By Tatalo Alamu
This past week the good people of Tanzania bade farewell to their plucky, no-nonsense and no-frills leader, John Pombe Magufuli, who died in storied circumstances about a week earlier. At sixty one, the sprightly and energetic Magufuli was a spring chicken by contemporary global standards of leadership. As attested to by his wife, the late president was a passionate romantic who was partial to the early morning romp.
Although the official cause of death was ascribed to a subsisting heart condition, the true nature of his sudden demise has given rise to frenzied speculations among his compatriots and the world at large. The late president of Tanzania was a famous Coronavirus sceptic who maintained that the whole pandemic scourge was a grand hoax.
There are not a few of his fellow Tanzanians who believe that Magufuli, like the Burundian president before him who pooh-poohed the whole idea of the pandemic, eventually succumbed to its deathly claws. To these people, it was a case of an anti-scientific cast of mind getting a short shrift from the brisk terminator.
Whatever the cause of death, the outpouring of grief among Tanzanians has been remarkable. The national mood was of profound bereavement accompanied by a feeling of irreplaceable loss. Six people were trampled to death in the rush to bid the fallen leader a final goodbye.
Magufuli was not a saint by any stretch of the imagination. Neither did he cast himself in the garb of a secular angel. Yet despite what is widely perceived as his ruthless autocratic streak, his authoritarian bravura in going after perceived enemies and his populist disdain for elite racketeering, it has been an emotional rollercoaster for the people of Tanzania.
Even his most adamant critics concede that Magufuli rolled up his sleeves to make his country work. In six years of bold and visionary leadership, he has brought his resource-strapped and rather somnolent nation to the portals of modernity without caring whose ox is gored.
Magufuli was an impatient and driven moderniser committed to an infrastructural overhaul of his country. Nothing seemed to deter him. On many occasions, he could be seen mixing it with construction workers or sweating it out with grimy and soot-covered foremen.
This was inspired and inspiring leadership. Magufuli led from the front. The people always appreciate a good leader when they see one. Good leadership is like a luminous fish which cannot be hidden. This is not about shameless canards which attempt to justify poor and uninspired leadership or the resort to ethnic and cultural victimhood in defence of abominable performance.
It has been observed that African colonial nations are poor imitations of the original Westphalia model of the nation-state. But there are colonial nations and there are colonial nations. Some have been known to lift themselves out of the morass of ambiguous paternity through the gritty determination of the people and by exemplary leadership.
The original treaty of Westphalia handed territorial authority and sovereignty to the particular principality in charge of a delimited territory. It was a mortal blow to the notion of empire and religious suzerainty.
But it does something else. Unlike the empire-state which depended on the whims of an absolute ruler who regarded himself as the embodiment of the will of empire, the nation-state paradigm facilitates the institutionalization of democracy and the rule of law through the enthronement of the people of a particular territory as absolute sovereigns who merely donate their sovereignty to government on the basis of credible elections.
For this transformation to occur, certain conditions must be in place. There must be an organic essence to the nation. The people must share certain ideals and core values which conduce to uniformity of worldview and the standardization of occasionally clashing norms no matter the surface disagreement or superficial tension.
This process of forming the nation and infusing it with a life of its own is not a one-off affair or a one-day business of empty pontifications. Nation-building depends on a continuous supply of visionary and committed political elites who have adopted the nation as their sole religion, their sole family and life purpose. In most of these successful countries, the worship of the nation assumes a sacred and mysterious dimension; the divinity of nationhood supersedes the nationhood of divinities.
It has been observed that one sure thing about organic communities is the fact that they are always gone; they always belong to historical antiquity. In other words, the idea of a perfect organic community is a myth always invoked to beat the disorderly present into some form of order and rationality. This elusive Elysium of harmonious humanity is nothing but an imaginative construct that speaks to human yearning for order and progress.
What this means is that an “organic” nation can actually be coerced or willed into existence by a visionary elite driven by sheer necessity and extraordinary will combined with intellectual daring. This is what has happened in the case of continent-nations such as the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
These are all colonial and colonized nations far removed from the original Westphalia template of the nation-state. A visionary elite group is the difference between these nations and the politically regressive caricatures of nationhood such as found in postcolonial Africa. In the particular case of the USA, its founding fathers were bent on creating something radically different from the feudal autocracies their forefathers fled from.
The process of nation-formation in the US is as intriguing as it is engrossing in the scope and scale of human ambition. The whole idea of a little city on the hillside with light shining is a tolerable and honourable myth. So is the idea of manifest destiny and American Exceptionalism. These are intellectual tools needed to forge a great nation from the furnace of adversity.
The savage suppression and vaporization of the indigenous people are great crimes against humanity to be regretted. So is the enslavement of Black people who were subsequently treated as sub-humans. But it can be argued that it was the stage the historic dialectic had reached at that point in time, after all there are Westphalia nations that had also progressed through brutal suppression and elimination of other people all in the name of human advancement.
The point to note is that all nations are artificial entities and like all human constructs, nation-growing is a permanent work-in-progress. The mistake certain western elites, particularly Americans, make is to imagine that their nations are perfect and fit for purpose without any need for further refinement and social reforms. The advent of Trump and the current pandemic scourge ought to have served as a cautionary tale against such inherent fallacies.
It will be useful to wrap this up by comparing the fate of two African colonial nations: Tanzania and Nigeria. Both are multi-ethnic human conglomerations cobbled together by imperialist will. But while Tanzanians were having a festival of renewal and rededication to the essence of their nation as it was obvious in the national solidarity that benchmarked the funeral of their departed leader, Nigeria was dissolving into near anarchy and chaos.
With a divisive and polarizing leadership bent on imposing its primitive and anti-modernizing phobia on the rest of the country, the most significant sections of the Nigerian populace appear to be up in arms. The previous week, a gubernatorial convoy was overwhelmed by non-state actors bearing superior munitions. The governor took to his heels. It has never been so bad in the history of the country.
Yet both countries started out around the same time. In fact for Tanzania it was a case of double or even triple colonial jeopardy. It was originally a German colony. But after the Germans lost out in the First World War, it became a British protectorate. This is not discounting the impact of Arab slave traders who overran the territory after dislodging the Portuguese who had held sway for about two centuries.
Tanzania’s sister island of Zanzibar was ruled by an Arab Sultanate until it was liquidated in a bloody revolution spearheaded by an ethnic Ugandan. In 1964, Nigeria troops were instrumental in quashing a military rebellion in Tanzania. Thereafter, the two nations took different trajectories. What did Tanzania get right that Nigeria with its superior human resources, spectacular natural endowment and much bigger population got wrong?
Tanzania is lucky to have had a unifying lingua franca like Swahili. Despite its roots in Arab colonization, the Swahili language has acted as an instrument of elite cohesion and a weapon of mass mobilization on the East African sub-continent.
Swahili-speaking political elites cut across diverse East African countries such as Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti. In an irony of history what began as a language of cultural and political subordination has transformed into a vehicle of popular liberation. This is how an initial disadvantage often turns into a later advantage.
But what has made the most critical and crucial difference in the emergence of Tanzania as a viable nation is the presence of sterling and exemplary leadership at the time of independence. The founding father, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, was quite a model of principled, focus and visionary leadership.
Post-independence Tanzania owes a lot to this simple, modest, austere and detribalized former teacher. Coming from a minority ethnic group, like Nkrumah in Ghana and Senghor in Senegal, Nyerere was able to weld together a disparate collection of ethnic groups into a coherent and cohesive modern nation by sheer force of personality and unrivalled moral authority.
Nyerere led Tanzania from the front and by the power of example. He was an ethical exemplar passionately committed to the ideals of social justice and political equity. His ideology of Ujamaa may smack of a relapse into primitive communalism which only equalized poverty and Stone Age underdevelopment.
But despite leaving his country in virtual economic ruins, it should be noted that nobody ever accused Nyerere of personal corruption, ethnic or religious bigotry or arrant nepotism camouflaged by sanctimonious humbug and fraudulent grandstanding. He was for all Tanzanians irrespective of caste, creed or religion.
So parsimonious, ascetic and self-denying was this man that when he retired, he had to appeal to his compatriots to stop bringing gifts to him because there was no place to store them in his modest bungalow. The people are always willing to follow the example of a selfless leader committed to the greatest good of the greatest number. By the power of personal example, Nyerere virtually succeeded in eliminating humongous corruption from all aspects of Tanzanian public life.
There is nothing like luck or happenstance in these matters. You cannot plant the seeds of corruption and expect to harvest the palm kernel of probity. A fruit does not fall very far from its parent tree. Having put down the template of good governance, it was inevitable that Nyerere would be followed by a remarkable string of Tanzanian leaders who set store by accountability and decent governance.
Among this breed of Tanzanian leaders who followed Nyerere are Ali Hassan Mwinyi, his handpicked successor, Benjamin Mkapa, who focused on fighting and preventing corruption but left with a smear on his reputation, Jakaya Kikwete and the recently departed John Magufuli. They may not be branded by the mark of political genius like the founding father. But they have succeeded in holding their country together, gradually transforming it into a viable modern nation.
In the light of the above exposition, it can now be seen why many colonial nations fail and why only a few succeed.
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