It is a painful truth, but it is a truth we all prefer to deny ourselves on a daily basis. That is, as Shakespeare said, from hour to hour we rot and rot as we all approach our graves. When the moment actually arrives, it is always painful, though somehow inevitable. It is always untimely, however old we may be.

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere on Thursday reached that moment; not accidentally, but by the painful process of falling sick with one of the world's most deadliest diseases: leukemia.

Julius Nyerere of Tanzania is now being eulogised as one of Africa's greatest statesmen. As the founding father of the Tanzanian nation, founding member of the Organisation of African Unity, driving force behind South-South Cooperation, and a voice of reason at all international forums where heads of state meet, Nyerere has always stood taller than his compatriots in reputation, performance and respect.

Greatness is not found in possessions, power, position, or prestige. It is discovered in goodness, humility, service, and character. Moreover, a great man is one who can have power and not abuse it. Was Nyerere, therefore, a great man?

When he was poised to take over as Prime Minister in newly independent Tanganyika in 1961, Nyerere chose to resign from government and spend one solid year building his party, the Tanzania African National Union (TANU).

His colleague, Rashidi Kawawa, took over the reigns of government while Nyerere travelled up and down all over Tanganyika building the party.

Nyerere did this after realising that only a strong nationalist party with a vision for Tanganyika the country would bring meaningful changes in the lives of the people after independence. The colonial state has had been set up to serve external interests and to preserve and an ethnic and class divided society.

Left to itself, the state structure could easily seek to perpetuate power relations, which were inimical to the realisation of the hopes of the people after independence.

Across the border in Kenya, there were similar problems. The Kenya African National Union (Kanu), TANU's counterpart, was itself riddled with factionalism right from the beginning. Attempts to give it the kind of social force that TANU enjoyed in Tanganyika were met with a rude shock when KANU's greatest architects, Tom Mboya, was gunned down by an assassin in the streets of Nairobi in July 1969. From then on, attempts to create one solid nation in Kenya were forever riddled with ethnic contradictions.

One of Nyerere's earliest achievements was this conscious effort to create a strong grass-roots party with a clear ideology on nationhood and clear principles on citizenship. Independence could not be meaningful without national unity. Not fake and propagandistic unity; but unity based on a shared political culture, social practice, equitable economic development and accountability of the governors to the governed.

TANU's structure was based on a pyramid whose base was found in the villages among ten household cells. This climbed to the top where the Central Committee of the party reigned supreme. The state was subordinate to the party, although party men actually ran the state. The party formulated policies that the state was meant to implement. In this regard, the party structure was meant to give voice to the people in policy formulation.

In order to enhance equality among the new citizens of independent Tanganyika, TANU addressed all citizens as ndugu, or brother. To promote communication among the brothers, Swahili, the national language, was vigorously promoted. In fact, at the University of Dar es Salaam, a new Swahili Studies Centre was established, researching into the language and modernising it for use in government, scientific research and international discourse.

Within the first decade of independence, Tanganyika, later Tanzania, became one of Africa's most solid nations in the way in which the people identified themselves as citizens of a social republic and not tribesmen who only happened to share one common oppressor. This could not have been achieved without Nyerere's two other major concerns in building the new nation. These were his fervent quest for pan-Africanism and his unswerving belief in and commitment to ujamaa, or the Tanzanian version of socialism.

Soon after independence, the government of Tanganyika was shaken by an attempted military coup. Nyerere reacted by disbanding the whole colonial army and establishing a nationalist army closely integrated into the ruling party. He also founded the National Service into which every young person had to serve before graduating from school or university. These were attempts to reduce the distance between the armed forces and the people as well as demystifying defense as a purely "army thing."

Almost at that same time, the government in Zanzibar was also overthrown in a military coup. It became clear to Nyerere that an unstable Zanzibar could easily destabilise the mainland government. He took the initiative to bring together the Afro-Shirazi Party in Zanzibar and TANU, and to discuss the union of the two governments. Nyerere, unlike Nkrumah of Ghana, always believed that African Unity would eventually be brought about by states first coming together at the regional level.

The fusion between Tanganyika and Zanzibar in 1964 produced the United Republic of Tanzania with a structure of government that was reasonably lose to ensure the units did not lose their identities permanently, and reasonably strong to guarantee a lasting marriage. The person of Nyerere, however, remained a strong uniting factor. His departure may easily herald a stormy season for the pan-africanist marriage.

Nyerere always contended that "all human beings are equal and Africa is one"--bina damu wote ni sawa na Afrika ni moja. That, indeed, was the corner stone of his other cardinal belief in socialism, the only viable ideology for development in Africa as far as Nyerere was concerned.

Socialism was based on the equality of all human beings, something that was to be found in African culture. People worked in order to live. Idlers were not tolerated. Mgeni siku moja, siku ya tatu mmpe jembe. The products of human labour were used, not for social domination but for social reproduction. Those who organised society to ensure division of labour, security and leisure were not political oppressors but politically responsible. When they became exploitative or oppressive the people either rebelled against them or they destroyed their own societies. Societies that were on the road to destruction were either abandoned by those who were sensible enough to leave--through migration--or were destroyed by internal wars and conflicts.

This view of African socialism being based on familyhood, mutual social responsibility, egalitarianism and democratic governance influenced and shaped Nyerere's ujamaa philosophy. He wrote extensively about it. He associated various aspects of development and governance to ujamaa. Thus Oxford University Press published his speeches and essays on democracy, socialism and unity under the titles, Freedom and Socialism, Freedom and Unity, Freedom and Development, Socialism and Rural Development and, the most memorable was the very well argued book on Ujamaa: the basis of African Socialism.

The highlight of Nyerere's attempts to build socialism in Tanzania was the Arusha Declaration in 1967. Known in Swahili as Azimio la Arusha, this was the document accepted by the National Executive Committee of TANU in Arusha on 29 January 1967. It made explicit Tanzania's socialist ideology. It begins with a declaration of the TANU creed; the party's commitment to building one united Tanzania based on the equality of citizenship. It confirms democracy as the viable system of government at the national and pan-African levels.

It then sets out the chief tenets of socialism as being absence of exploitation of man by man, social ownership and control of the means of production, self-reliance, hard work and good leadership. Although the role of the government in nationalising the commanding heights of the economy later came to be assumed as the centre-piece of the Arusha Declaration, there was no emphasis on this in the original document. If anything, the emphasis was on the peasant and peasant agriculture as the basis of the socialist project.

Hard work, intelligence, the land, the people, good policies and good leadership: these were the moral imperatives for the success of socialism in Tanzania. Their lack, perhaps their inadequate supply, became the major problems for the success of Ujamaa in Tanzania.

Issa Shivji observed as early as 1971, in his essay The Silent Class Struggle in Tanzania, that Ujamaa would suffer at the hands of state bureaucrats. Capitalising on the need to Africanis the economy, the bureaucrats would seek to use state power for self- enrichment. Very soon, they would find the economic distance between them and the peasants rather inimical to democratic politics, especially when they systematically bend the rules of the game to suit and support their rent seeking activities. They would serve their exploitative interests while giving lip service to socialism.

The contradiction between the governors and the governed became clearer during the implementation of the setting up of ujamaa villages. This was a program meant to bring peasants together into productive hamlets to which government would find it easier to provide social services and infrastructure. The end result would be increase in agricultural productivity as well as better standards of living for the peasant communities.

As things turned out, ujamaa villages became instruments of state control over peasant production and lives. Bureaucrats more often than not simply pocketed resources meant to provide social services in the villages. The end result was the ruination of peasant agriculture in Tanzania and the increase in the nation's external dependency not only on food but aid as well. Peasants cunningly disengaged from the villages, becoming recluses into independent subsistence agriculture, hence remaining generally "uncaptured" by the state. The story has been well told by Goran Hyden in his book entitled Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry."

When Idi Amin overthrew Milton Obote's UPC government in Uganda in January 1971, Nyerere gave Obote and his team political asylum in Dar es Salaam. He started a long-drawn process of resisting military dictatorship in Uganda. The East African Community became a casualty, as Nyerere would not sit on the same table with Amin, a member of the East African Authority comprising the Presidents of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

To some Kenyan officials, Nyerere was simply being stubborn and arrogant; they saw no principles in the statement Nyerere was making. To avoid further embarrassment, they simply moved in to fold up the Community in a rather untidy fashion. Nyerere was not amused.

Following the demise of the Community in 1977/78, Nyerere paid more attention to liberation movements in Africa, a subject he had been passionate towards all his life. First, this meant getting rid of the Amin regime closer at home. Obote had followed Nyerere's ideological footsteps, publishing the Common Man's Charter, Uganda's socialist blue print, just before his overthrow. The famous concern of the Charter in moving to the left towards socialism was to guide the misguided and inform the misinformed in Uganda about nationalism, socialism and pan-Africanism.

In Uganda, Nyerere succeeded in 1979. By the early eighties, the focus was on Zimbabwe where Mugabe's ZANU assumed power by end of 1981. Further south, Namibia and South Africa remained under the menace of apartheid. The liberation movements rose to success after Nyerere left state office in 1985 but remained as head of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the new name of the TANU/Afro Shir-azi marriage.

Was Nyerere a great man? Yes he was. Nyerere was agreat man. Always simply dressed and disarming in the manner in which he poked fun at himself and almost ridiculed his best qualities, Nyerere was the epitome of sharp wit and a razor-like mind. He suffered no fools but when he found himself foolish he was ready to accept his mistakes. That is why Nyerere, in the mid-eighties, as Tanzania's economy was limping towards disaster, apologised to his people and bowed out of office. He accepted the shortcomings of his ujamaa policies and exhorted Tanzanians to restructure the economy without throwing the baby away with the birth water.

Humility, courage, good leadership, respect for the intellect, love for communication, cultural universalism, support for the liberation of man and a deep belief in human dignity: these, I think, are the legacies of Nyerere to humanity as a whole. To Tanzania, he will be remembered as the father of the nation. In this regard, he has left a gap that Ben Mkapa will find difficult to fill. In this gap also lies potential instability for the United Republic of Tanzania.

Will the Union survive Nyerere?

To living heads of states and governments in Africa we need to pose two questions. How do they compare with Nyerere? Can they accept their mistakes, apologise and bow out? These questions are posed with much concern for genuine answers in Harare, Windhoek and Nairobi.

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