Rage and fury
Michael Kinsley, editor of the online magazine SLATE, once defined a
political gaffe as anytime someone tells the truth. Kinsley's perverse logic
could be found in Halifa's recent long-winded reply to the article on
Nyerere's legacy by George B.N Ayittey, a Ghanaian and Associate Economics
Professor at the American University,Washington, DC, and Ludovick Shirima, a
Tanzanian and Research Assistant at the Free Trade Africa Foundation,
Washington, DC.

Like a flash of lightening skirting out of thunderous clouds,Halifa's
reaction can be fast and furious. He was evidently miffed at the tone and
contents of the article, not its refutability. Yes, because Halifa could not
pinpoint any falsehood, lies, inaccuracies in the article(we shall come back
to this later). He simply let his dogmatism be an iron hand that throttled
his objectivity. Kinsley's logic helps here: just an iota of acerbic truth
about Halifa Sallah, or his political party, or the ideology it peddles, or
iconoclastic African leaders, is enough to send Halifa to the fringes of
hysteria and bitternesss. His emotionalism becomes a needle that stitches
the contours of his intransigent idealism with an absence of fairly-rounded
scrutiny.

And for a reason. Halifa is a Pan-Africanist. Or so he sounds to be. Small
wonder, then, he could be as reactive as shallow in his responses to
anything critical of the Nkrumahs, Nyereres, Lumumbas and the Toures. Take,
for instance, how Halifa contextualised President Bill Clinton's trip to
Ghana earlier this year. Clinton was welcomed by hundreds of thousands of
Ghanaians, a massive gathering billed to be the first of its kind the US
president had ever seen in his rallies.

A CNN tv footage showed a perspiring Clinton, amidst a large crowd of
Ghanaians, helplessly urging his spectators to withdraw back from their
close proximity to him. A phalanx of security agents couldn't control the
ecstatic Ghanaians. They kept marching towards the president and Clinton
repeatedly urged his spectators to move back.

That was enough to stoke the fire of Halifa's Pan-Africanist zealotry. He
went bonkers! And he contrasted Clinton's attitude with that of the former
Guinean leader Sekou Toure, during a visit to Banjul. Halifa rhapsodized on
Toure's eagerness and willingness to shake hands with people in Banjul. But
Sekou Toure visting Banjul? Shaking hands with the people? What's the
significance? Out of Halifa's hackneyed imagination was constructed an
affable Sekou Toure, all-smiling, all-embracing, momentarily assuming an air
of exclusiveness as a populist-man-of-the-people.

But that is empty hogwash. Toure was a vicious tyrant under whose tenure,
Guinea saw copious cases of human rights violations. Political opponents,
real or imagined, became victims of political thuggery, governmental
intimidation. Toure's power-hunger, quenched by terror and brutality,
created an aura of hopelessness steeped in Guinean political consciousness.
Toure made it a habit to lecture and hector his countrymen on revolutionary
ideals that were more self-aggrandizing than helpful to the Guinean cause.
He is, perhaps, best remembered for his rabble-rousings against the French
colonialists and standing up for Guinean independence. The rest is
chock-a-block with tyranny and misery for the people of Guinea.

African leaders are adept at putting a veneer of political correctness when
they visit other countries. When Halifa's president-or if the
sociologist-politician-journalist - pleases, political opponent, Yahya
Jammeh, recently visited the US, he seemed a democratic leader presiding
over a country enculturated in democratic ideals. Which we all know is
fatuous nonesense. Tact and objectivity must be employed when analysing the
postures, intricacies of African leaders. And their legacies, too.

                    Nyerere under microscope

Knowing next to nothing about polemical brevity and with a penchant for
regurgitative history, Halifa's rejoinder to Ayittey's and Shirama's article
was a circuitous road of historical narratives meshed with dogmatism and
devoid of self-injecting objectvity. Halifa asserts:"if we want to judge
Nyerere fairly, we must identify his proper place in the struggle for the
liberation of the African people to achieve liberty, dignity and
prosperity." He asks:" was Nyerere part of the problem or part of the
solution?" To Halifa, Nyerere was only part of the solution. Or, atleast,
that's what we delineated from his article.

But Ayittey and Shirama told us Nyerere was both a solution and a problem.
And rightly so. "Although Julius Nyerere belonged to this generation of
African leaders," they write, "he did not display their egregious and
megalomaniac excesses. He was not personally corrupt and his living style
modest - a rare and refreshing exception among African leaders." They write
further: "Nyerere was also among the very few African heads of state who
relinguished political power voluntarily." And: "Nyerere worked
indefatigably to mediate conflicts and bring peace to the East African and
Great Lakes Region... Nyerere was quite active in promoting peace,
understanding among people of the developing nations."

But Ayittey and Shirama took a critical look at Nyerere's domestic record,
unimpressive as it was: A socialist program forcibly shoved down the throats
of Tanzanians. Result? State-control of industries and a "controlling
interest in the major multinational corporation subsidiaries, coffee estates
and the sisal industry." Within a decade, according to the authors, most of
Tanzania's state-run industries had become inefficient and redundant.
Economic loss and unemployment soared. Tanzanians groaned.

And groaned even more with Nyerere's resettlemt programs: "Operation
Dodoma," "Operation Sogeza," "Operation Kigoma." The two authors revealed
that for the good of Nyerere's "communal villages," farmers were "loaded
into trucks, often forcibly, and moved to new locations. Many lost their
lives and property in the process. To prevent them from returning to their
old habitats, the government bulldozed the abandoned buildings." And by
1976, according to the authors, some 13 million peasants had been "forced
into 8,000 cooperative villages, and by the end of the 1970s, about 91
percent of the entire population had been moved into government villages."
And consider this: "regulations required that all crops were to be bought
and distributed by the government. It was illegal for the peasants to sell
their own produce."

Nyerere's "Ujaama" villigization proved a disastrous failure. Agriculural
productivity dwindled and industries were sent packing. And Ayittey and
Shirima told us a UN report revealed that because of the policy of forced
villagization, Tanzania suffered ecological disaster, desertification as a
result of deforestation, over-grazing, over-cultivation and population.

Halifa's response to Ayittey's and Shirima's dissent on Nyerere's "Ujaama"
was simply to lay the blame at the doorsteps of the colonialists and
multinational corporations. He argues that when Nyerere and others took
over, they realized "the colonialists had not created any avenue for the
local population to become owners of capital so as to invest in a local
economy." And he states further:"... it was the colonial multinational
corporations which controlled imports and exports, mines, plantations and
industrial establishments. What could such people do to create a national
economy?" While there is a ring of truth about that, Halifa, unfortunately,
did not see anything wrong or blameworthy about Nyerere's own policies. He
heaped entire blame on the colonialists and its agents, leaving Nyerere
scot-free.

Halifa unknowingly tried dismissing Nyerere's efforts because Halifa
imagined success could not be attained no matter how Nyerere tried, given
the controlling nature of multinational corporations. "What could such
people do to create a national economy?" he asks. Force people into
governemnt squatter camps to till the land? Nationalize all the industries?
All crops to be bought and distributed by the government? Illegal for the
farmers to sell their own produce? Were these not Nyerere's policies? Did
they help Tanzania? Do we - can we- find anything inherently wrong with
Nyerere's own policies independent of any colonialism and multinationalism
effect?

                     Nyerere: words and deeds

Halifa is ecstatic about Nyerere. He introduces us to a "dialogue with
Nyerere," which, come to think of it, is a simplistic appraisal of Nyerere's
words, not an objective contrast with his deeds. On leadership, Halifa
quotes Nyerere:

"Let me emphasize that this leadership I am now talking about does not imply
control, any more than it implies bullying or intimidating people. A good
leader will explain, teach, and inspire. In an ujamaa village he will do
more and he will lead by doing. He is in front of the people, showing them
what can be done, guiding them, and encouraging them. But he is with them.
You do not lead people by being so far in front or so theoritical in your
teaching that the people cannot see what you are doing or saying. You do not
lead people by yapping at their heels like a dog herding cattle. You can
lead the people only by being one of them, by just being more active as well
as more thoughtful, and more willing to teach as well as more willing to
learn from them and others."

And Halifa concludes in a linear note: "Now may we ask: Can this be the
words of a tyrant?"  But who said Nyerere was one? Bettr still, Halifa
should be told that politicians and public figures are not - should not - be
judged by their words but their deeds and the consequences of their deeds.
It is not even that Halifa doesn't know about this; he does. In my debate
with him, earlier this year, Halifa admonished that history is not judged by
words but by deeds. Yet here, doing injustice to objectivity, Halifa simply
finds solace in Nyerere's words, failing to contrast them with his own
actions on the ground. Take, if you will, Ayittey's and Shirima's
observation on Nyerere. They als quote the late Tanzanian leader:

"Democratic reforms are naturally well-suited to African conditions. For me
the charctersitics of democracy are: the freedom of the individual,
including freedom to criticize the government, and the opportunity to change
it without worrying about being murdered." But in doing what objective
critics do, the two authors make a contrast of Nyerere's sacchrine words
with his own deeds. And they find: "...soon after becoming Tanzania's
president, he changed his tune: 'Democracy will create opposition among...'

The authors reveal further: Said Fundikira, Mwinyijuma Othuman Upindo and
James Mapalala, founders of Civic Movement, campaigned for greater political
pluralism, they were immediately arrested in 1986 and detained under the
Preventive Detention Act of 1962 ... exactly the same repressive colonial
measure used to quell black aspirations for freedom." Halifa did not, could
not, refute this; instead he tried finding historical analogies:

                     Searching for faults yonder

"Kennedy is seen as a saint. However, he presided over a nation where the Ku
Klux Klan murdered black people with impunity. US congress served the
humiliating role of debating whether to pass legislations outlawing
discrimination on the basis of race, " Halifa writes.

I don't know any honest, seasoned American journalists, critics, writers and
historians who consider Kennedy a "saint". Kennedy's good and bad sides have
both been illuminated by political pundits and revisionist historians. The
same can be said about Thomas Jefferson. For much of this year, journalists
unearthed and expounded upon reports of his extramarital affair with a slave
and for owning slaves. If Kennedy and Jefferson and Washington were "saints"
their indignities read in historical accounts and magazine reports do not
qualify them so.

Fact is, in Africa, the US and elsewhere, fanatical nationalism can be as
imbecilic as a threat to objective intellectual discourse. Some people are
not willing to submit themselves and their environment to critical srcutiny.
They feign at any semblance of dissent, which is considered an import of
external culural and intellectual hegemony. For Halifa to urge Ayittey and
Shirima to read the books of Nyerere, Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, others, not the
works of their critics, smacks of intellectual discrmination. It is wrong.

                    The good, the bad and the ugly

Undoubtedly, Nyerere, Nkrumah and some other Pan-Africanist leaders, had
good intentions for Africa. They strove very hard to free Africans from the
yoke of colonialism. However, their idealism betrayed not only their visions
and hopes, but the collective will of their peoples. They built large
personality cults that insulated them from the needs and aspirations of
their constituents. They became power-hungry, crushing dissent, stifling
political actvity. Multipartyism democracy became an anathema.

Nkrumah, for instance, was becoming increasingly tyrannical in the dying
days of his rule. Like his colonial captors, Nkrumah used his notorious
Preventive Detention Act to jail his opponents with impunity. J.B. Danquah,
one of the paragons of Ghanaian liberalism, was detained and died in jail.
Has Halifa read this in Nkrumah's books? "His overthrow on 24 February 1966,
thus, came as a huge relief to most Ghanaians who didn't really understand
the world milieu in which Nkrumah operated" (New African, April 1997; p.14).

Halifa's rhetorical Pan-Africanist zealotry tossed in his article is
required for an audience conditioned to believe too much in Afrocentrism,
little in self-penetrating objectivity and criticism. Halifa's article was
slanted in an angle different from that of Ayittey and Shirima. He argued
his points from the position of a Pan-Africanist, whereas the two authors
argued theirs out of independent-mindedness, sharpended by incisiveness and
scholarhip. Ayittey's and Shirima's article is endowed with irrefutable
facts - facts that speak to the truth about Nyerere's legacy.

And get this: Ayittey is a scholar, critic, writer. He has written
extensively on Africa. He tackles African issues with insightful scrutiny
unlike the Halifa Sallahs, who, out of drooling utopianism and incontinent
lust for nationalism, are hopelessly unrestrained in their kissing up to
vaunted Pan-africanism starved of self-dissenting objectivity. And honesty.

Let Halifa be objective.

Cherno Baba Jallow
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan


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