By Charles Onyango-Obbo

More by this Author

The ghost of Tanzania’s founding president Julius Nyerere, appeared at Nation Media Group’s Second Kusi Ideas Festival in the lakeside city of Kisumu on Wednesday. Fortunately, it wasn’t a frightening version of Mwalimu’s apparition.

It was called up on the floor by Kisumu County governor Prof Anyang Nyong’o. Like Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, Nyong’o believes the peasant economy and living is no longer sustainable.

It’s expensive, and yields marginal returns to follow peasants living in scattered far away places with infrastructure and services like health, he argued. Nyerere, he opined, got it right when he sought to resolve this problem through Ujamaa, where millions of Tanzanians were moved into collective living in villages (many forcefully), that were aimed to improve their access to economic resources, and also build brotherhood and sisterhood.

The success of Ujamaa remains a divisive issue, with economic purists judging it a spectacular failure. Several scholars and pan-Africanist types look very favourably on it, considering it a successful project in community and nationalist state-building. Ujamaa, no doubt, significantly changed Tanzania, and a large part of the country’s culture; music, literature, and ideological mindset that defines the country today grew from those collectives.

In Nyong’o’s view, Nyerere’s vision ran ahead of the ability of the Tanzania economy and the availability and access to technology to make Ujamaa the kind of agricultural success that, for example, the kibbutz were in Israel. They weren’t productive enough, and the farmers fell into ruin.

However, with the economic expansion of the last two decades in most of Africa, the development of cheap and clever technology solutions to many problems in agriculture, and the availability of fairly advanced scientific knowledge available online, the times are ripe for Ujamaa-like models.

Indeed, after the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) came to power in 1994, a large part of its resettlement of a country that had extensively been uprooted by the genocide, and faced with thousands of refugees returning after nearly a 40-year absence, was a cocktail of Ujamaa and kibbutz.

In the Kisumu governor’s view, Covid-19 had made a relook at Ujamaa imperative, because it creates the case for moving people from remote places (where they’re exploiting the environment and increasing the risk of more zoonotic diseases like coronavirus), but also brings them closer to access to things like vaccines and emergency support, if we assume our future will be filled with more pandemic outbreaks.

But, as he noted, it might not be necessary. The people are voting with their feet, as can be seen in the sharp rise of “market towns” all over Kenya, as in most of Africa. When young people get enough resources, they no longer build a hut in the village as custom dictates. They move to the market towns and set up there.

Many years ago, a report by a then more enlightened Ministry of Finance in Uganda, projected that in a few years at least 70 percent of the people in the country would live within 10 kilometres of a main road. The report was quickly forgotten, but the projection is arriving earlier than it foresaw.

Nyerere has proved extremely restless. He just won’t stay in his grave.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3