The Arusha Declaration
By mid-decade a number of problems — economic, social, and political—faced Tanzania, and they were likely to become more intense with time. Despite increases in agricultural production and in import-substitute manufacturing, the world market was such that the country was confronted with difficulties in its balance of payments. Where once there had been a shortage of primary and particularly secondary school graduates, soon there would be too many without appropriate job openings.
The peasants, despite their contributions to the production of export crops had not been rewarded as well as urban workers, and there was a growing discrepancy between urban and rural incomes, exacerbated by the tendency of government to allocate more social services to the urban than to the rural areas. That discrepancy was a major factor making for the continuing migration of primary and secondary school graduates and others to towns that were not in a position to absorb them.
Beyond these there were, for Nyerere at least, other more important issues. The policies followed to encourage peasant production had had some success but only at the cost of increasing differences in rural incomes. These differences and those between rural and urban incomes were bound to lead to a class system if they had not already done so. Perhaps more troubling to Nyerere was what he saw as the increasingly self-aggrandizing and elitist perspectives of his colleagues in the TANU leadership.
That leadership had also come to accept the view that major foreign aid was essential to economic development, and that view was reflected in the actions of the National Development Corporation, which had been established to deal with private investment in the nonagricultural sectors of the economy. Much of that investment came from foreign sources, and the corporation sought to maximize it, a tendency that Nyerere decried in early 1966.
Toward the end of 1966 the government under Nyerere's guidance undertook an examination of its strategies for attaining economic development and a just society. The outcome was the Arusha Declaration of 1967, presented by Nyerere and showing his very substantial influence. In October 1967 the declaration was added in toto to the Interim Constitution.
The Arusha Declaration began by explicating the meaning of socialism: it is said to require not only absence of exploitation and the public control of the principal means of production and distribution but also a democratic government and leaders who believe fully in socialism and practice what they believe. The last element encapsulated Nyerere's approach to one of his chief concerns. TANU and government leaders had shown an increasing tendency to seek various material perquisites of office and to acquire, in part because of their comparatively high salaries, additional means of accumulating wealth.
Nyerere was adamantly opposed to this, not only because he considered it wrong in itself but because it would be impossible for an economic elite to lead the people toward a socialist society. In the declaration itself a set of leadership rules limited very strictly the extent to which leaders could acquire wealth beyond their salaries and, in Nyerere's terms, exploit others.
The extent to which Tanzania remained dependent on foreign aid and accepted this dependence was also dealt with. In the mid-1960s a number of events had led to severing dependency relations with Great Britain and other Western powers and a limited turn to communist states for aid, although Nyerere clearly expressed a policy of nonalignment with respect to political issues dividing those states and the West. As time went on the Western powers and international agencies linked to the West, such as the World Bank Group, were once again relied on for aid. In Nyerere's view such reliance on outsiders was excessive and tended to be a barrier to hard work by Tanzanians on their own behalf. Hence the call in the Arusha Declaration for self-reliance (kujitegemea). It did not exclude foreign aid, but it reversed the previous emphasis.
The leadership rules and the call for self-reliance were made in the context of a statement—the Arusha Declaration—insisting on socialism as the path Tanzania was hereafter to follow. The path, in Nyerere's view, was not to be precipitate. Socialism was an attitude of mind. Institutional changes might be made quickly, as indeed they were--witness the nationalizations that soon followed the declaration — but he did not expect socialism to develop overnight and, indeed by his definition, it did not.
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