Authoritarian Trend
There is less ambiguity about the relationship between corruption and the tendency toward authoritarian rule. By eroding trust in government authority, corruption diminishes the prospects of government legitimacy based on the consent of the governed. In societies such as Tanzania, where corruption affects nearly everyone, it creates an almost adversarial relationship between citizens and the state, forcing government to turn increasingly to coercive mechanisms to maintain itself in power. Its greatest contribution to the authoritarian tendency, however, is to raise the stakes of holding onto political power. Since political office is the key to acquiring wealth, the loss of political power is an assured way of losing it. This anxiety unifies the members of the CCM political oligarchy and, whatever their other differences, fortifies their resolve not to be defeated in general elections.
The statist economic strategy, the spread of corruption, and the emergence and trend toward authoritarian rule went hand-in-hand. The causal connections were painfully apparent. Rural populations who were the overwhelming majority of the society quickly came to resent the imposition of a policy framework that subjected small farmers to deeper and deeper levels of taxation as well as increasing social regimentation. Until the new industries became sufficiently large to employ significant numbers of workers and managers, the social groups in favor of the industrial strategy would be limited and barely organized as a political coalition. The political dilemma of the ISI strategy in countries where the overwhelming majority of the population was smallholder farmers was that the pain of economic loss would be suffered far earlier and by far greater numbers of families than would benefit in the short term from the emerging industrial sector. To resolve this dilemma, governments would need to resort to authoritarian measures to impose the strategy on reluctant majorities.
A steady drift in an authoritarian direction marked Tanzania’s post-independence years. The tendency toward greater and greater state control assumed several different forms. In the legislative realm, it consisted of the continuation of a number of colonial-era laws combined with a set of new laws that gave the Tanzanian government a high degree of coercive authority over the lives of individuals and the activities of civil society associations. Taken as a group, these laws are known as the forty oppressive laws, identified as such in the report of the Presidential Commission on Single Party or Multi-Party System in Tanzania in 1991. This report is commonly referred to as the Report of the Nyalali Commission, after its chair, Chief Justice Nyalali. In its inventory of oppressive legislation, the Nyalali Commission report included such laws as the Preventive Detention Act (1962), the Regions and Regional Commissioners Act (1962), the Collective Punishment Ordinance (1921), and the Resettlement of Offenders Act (1969).34 Under the Preventive Detention Act, anyone suspected of dissident political activity could be imprisoned and held without trial for a specified period. The National Security Act of 1970 gave the Tanzanian police a wide degree of latitude to arrest (without warrant) and to imprison persons suspected of “sabotage.”35
Large parts of the oppressive legal framework fell with special weight on the country’s rural population. The Regions and Regional Commissioners Act, passed the same year, gave Tanzania’s regional commissioners, who represented government authority in the rural areas, the power to use that act, thereby empowering them to become virtual autocrats.36 The Collective Punishment Ordinance, which gave the government the authority to impose collective punishment on the community with which an accused individual was associated, meant that villages and towns could be held hostage to the political behavior of their individual members. Other legal measures further illustrate the Tanzanian government’s determination to impose its economic will on the countryside. The Confiscation of Immovable Property Decree of 1964, for example, permitted the government to confiscate land without compensation. Smallholder farmers, lacking in resources and without the ability to defend themselves in court or in the political arena, were powerless to resist the arbitrary use of this legislation.
The government further disempowered rural communities by abolishing the administrative and judicial role of traditional chiefs. During the colonial era, many important functions of local administration, including local law enforcement and taxation, had been carried out by government entities termed native authorities. Traditional chiefs, many of them appointed by colonial authorities, presided over these institutions. However, during the late colonial period, traditional chiefs had also begun to act as spokespersons for local communities, communicating rural grievances over agricultural taxes, inadequate educational facilities, discrimination in government employment, and, more generally, the indignities of the colonial experience. After independence, President Nyerere took the position that the native authorities were feudal institutions that had no place in a modernizing democratic society, and the special powers and financial resources assigned to traditional chiefs were eliminated. Whatever the merits of this viewpoint, it is best viewed in its economic context. As the central government began to escalate its levels of taxation and political control over the Tanzanian countryside, traditional chiefs had become active spokespersons for local communities discomfited by the new economic framework.37 Dissolving the authority and special status of these individuals was one of several mechanisms for minimizing local resistance to central government control and heightened agricultural taxes.
The major step in Tanzania’s authoritarian drift was the creation of a constitutionally mandated single-party state in 1965.38 The political imperatives that set this transition in motion are self-evident. The economic measures that the government was beginning to implement created an adversarial relationship between a small urban minority of civil servants and industrial workers and the overwhelming majority of the population, which consisted of smallholder farmers. An open, multiparty democracy, which would empower the rural majority to oppose this policy, would place the ISI strategy at risk. If the party of the rural majority were actually to gain political power, the economic framework that over-taxed farmers to invest in urban industry would quickly come to a halt. The only alternative, other than to abandon the strategy, was to eliminate any possibility of opposition parties that might gain the support of the rural majority.
The Policy Factor
Reduced to its essentials, the most elemental question about these trends can be stated simply: what caused all this? The best place to begin looking for an answer is in the area of policy choice. Robert Bates’s answer to this question centered on the differential influence of urban versus rural interest groups. He theorized that a powerful coalition of urban interests—including industrial workers and civil servants along with businesses attached to the industrial sector—used their political muscle to impose an economic framework that extracted wealth from the rural population to transfer it to the new state-managed urban industries. The concentrated political power of these groups far exceeded that of smallholder farmers, for whom collective action proved especially difficult because they were scattered over vast distances, physically remote from the capital city, and hampered by a scarcity of organizational skills. As a political explanation for the continent-wide pattern of agricultural decline that followed independence, Bates’s theory has dominated discussions of African development. It remains the starting point for any political understanding of Tanzania’s agricultural decline.
On closer reflection, however, it became apparent that Bates’s urban bias thesis had a serious shortcoming. It overstated the influence of urban interest groups relative to their rural counterparts. Bates himself was among the first to point this out. In a 1991 article, published a decade after his book Markets and States, he acknowledged the existence of “discordant facts” that contradicted his earlier depiction of a decisive power imbalance between city and countryside.39 Bates’s discovery of discordant facts applied with special force to Tanzania where interest groups connected to the rural sector were very strong. Export-oriented farmers such as coffee, cotton, and tobacco growers had formed well-organized producer cooperatives, with well-funded apex offices that provided an influential lobbying presence in the capital city. Several of the country’s most powerful trade unions were closely tied to the prosperity of the agricultural sector rather than urban industry. One was the agricultural workers’ union, whose members
