete in khaki perched on a landrover conversing with villagers, visiting even those villages where they still think Nyerere is the president. It was not to be. Instead, we found the President jet-trotting to foreign lands, including the most hated bullies of this world, chasing ‘development’. If investors needed to be charmed, that could well have been done by his charming Prime Minister. But JK needed to be in the country to transform himself into a JMK.

While the populist support was not converted into a popular support, worse, within one year the President lost even his populist support, thanks to his short-sighted lieutenants who mercilessly chased away Wamachinga thus piling up the numbers of unemployed. Now the President will have to create not one million, but perhaps 1.4 million jobs to accommodate the former Wamachingas!

The Cabinet

The ‘who’s who’ in the cabinet would give a signal of the President’s direction. In the people’s perception, the previous vigogo had indulged in an orgy of self-enrichment, ujasiriamali. They could not name names in public for fear of being persecuted by the State but in their palavers - majiweni and mabarazani - they could tell you who owned what and how he/she got it. The tip of the iceberg was an utterly inexplicable sale of government houses.

True, Mwalimu’s leadership code was killed and buried in Zanzibar by Mzee Ruksa. What we did not know then was that it was a signal to forsake even elementary political ethics. In the second half of the third phase government the neo-wabenzi, against whom the leadership code was promulgated in the first place, went berserk, holding directorships in companies, sometimes in the very sector under your ministry; awarding tenders to sons, and cousins and girlfriends; accumulating real estate; having a finger in every business pie, fair or foul, and much more. People were not only disappointed with this type of ujasiriamali, they were simply disgusted - and despaired.

People expected a messiah in JK who would deliver them from the orgy of self-enrichment. They expected him to signal a different direction by, at least, choosing into his cabinet people of unquestionable personal integrity. As a symbolic gesture he would have perhaps declared that those who took government houses had disqualified themselves from the potential pool of ministers. That alone would have sent a signal that he meant business, that he was truly a man of the people. And Kikwete could have done it; he was riding on a wave of 80 per cent vote. For reasons best known to him and his advisers, the president rubbed salt into the wound by announcing that he too had “bought” a government house!

CCM appointments

The 2005 nomination process of the presidential candidate within the CCM was one of the worst in the party’s history. Politics of ethnicity and race were freely deployed; the amount of money used could have only come from slush funds provided by tycoons; factional fights and intrigues abounded. Many felt in their bones that the party could crack. That did not happen. But the party came out of elections more fractionalized than it had entered it. Any farsighted leader of a political party in that situation had two major tasks.

First, to cement the party with a vision and a programme transcending factions and primordial prejudices. Second, to re-establish the integrity of the party and its leadership. Two party posts would be germane to this double-task, the post of the secretary general and that of the treasurer.

The party cried out for a sober organizer as the secretary general, not a cheer-leader used to haranguing people as if they were some empty tins fit only for making noises. It called for a treasurer who would be absolutely above board and known for his/her personal integrity, who would not compromise in matters of money. Again, the chairman did not measure up to the expectations in his party appointments.

Social and economic development

One year is not long enough to assess the developmental performance of a regime. But it is long enough to gauge its developmental direction. In this case, the fourth phase government seems to have decided, either consciously or by default, to stay the course. The course was set by the Mkapa regime: mindless privatisation and marketisation of the economy, including privatisation of strategic sectors, for example, finance and insurance; commodification of public goods and services, for example, land, water, energy, health and education and ruthless and unregulated exploitation of resources by multinationals – minerals, timber and forests and other bio-resources.

The experience of mining companies and the fiasco of privatized management in the water and electricity should have made the fourth phase government to revisit the course rather than stay it. The current power crisis, whose origins could be traced to the scandalous IPTL deal and equally scandalous imposition of Net Group management by force (remember that FFU accompanied the South African management when taking over TANESCO offices against resisting workers!), has been made worse by the outrageously scandalous Richmond saga. The credibility of the regime has hit rock-bottom, and the president’s studious silence only helps to feed the rumour mills of Dar es Salaam.

After some twenty years of the neo-liberal direction of the economy, one would have thought that the new government would have made a sober assessment in the light of its own experience and the experience of other countries, particularly Latin America where neo-liberalism has been discredited to the boot. Instead, we have accepted to be part of the perverted logic of IFIs (International Finance Institutions) which attributes lack of success to insufficient reforms – so reform is the only industry that shows exponential growth rates! When shall we be done with reforms?

Space does not allow going into details. But the least that is expected is that we seriously revisit our development paradigm. Are Mkukuta and Mkurabita serious developmental programmes? Which country has reduced poverty by cash transfers without developing the economy? And where is an example of success of De Soto’s Mkurabita?

Foreign policy

If there is one area where both the third and fourth phase governments have shown utter lack of appreciation of the world situation, it is in the country’s foreign alignments. True, there is only one superpower but that does not mean one has to go into its armpit. This superpower is a vicious military power with a clear military design on Africa. It is therefore very difficult to understand Tanzania accepting to send a brigade to Lebanon and co-sponsoring the US-authored UN resolution for intervention in Somalia. The design of the US on the Eastern seaboard is clear – to string it with military bases from Djibouti through Somalia and Dar es Salaam to Durban. Tanzania is one country which has a relatively stable polity and the lingering Nyerereist legitimacy in Africa. Its landmass connects the Indian Ocean to the heart of rich Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo. For these and many other reasons, US eyes Tanzania. It is surprising therefore that instead of keeping safe distance, our leadership goes out of its way to court this dangerous military octopus.

It is school-boyish to think that non-alignment does not make sense in the unipolar world. It makes more sense today than ever before. Remember Bush has drawn the line – you are either with us or with the “terrorists”, which means anyone who is against US foreign policy. Under these circumstances, non-alignment means ‘we are neither with you nor with the terrorists!’

By the same token, it is again surprising that Tanzania is increasingly courting and embracing another vicious military power totally aligned with the US – Israel. Hopefully, our leadership will realise its folly before it is too late.

The union question

This has been the continuing subject of discussions and frustrations in the media. The tail continues to wag the dog. The mpasuko in the union cannot be resolved without resolving the mpasuko in Zanzibar. And for resolving the mapasuko, the CCM has to rise above political opportunism. The problem is that the CCM leadership fails to discipline the Zanzibar CCM because mainland CCM factions opportunistically seek out the most reactionary elements in Zanzibar, lest the ‘opposition’ get into power. This is a groundless fear. There is no force in Zanzibar which would want to break the union but if the situation continues as it is, where Zanzibar fails to build a national consensus, then indeed the union could breakup. The JK government has failed to move on this score. One needs to be firm; flabbiness of position wouldn’t do. Sharing of power in Zanzibar is not going to rock the Tanzanian boat at all, nor, in fact CCM’s hegemony. Those who are opposed to national unity on the Islands are purely doing so out of personal interest and personal interests cannot be allowed to wreck a country.

Summing up

In sum, then, the immediate task facing the fourth phase government is to take a serious stock, not only of its one year in power, but also the direction in which the country has been moving for the last twenty years. For any government to lose its massive support within a year is very serious indeed and it requires serious attention, not escapism and scapegoating.

• This article first appeared in The Citizen, a Tanzanian daily, on 21st December, 2006. Issa Shivji is a retired law professor.

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

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