Young African intellectuals should revisit the philosophies of visionary leaders like Nyerere and Nkrumah for inspiration and a sense of self-belief, rather than looking to ideas from outside the continent, Marie M. Shaba argues in this week’s Pambazuka News.

With a mere 30 days remaining until Kenya's Harmonised Draft Constitution makes its way to Parliament, L. Muthoni Wanyeki stresses that throwing out the idea of proportional representation altogether would ignore the efforts of the report's Committee of Experts to address potential concerns with the system.

With Graça Machel set to re-visit Kenya this weekend as a member of the Panel of Eminent Persons overseeing the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), L. Muthoni Wanyeki stresses the need for all Kenyans to ensure that those in charge are not permitted to paint a rosy picture of 'achievements' for Machel's team.

Looking to Mwalimu Julius Nyerere's understanding for guidance, Issa G. Shivji stresses the contemporary importance of non-alignment for Tanzania and African countries at large. In the face of a multi-polar world where power is progressively drifting eastwards, Africa must revitalise its erstwhile spirit of national liberation and autonomy, Shivji argues.

Cheikh Tidiane Dièye

Why are so many Kenyans unhappy with the work of the Committee of Experts charged with determining options for resolving contentious issues around reforming the country’s constitution, L. Muthoni Wanyeki asks in this week’s Pambazuka News. And will their disgruntlement end up defeating and derailing the latest effort to finally conclude Kenya’s constitutional reform process?

Ten years ago, on 14 October 1999, a giant died and left a cavern in our consciousness, if not in our conscience. Julius Kambarage Nyerere was a man of extraordinary achievements on a a national, continental and international scale, writes Firoze Manji, in this introduction to a special issue of Pambazuka News.

Last week the BBC published a story entitled , making public the fact that ethnic groups in the Rift Valley were rearming in preparation for future election violence. Apart from this being a very worrying story, the backlash this has had on Ken Walfula – who gave subsequent interviews to Kenyan newspapers on the matter – has been disconcerting, argues L. Muthoni Wanyeki in this week’s Pambazuka News. Ken Walfula is now facing charges of incitement and the circulation of false and alarming information from the Kenyan government. Furthermore, as Wanyeki points out, there has been both public and private discussion of rearming, such as that undertaken by the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Monitoring Project. This is an issue the Kenyan government needs to take seriously, the author stresses.

"Tanzania must support the struggle for freedom … regardless of the political philosophy of those who are conducting the struggle. If they are capitalists, we must support them; if they are liberals, we must support them; if they are communists, we must support them; if they are socialists, we must support them. We support them as nationalists. The right of a man to stand upright as a human being in his own country comes before questions of the kind of society he will create once he has that right. Freedom is the only thing that matters until it is won."

President Nyerere, University of Toronto, October 1969

The totality of his commitment to the freedom of others regardless of their political affiliations and the universality of his belief in the unity of Africa and other oppressed people gave Nyerere considerable strength and confidence. From the very beginning of his career, first as a nationalist for Tanganyika's independence and then as an internationalist leader of a Third World country, he led the newly formed international organisations of the day, the OAU (Organization of African Unity) and the Commonwealth in particular, to find their identity and purpose in action. This is evident in the first-hand testimony provided by two eminent international civil servants, Chief Emeka Anyaoku and Mohamed Sahnoun, who were sent to serve at the OAU and the Commonwealth and who collaborated in the strategy for liberation. This week's Pambazuka News features an interview with Chief Emeka Anyaoku entitled and a memoir from Mohamed Sahnoun entitled [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Annar Cassam discusses two historic interviews conducted with Mwalimu Nyerere, the .

In an interview originally published by El País on 16 November 1991, Ana Camacho questions Mwalimu Nyerere on the implications for the global South of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the role of democracy in Africa's development.

In an interview with Nawal El Saadawy of Egypt's El Mussawar first published on 19 October 1984, Mwalimu Nyerere discusses Palestine, Tanzania's relations with Libya, and Africa's economic woes.

Mwalimu Nyerere, writes Issa G. Shivji, “saw Tanzania essentially as a nation of village communities [that] was likely to be so for the foreseeable future.” He thus saw it as site of statist development and bureaucratic social service provision. Although there were “seeds of the conception of the village as a site of governance” in his thought, “there is no evidence that he advocated any consistent, political programme to evolve village governance.” Shivji thus calls on us take Mwalimu’s limited thought on the village one step further by placing the “restructuring of village governance on the centre stage” whereby it should be based on the rule of law and separation of power, not top-down administrative fiat. This will enable people’s development through a process of ‘accumulation from below’ in villages.

Helen Kijo-Bisimba and Chris Maina Peter review the highly complex position that Mwalimu Nyerere had on human rights. On the one hand, they write, there “is Mwalimu the individual – a God fearing and religious family person who respects and champions rights of all people”. Yet on the other there is “Mwalimu – the President of the United Republic – signing a few death warrants, detaining people in custody without trial” and “deporting citizens of Tanzania from one part of the country to another”. This apparent complexity, they assert, had to do with his belief that “the community was far more important than the individual” and thus an “individual could be sacrificed but not the community.” Kijo-Bisimba and Peter thus conclude: “Whatever Mwalimu did that could be interpreted as violating human rights can always be explained in wider benefits to the community.”

Looking back on Mwalimu Nyerere's tremendous intellectual influence, Chambi Chachage considers the enduring importance of the leader. Noting Nyerere's prescience in arguing against nations surrendering their "power of decision making" to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Chachage stresses that the leader's legacy is rooted in stimulating impassioned public debate around positive socio-economic change.

Faustine Kamuzora’s article looks at the vision that guided Mwalimu Nyerere’s economic policies. “Since the majority of the citizenry lived in rural areas,” the article notes, “rural development was accorded high priority in economic policies.” These policies had mixed results whereby “while a number of indicators of human development indices improved appreciably, productivity in some sectors did not improve resulting into an economic growth decline.” “Nevertheless,” the article concludes, “the underlying philosophy of Nyerere’s economic policies of building an egalitarian society has enabled Tanzania to attain a stable nation status.”

In this interview with Annar Cassam on 29 September 2009 in London, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, the former secretary-general of the Commonwealth Secretariat, reflects on Nyerere’s influence on international diplomacy. In “his many interventions and initiatives on behalf of Africa and the Third World in general and on behalf of the liberation struggle of South and Southern Africa in particular,” Anyaoku reflects with Cassam, Nyerere “came into serious conflict with the British government of the day, for the Commonwealth connection did not turn out to be the cosy network they had perhaps once imagined.”

Drawing from Mwalimu Nyerere’s thoughts on colonialism and post-colonialism, Marjorie Mbilinyi critiques the current state of leadership. “Corruption and the lack of patriotic leadership”, she observes, “has increased during the last 20 some years, but not in a vacuum.” This is so because an “enabling environment was created for corruption, individualism and compradorial tendencies by neo-liberal ideology and macroeconomic reforms which successfully took a dominant position in Tanzania – and much of the rest of Africa – in the mid-1980s.” To bring an end to this leader-centered group leadership, Marjorie calls for a people-centered leadership whereby “group-centered leaders … are grounded within their organizations or institutions, or movements; and the groups/organizations/movements they lead are identified not by a particular individual, but rather by the collectivity and its vision and mission.”

Ng’wanza Kamata critically reflects on Nyerere’s foresight on the land issue. To Nyerere, he notes, “land cannot, under any grounds, be transformed into an item for sale in the market.” That is why he advocated for a leasehold system instead of a freehold one that would create a perpetual class of landlords and tenants. However, he laments, Nyerere’s government did not go one step further to abolish the colonial Land Ordinance’s tenet of vesting land in the control of the state and not the people. As a result bureaucrats “were and are able to evict people from their lands.” Kamata thus recalls Nyerere’s earlier clarion call for the masses to resist a method that enables a few people to claim ownership of what belongs to all – land.

Pambazuka News brings to you the first Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Lecture delivered by Haroub Othman on 14 October 2005 at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Haroub reminisces on the glorious days of the ‘Dar es Salaam School’, the massive impact it had on the liberation of Africa and the role that Mwalimu Nyerere played in shaping its development away from a colonial and Western intellectual mould. On his last visits to the University of Dar es Salaam, Haroub recounts, Mwalimu made “one very important point, that Africa South of the Sahara was on its own” and as such we “have to rely on ourselves, and to cooperate among ourselves.” Taking a leaf from that spirit of Pan-Africanism, Haroub reminds us that “the Southern African-subcontinent is facing a deep crisis”, urging its “present intelligentsia to transform our societies and to give content to human dignity”.