False Economy - Alan Beattie [120]
In terms of his personal conduct, much of the adulation is understandable. Nyerere was by all accounts a decent, honest, modest president, quite different from many of the corrupt and repressive "big men" who ruled African countries in their first decades of postcolonial independence.
Yet under his rule, Tanzania was riddled with corruption, and Tan-zanians ended the two decades of his presidency no better off than when it began. It is poignantly typical of him that, unlike his self-aggrandizing contemporaries, he pointed out his own deficiencies. "I failed," he said in his valedictory speech as president in 1985. "Let's admit it."
Nyerere meant well. He was, however, horrendously misguided. His philosophy involved extending ujamaa, loosely translated as "family-hood," into a principle of economic governance. In practice, as in many African countries, this meant trying to build up a self-sufficient economy behind high barriers to trade. It led to stagnation and inefficiency. Nyerere burdened Tanzania with price controls, foreign exchange rationing, and hundreds of underperforming state-owned companies—all of which only led to smuggling, corruption, and a large underground economy.
Most notoriously, he swept up millions of smallholding farmers into large collectivized villages in the name of efficiency. A wide network of bureaucrats was created to supply them with seeds, fertilizer, and other inputs, and to buy their output from them. Handing such power to officials who had little connection to the people they were supposed to be serving created a fertile environment for exploitation and corruption. However honest Nyerere himself was, his officials took wide advantage to extract bribes. Farmers reacted by retreating into semisubsistence production and selling any surplus produce illicitly in a parallel market in which they could get higher rewards than the state price. After agricultural production collapsed, Nyerere was forced to abandon collectivization.
As one observer points out, Nyerere attempted to nationalize the villages, but instead he villagized the nation. His cadre of socialist state bureaucrats morphed into a cohort of self-interested local merchant-monopolists, their grabbing tendencies unmitigated by any ties of kinship or neighborhood to the people they were exploiting. The morality of the man at the top did not extend down to the officials executing his policies. Unlike Suharto, Nyerere had no means of getting his subordinates to do what he wanted them to. Tanzania's companies and bureaucrats were shielded from competition and held only weakly accountable to the president. Nyerere had a principal-agent problem on a nationwide scale.
The achievements of the two men stand in sharp contrast, and so do the way their governments functioned. One obvious comparison is the case of the agricultural state marketing board. Marketing boards sound like a ferociously dull and technical subject, until you recognize that for many developing countries where farming remains a central part of the economy, they form an essential part of the