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Papers > Politics > Failure of Ujamaa in An Agricultural Conext
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Failure of Ujamaa in An Agricultural Conext |
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... I to the late 1960’s, Tanzania had a booming and healthy agricultural sector. ... I, the subsistence agricultural sector began to commercialize (1984). ... However, since the beginning of the 1970’s, in correlation with the implementation of Ujamaa, Tanzania has consistently imported food in order to meet a persistent food gap. ... The failure of Tanzanian socialism is obvious but Julius Nyerere, who was its engineer, maintained the failure of the agricultural sector was not due to a flaw in ideal but was principally a problem of implementation. ... Unfortunately, just like many other social experiments of this nature, it was a failure. ... This later became the key cause for the failure of Tanzania’s economy. ... The Tanzanian elite, unlike in Kenya, did not have personal economic interest in agricultural activities. ... In sum, Tanzania’s agricultural sector, at the time of independence, was the core of the nation’s economy even though it was not as advanced as in Kenya. Government Policy Most Africanists argue that the causes of Ujamaa’s failure were both internal and external; a response that seemingly lacks academic credibility for the reason that such an answer could be used at any circumstance and applied to any issue. The explanation given by Uma Lele suggests that external influences such as the drought of 1973-74, the break up of the East African Community in 1977, the war with neighboring Uganda in 1979, and two oil crises in 1973 and 1979, had indeed contributed to the failure of the Tanzanian economy, but, she argues, it is also necessary to place “blame of failure on the government’s own economic policies” because, Tanzania being one of the largest African recipients of foreign aid ($2. ... Lofchie exemplifies the nature of the failure as a result of a long series of harmful policies and a social/political dilemma between concentration of capital and redistribution of wealth (148). ... The fact is the socialist Tanzanian government was opposed to any substantial mixture of capitalist practices in Tanzanian economic development; it was against the use of market incentive systems as a means to excite production in any mercantile sector let alone the agricultural sector. ... Observers who are sympathetic to Tanzanian socialism generally seek to blame the external economic effect in order to exonerate Nyerere’s socialist policies, which were the ultimate cause of economic failure. Other academics argue that if the export volume of agricultural crops had remained the same during the 70’s, Tanzania would not have had to face such economic catastrophe. As a developing country, Tanzania needed foreign currency from the sale of agricultural products badly, but when the export volume of crops fell in the 70’s and at the same time major import goods, such as oil, increased in price, expenditures increased, and it followed that the government went bankrupt and faced a balance of payments crisis during the early 1980’s. Ujamaa Villages The Tanzanian government attempted to implement a nationwide system of collectivized agriculture. Due to geographical problems, Nyerere thought putting peasants together in communes would benefit them because of social infrastructures such as schools and clinics available in the Ujamaa villages. Another goal for Ujamaa villages was to increase production by concentrating the labor force. Ujamaa is the word in Swahili used to describe family unity. The technique of Ujamaa was to replace individual farms with a network of village communities in which land should be collectively held and production collectively organized. In the analysis of Brian Van Arkadie, senior advisor to the Economic and Social Research Foundation and the project director to the Globalization Research Project, the purpose of Ujamaa was: “To transform the pattern of rural settlement by congregating the rural population, which previously had been resident predominantly on dispersed family smallholdings, in nucleated villages of sufficient size to be efficient units for the delivery of services. ... On two occasions, because the policy was so unpopular, the Tanzanian government had to use military force to implement Ujamaa. ... According to Lofchie, before collectivization, merely 5% of the rural population lived in villages, but by the end of 1975, Ujamaa policy had forced more than 60% of the rural populace to live in settled villages (153). The collectivization policy correlated directly to the Tanzanian agricultural crisis of 1974-75. For instance, agricultural production in the 1970’s differed extraordinarily from the previous decades. ... 5% from the 1950’s into the 1960’s but the 6% growth in the agricultural sector indicated that without a doubt production was increasing. ... On the other hand, if the industrial sectors had performed as well as Julius Nyerere had expected, the financial crisis would have been abated regardless of the agricultural drop-off. Unfortunately, the poor economic performance of the agricultural and industrial sectors, due to the policies implemented by the socialist government, caused economic collapse. ... It was accompanied by implacable governmental opposition to any substantial mixture of capitalist practices in the nation’s development and therefore refused to use free market incentives as a means of improving agricultural and industrial growth. |
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Title: Failure of Ujamaa in An Agricultural Conext
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