Tanzania in the 1990s: A troubled decade

The nineties rolled in on a good note, with much of the experiments from the eighties making it into the new decade. However, even with some very good news from within and without, slowly, it would be clear that this was going to be a troubled decade, both for Tanzania and the region.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had direct consequences throughout the region, which manifested in various ways across the region, including quickening the pace of political and economic liberalisation.

In Uganda, the rise of a relatively youthful leader out of the bush war did not silence the guns there as other rebel groups and all sorts of armed groups sprung up to fight his government. However, the real headache came from Rwandan refugees who had supported his efforts but had increasingly become frustrated about the developments in their own country and launched a failed invasion of Rwanda in October, 1990, but this did not discourage those who were determined to return home. Rwanda sunk into ethnic violence which led to the horrors of a genocide in 1994. Burundi next door had seen an elected president assassinated. Zaire which had been fighting its own rebels found itself embroiled in the genocide and wars playing out in the region which ended with Mobutu Sese Seko toppled by a rebel group backed by Rwanda and Uganda.

Zaire, renamed Democratic Republic of Congo by the new man in charge, ended up fighting its patrons in a war that pulled in many countries; comrades went to war with each other. These successive wars and armed conflicts, sent refugees across the borders in the region, including many who crossed into Tanzania.

In the south, Namibia and South Africa were finally liberated.

On the domestic front, 1990 was a busy year for the political calendar. Mwalimu Nyerere retired as the chairperson of the ruling party, and President Ali Hassan Mwinyi was reelected in the last general election to be held under a one-party state. Zanzibar had a new president too, one Dr Salmin Armour.

The political storm that led to the resignation of a Zanzibar president in 1984, and the murky proceedings of succession politics in CCM, had not silenced a brewing political storm there well into the nineties. The return of multipartism in 1992 went a long way to reduce the political temperatures both in the Isles and the rest of the country, on the mainland. The crowded political field offered little quality in terms of the political characters on the stage, and before the decade was out, many of these political parties were mired into bitter crises and shifting political alliances.

There were constitutional and political crises in quick succession from Zanzibar’s decision to join Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), to a group of parliamentarians who convinced the government to form a Tanganyika government before Mwalimu forcefully intervened to avert the country taking that route.

The early nineties were characterized with serious socio-political tensions and conflicts. To some observers, these tensions which took various forms anchored in religion or economic or politics were a result of a country that no longer had a guiding ideology after Ujamaa na Kujitegemea was dismantled in all but name. The social unrests were threatening to tear the country apart.

The economic liberalization came with serious corruption scandals among the better connected. To a great extent the economy had been left to the whims of market forces, which in turn led to all forms of dispossession to the majority of the people. By the time the country got a new president in 1995, privatization ended up leaving so many out of the growing economy with some of the areas endowed with vast natural resources becoming some of the poorest in the country.

Zanzibar’s 1995 general election led to a bitter political dispute with the leading opposition party claiming that its victory had been stolen by the long ruling party, CCM. The dispute would last well throughout the nineties.

Mwalimu, the man who towered over Africa’s political scene and was described by some as being the ‘first among equals’ on the domestic political scene passed on as if on cue as the nineties were on their way out. He had retired as they dawned, now the country was on its own.

Even with all the troubles of the nineties, Tanzania managed to forge ahead with regional alliances where there was talk of reviving the collapsed East African Community from the early nineties which culminated in a treaty signed as the decade came to a close.

In some ways, the nineties, despite the troubles the country went through concluded on a somewhat hopeful note. That gave the noughties an air of a promise; a dawning new hope despite the trepidations of the unknown