The Shining Example

Andrew Field,

Tanzania, development and the price nobody paid

For half a century Tanzania was the country you pointed at when the argument turned ugly. Nyerere’s inheritance, the island of peace, the one that never burned. No coup, no civil war, no gunmen in the palace. That reputation is now doing a very particular job. It helps explain how 518 dead can be filed as a domestic administrative matter.

The bargain on offer is not concealed, which is refreshing in its way. President Samia Suluhu Hassan has said for years that her priority is the economy and that constitutional reform can wait. She does not call it unimportant. There is simply much still to do. Investors and jobs come first. Since the October 2025 election the same case has arrived under the 4Rs: reconciliation, resilience, reforms and rebuilding. Opening Parliament in November, Samia promised growth above 7 per cent by 2030, generating capacity doubled to 8,000 MW and five million acres under irrigation. Politics later. Development now.

Give the government its due, because the delivery is real and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project at Stiegler’s Gorge has all nine turbines operating at 2,115 MW and has transformed Tanzania’s generating capacity. The standard gauge railway is partly operational and construction continues westwards towards Kigoma. The East African crude oil pipeline from Uganda is well advanced. Gold exports rose 37 per cent to a record $4.7 billion, while mining has passed 10 per cent of GDP. Growth ran at about 6 per cent in 2025 with inflation comfortably controlled. There are governments in this region that would sell a province for those numbers.

And here is where the bargain collapses, because none of it was bought with the blood.

The railway is Magufuli’s project, begun in 2015. The dam is Magufuli’s project, begun in 2019. The pipeline exists fundamentally because Uganda discovered commercially recoverable oil and needed a route to the Indian Ocean, although Tanzania will certainly profit from it. The gold windfall is a world price rally that would have arrived had Tanzania been governed by a committee of nuns. The flagship achievements now presented as the dividends of stability were conceived, financed or substantially built before a single shot was fired in October 2025. The turbines were already feeding the national grid months before the election. A thing cannot be the price of something that came after it.

Worse for the argument, the causation may run the other way. Samia’s strongest economic years began with liberalisation. She lifted newspaper restrictions imposed by her predecessor, ended the six-year ban on opposition rallies and brought political opponents back into the room. Investor confidence improved partly because she was visibly not John Magufuli. The political closure came afterwards, and international institutions now list renewed political instability among the risks to the economic outlook. In June the European Parliament objected to the Commission’s proposed 2026 action plan for Tanzania. Repression is not the price of Tanzania’s development. It increasingly threatens to become a charge against it.

Nor do the headline numbers tell us who has received the development. Poverty remains stubborn, inequality substantial, and World Bank analysis has found consumption growth among the poorest 40 per cent lagging the national average. That evidence reaches further back than the present crisis and cannot fairly be laid entirely at Samia’s door. It does, however, destroy the convenient assumption that a railway, a dam and six per cent GDP growth are interchangeable with human development. Nyerere himself understood the distinction rather better than many of those who now invoke his name.

What stability certainly did buy was an election. Samia was returned with close to 98 per cent of the vote after her two principal opposition challengers had been removed from the contest. Tundu Lissu of Chadema was already in custody on a treason charge. Luhaga Mpina of ACT-Wazalendo was blocked from standing. Minor candidates remained, but an election without the principal opposition is less an election than a ceremony with paperwork. Chadema itself was barred by the electoral commission from contesting elections until 2030.

Lissu remains in custody. On 21 August 2026 the High Court ruled that the prosecution had established a case requiring an answer, although that ruling was explicitly not a conviction. The state alleges that remarks he made in April 2025 concerned stopping the general election, mobilising resistance and disrupting the poll. Lissu denies treason and has elected to defend himself. Whatever eventually happens in court, Tanzania has reached the extraordinary position where the leader of its principal opposition has spent more than a year detained on a non-bailable charge carrying the possibility of death while his party has been excluded from electoral politics.

Then there are the dead. A presidential commission under retired Chief Justice Mohamed Chande Othman eventually counted 518 people killed in the election violence, including 21 children. More than 500 were civilians and the majority of the deaths involved gunshot wounds. These are no longer figures supplied by Chadema, foreign governments or troublesome journalists. They are Tanzania’s own numbers.

Tanzania has run versions of this play before. In 1991 Chief Justice Francis Nyalali headed a commission examining the political system and identified dozens of laws inconsistent with democratic government. The recommendations were absorbed, selected and diluted by the political machinery. Thirty-five years later another respected Tanzanian judge has been asked to explain a political crisis to a state dominated by the same organisation. The names change. The institution receiving the report does not.

Harare will recognise the machinery, although it prefers a different lever. Zimbabwe does not postpone its constitution so much as amend it, presenting changes to the architecture of power as administrative housekeeping. Dar es Salaam says wait, Harare says adjust, and in both capitals the citizen is instructed that the argument about who governs is somehow an obstacle to the business of governing. The people making that case are invariably those who profit from the argument never being had.

The refutation was written by the man whose name is on the dam. Nyerere is wheeled out whenever Tanzania wants to explain that Africa takes no instruction from Europe, often accompanied by his warning that democracy was not a bottle of Coca-Cola to be imported. Yet Nyerere’s writings on development were considerably less convenient. Freedom and development were inseparable. A new road extended a man’s freedom only if he could travel upon it. Development meant the development of people rather than things, and development imposed through force contradicted its purpose.

There is irony here because Nyerere himself built the one-party state and detained opponents. But he also lived long enough to understand what that system had become. By 1990 he was telling his own party that one-party rule was not ordained by God and that Tanzania had to confront the argument about political competition. The regime now prefers the Nyerere who justified African independence from Western prescriptions to the Nyerere who understood that development without human freedom was an empty achievement. The Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project stands as a monument to a man it refutes.

That contradiction should matter outside Tanzania. Western governments have accommodated unelected and authoritarian governments from the Gulf to Central Asia for generations when strategic interests required it. Tanzania now has gold, gas, a major oil corridor, an Indian Ocean coastline and increasing importance in the competition for influence between China and the West. Moral outrage becomes considerably more complicated when there is something valuable beneath the ground.

Garfield Todd understood the excuse. Having once governed Southern Rhodesia, he lived long enough to be stripped of his citizenship, passport and vote by the Zimbabwean government he had helped bring to power. His warning was that those who had opposed the racism of the past could not remain silent before the terror of the present simply because its perpetrators now carried a different flag.

That is Tanzania’s uncomfortable test. The terror of the present is harder to condemn because it wears the right flag, quotes the right founding father and governs a country that spent half a century as Africa’s shining example. Five hundred and eighteen people are dead according to the government’s own commission. The dam still generates electricity. The trains still run. The gold still leaves the country.

None of those things answers the question of freedom. Nyerere told Tanzania that himself.

Andrew Field

South of the African Equator – https://justandrewinzimbabwe.wordpress.com