When Mkapa pushed Ugandans to form unity government

Joachim Buwembo

Late 2004 I was at Ikulu (State House) Dar es Salaam on journalistic duty. President Benjamin Mkapa was in jovial mood.

The matter of removing presidential term limits in Africa came up. Cautiously, I asked him if he would consider mooting a constitutional amendment so he could get a third term.

“Tanzanians don’t have to fear such,” the president answered without hesitation. “If I even hinted at it, my own family would bundle me up to a mental hospital.”

That was Mkapa, blunt and not given to niceties. He happened to be best friends with our John Nagenda. Mastery of language and its unapologetic usage is one of the things they shared since Makerere. But Mkapa was also blunt in actions and gave his opinion openly.

His paradoxical rise to the presidency was also related his bluntness. Mkapa had once been a favourite protegee Tanzania’s Founding Father Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, in whose footsteps he had followed to Makerere University.

Returning home around independence, Mkapa worked both in local administration and foreign service, studied and joined journalism, ending up as Managing Editor of Daily News, the government mouthpiece.

After several diplomatic appointments, he ended up as minister of foreign affairs. It was not by accident that in when Idi Amin attacked and annexed Kagera in 1978 prompting Tanzania to hit back and start of an eight months war to overrun Uganda, Nyerere put Mkapa in charge of organizing the Uganda political groups to come together and form the first post Amin government.

He knew Uganda’s political and cultural tendencies quite well.

Those who attended the Moshi Unity Conference will tell you how Mkapa bulldozed them into forming a unity government even using threats and ultimatum.

But connoisseurs of Tanzania’s modern history say it was his world knowledge and open expression of his opinion that brought a temporary setback in his relations with his mentor.

The period after the war in Uganda that brought Tanzania’s economy to its knees, also witnessed the waning of socialism worldwide. While Nyerere cherished his Ujamaa, Mkapa had started expressing the need to open up, embrace market economy and prepare for the global village.

His sidelining started and many started writing him off. But Nyerere’s immediate successor Ali Hassan Mwinyi moved the country’s economy from Socialism to near anarchy with his permissiveness that earned him the nickname ‘Mr Ruhusa’ (permission).

By the end of Mwinyi’s tenure, an agitated Nyerere who was in retirement but still influential told Mkapa to pick the ruling CCM nomination forms, to the shock of the entire country.

Young Jakaya Kikwete was the favourite to clinch the nomination but he was ‘advised’ that he needed some more time to mature and Mkapa was made to win the CCM primaries. And the rest became history.

Once in office from 1995, Mkapa who had not wanted the job in the first place, just remained himself and put the country is a boot camp of sorts, not bothered with seeking popularity.

He sorted out the mess that almost turned the government over to the mafia, pushed through rational policies including public sector reforms, privatization, revenue collection enhancement and started on rebuilding and expanding the infrastructure.

His point man for road construction was one John Pombe Magufuli. It is not by accident that the East African Community made its fastest strides when Mkapa was president of of Tanzania.

Though Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni has always been the champion of reviving the EAC, the attitude at Ikulu in Dar es Salaam is what matters most for the fortunes of the regional integration process.

For before the entry of South Sudan in the EAC, Tanzania comprised more than half of the EAC land area, and was the only country sharing a border with all the member states.

Under the third president of Tanzania, there was no ‘Uswahili’ kind of ambiguity over matters of integration that have characterized Dar es Salaam’s attitude to the community since Mkapa retired in 2005.

In 2015, history repeated itself in a way when retired Mkapa did for John Pombe Magufuli what retired Nyerere did for him in 1995.

In 1995, CCM’s was under serious threat from Augustine Mrema, a populist anti-corruption crusader when Nyerere brought in Mkapa as candidate to restore sanity.

In 2015, it was former prime minister Edward Lowassa who was threatening CCM. Mkapa then brought the master card in form of Magufuli, then known as ‘Mchapa Kazi’ – the workaholic. And the rest became History.

Twenty years later, Magufuli is presiding over the funeral of the man who made him president.