A Letter from East Africa

...The democratic winds may be shaking the coconut trees of Africa, but they are not dropping any fruit...

...In 1963, when Nyerere was stomping for a one-party state, Fundikira, who was minister of justice at the time, resigned as both minister and member of parliament because he did not support a one-party state...

...Last July President Museveni said in a speech that Uganda will have a population of about twenty-two million in 2010...

...It may not be long before they and the growing army of Kenya's unemployed take to the streets to stake their claim...

...To the Museveni government's credit, the rest of the country outside the north and northeast is peaceful, and reconstruction has been done in some parts...

...The opposition is, understandably, reluctant to question this record and CCM's argument that it sacrificed the comforts of the Tanzanians for the greater "African cause...

...A war-weary population hoped finally for peace...

...Two years ago Tanzanians started to get defiant and to demand an accountable government...

...A tally from newspaper reports of the noncombatant civilians who have died is in the low thousands...

...For now, the worry is that the state-inspired rioting that broke out in March might scuttle a peaceful transition to democracy...

...The poor, as if not to be outdone, also multiplied...

...In Kenya the middle class grew larger and richer...

...A charming, intelligent man, Nyerere's Fabian socialist heart led his government to proclaim Ujaama, a local brand of socialism, in 1967...

...Beneath the reformist facades, there are elements of the old order...

...If this says anything, it is that the chapter on Uganda in the history of East Africa will remain written in blood...

...Winston Churchill once visited Uganda when it was still a British colony...

...The democracy movement has already produced its heroes, such as James Mapalala and other opposition figures, who were arrested last year when they staged a peaceful demonstration in the capital of Dar es Salaam to protest the refusal by the government to register the National Committee for Constitutional Reform (NCCR), one of several pressure groups formed to circumvent the ban on political parties...

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...So impressed was he by the country, its natural resources, and the affability of its people, that he dubbed it "the Pearl of Africa...

...The Museveni government must overcome great odds...

...His Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM-Party of Revolution) ruled, and continues to do so, as the sole legal party...

...The peace never came...

...The IMF is very fond of the Museveni government, because it has moved toward economic liberalization, even dismantling foreign exchange controls...

...In Tanzania, CCM doesn't have to cast fearful glances over its shoulder at the opposition, which was formally legalized in February...

...Many 388 • DISSENT East Africa Tanzanians are still proud of the prestige their government and country had as the principal backer and exile base of the liberation movements from Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Uganda during Amin's rule...

...This is truest in Kenya, where the tide of political events took a dramatic turn at the end of 1991...

...It retains the loyalty of some of the country's most brilliant minds, as well it might...

...Rich people like him, he argued, were the ones who would lose most if they let the lawlessness of Moi's regime continue...

...A report released last December by Amnesty International about the human rights situation, particularly in the north, tells a story of exceptional savagery by both sides...

...Mwinyi says he is determined to reform the economy...

...The "big men," as it had always been, had their way again...

...Something about the stately, gray-haired Fundikira captures the picture of the current political situation in the East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda...

...The continent's share of world commodity markets fell by 50 percent between 1970 and 1989...

...I had been in Lisbon a couple of days before that, and the city was just recovering from a controversy caused by the opening of a similar building in downtown Lisbon...

...The CCM government is, after all, the one that made it possible for nearly every adult Tanzanian to read and write Swahili...

...On January 26, 1986, guerrilla chief Yoweri Museveni took power as Uganda's ninth ruler since the country's independence in 1962...

...In the majority of the African countries, the coconut trees dried up twenty years ago...

...Only the actors will change...

...The government, citing the continued anarchy in parts of the country, postponed elections in 1990 and now promises they will be held in 1994...

...No civil opposition is listened to, or taken seriously, unless it has an armed wing...

...Moi, fighting for his political life, warned Kenyans that the "agitators" for "so-called democracy" were going to plunge the country in chaos similar to neighboring Uganda's...

...The people of Lisbon thought the building was an architectural monstrosity...

...If they press their secessionist demands too hard, they might have to fight for them, because the mainland is not ready to let them go yet...

...dollar...

...Around Nairobi, there are sprawling slums where over 600,000 people live in abject poverty...

...It was therefore their duty to take to the streets, to bring about the rule of law which guaranteed the security of their wealth and the freedom to enjoy it in peace...

...He is the one who recently said the winds of democratic change from Eastern Europe were "shaking the coconut trees" of Africa...

...The glow was snuffed out in 1971 when General Idi Amin grabbed power in a bloody coup d'etat...

...In a Kenyan magazine interview, Muite was asked to explain why someone as wealthy as he was out on the streets campaigning for democracy and enduring abuse by the police...

...Not so the Nairobi people...

...Cynics say the difference between Moi and his men and the opposition is one of style...

...Uganda was not always a strife-torn breadbasket...

...A quarrelsome people, the islanders want out of the union...

...Perhaps he was distracted by literary pursuits, including translating Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into SUMMER • 1992 • 387 East Africa the national language, Kiswahili...

...Some political groups have rejected the whole process out of hand...

...If they live on the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar, which joined with Tanganyika in 1964 to become the United Republic of Tanzania, they will see it on television...

...Hundreds of miles of road have been rebuilt in most of the country, as have facilities for the small rich class—like four-star hotels and swimming pools and squash courts...

...The Obote government's counterinsurgency against the NRA left between 300,000 and 400,000 people dead, mostly in the southern part of the country where the fighting was concentrated...

...Health services are on the verge of collapse...

...But if FORD takes power, the structure of the country's unfair social and economic system will still remain unaltered...

...But even if all else were well, AIDS alone would still have brought the country to the brink of crisis...

...The per capita health expenditure on the country's 16.5 million people is about $2...

...The Zanzibaris, though, are angry...

...They had long ago gotten used to living with these strange structures...

...The government that succeeded Amin tried—and failed—to restore the rule of law through a December 1980 election...

...By Kenya and Uganda's standards, their neighbor Tanzania is boring...

...The one group of Kenyans that will have a lot of business to do in the future will still be the riot police...

...Many were once ministers in Moi's regime or that of his predecessor, Jomo Kenyatta...

...No group can, as yet, govern in Uganda if it is not militarily superior...

...Up to the end of the 1960s, it was one of Africa's most prosperous states...

...But corruption is so widespread, and he has had little success so far...

...Part of their wealth was made from advantageous political connections...

...The smugglers were still being questioned when orders came from the "highest authorities" on the island to release them and their booty...

...For the first time in the country's troubled history, some opponents of Museveni's government now openly preach revenge against him and "his people" if they ever take power...

...Not surprisingly, the opposition groups that sprang up against the NRA government in the north and northeast chose to take up arms...

...without AIDS the population would have been about thirty-five million...

...A new constitution is being drafted, but the government says it does not favor a constitution that will provide for multiparty politics...

...In spite of this and the egalitarian posture of Nyerere's Ujaama, the economic failure of his government was colossal...

...By the end of 1990, the standard of living of the average African was worse than at the end of the colonial period some thirty years before...

...As the middle class, the poor, and corruption in Kenya all grew, so did repression...

...There are also strong feelings against the veto powers that the present law gives to the army in the proposed constitutional assembly...

...CCM, despite its diminished stature, still stands tall...

...Tanzania became the highest per capita recipient of foreign aid in Africa during Nyerere's time...

...Since 1987, when the government introduced a new currency, the shilling has depreciated by 2,500 percent against the U.S...

...For thirteen years, president Daniel Toroitich arap Moi and his Kenyan African National Union (KANU) ruled the country with a big stick...

...Nyerere was one of the third world's most highly regarded statesmen and remains a prestigious figure as chair of the South-South Commission...

...The Tanzania he passed to Mwinyi was a shambles with empty shop shelves everywhere...

...They believe the mainland robbed them of the wealth from the export of the island's spices, before the collapse of the world commodities market...

...One of the stars of the opposition, the outspoken lawyer and president of the Law Society of Kenya, Paul Muite, is as good an example as one can find...

...Tanzania has been one of Africa's most stable countries since it gained independence in 1961 under the leadership of Julius Nyerere...

...To be sure, not all the countries went to the dogs...

...It ended up orchestrating a massive electoral theft in favor of the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) led by Milton Obote...

...Many young Tanzanians do not know what a road without potholes looks like...

...Mainland Tanzania still has no television station...

...Uganda, meanwhile, needs a bit of prayer and lots of statesmanship...

...According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by 1988 they had stashed four billion dollars in private bank accounts abroad...

...Another opportunity to forge a national consensus looks headed for the rocks...

...Several groups took to the bush to fight the UPC...

...Bongo was never a model democrat, yet today the man is famous for freedom-sounding political remarks...

...He is Chief Abdullah Fundikira...

...Nyerere's successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, is generally less respected inside the country today than Nyerere and is certainly dwarfed by the old man internationally...

...The country's two-billion-dollar debt economy cannot handle the epidemic...

...The bitterness that civil war always leaves has continued to deepen...

...It is very easy to buy foreign currencies in the many bureaus in Kampala City if you have the sackfuls of Uganda shillings they cost...

...Amin will not be forgotten for a while...

...Last year in a wave of crackdowns on corruption, police intercepted $500,000 being smuggled out of Zanzibar airport...

...In mid-1982, after an abortive military coup by junior officers, Moi's regime banned political parties and began beating up, detaining, and exiling critics of his one-party dictatorship...

...Today it is one of its poorest...

...Things might change...

...I was in Nairobi last in May 1991 and went with friends to the Yaya Center, a new multistoried pink-yellow office and shopping complex...

...It is estimated that up to one million people could be HIV-positive...

...The time had come to take a close hard look at the opposition leaders...

...His answer was unusually blunt and revealing...

...Both the government troops and the rebels have engaged in pervasive human rights abuses in the war...

...Apart from the churchmen, most of the opposition figures are very rich...

...In January 1986 the main guerrilla group, the National Resistance Army (NRA), rode triumphant into the towns after a bitter five-year war...

...The Yaya Center is owned by a former cabinet minister, who was accused by colleagues in parliament of having got the money to build it in an equally modern way—through corrupt deals...

...In 1985, Nyerere became only the third African president—after Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroon—to step down peacefully from the presidency...

...Early last December, internal dissidents, with a little help from Western donors threatening to cut aid, forced Moi to legalize opposition parties and allow open debate...

...By 1991 the opposition in Kenya had grown teeth...

...The years of bloodletting had bred a culture that was tolerant of violence and believed in its efficacy...

...In eight years, 386 • DISSENT East Africa his army and security forces murdered between 500,000 and 800,000 people...

...An unusual figure appeared among the ranks of the Tanzanian opposition...

...There are very many such people in the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD), the main opposition group...

...Amin's regime was ousted in April 1979 by a combined force of Ugandan exiles and invading Tanzanian troops...

...Kenya's capital, Nairobi, is a thoroughly modern city...

...This is a popular road to wealth for Kenyan politicians and public officials...

...Exactly how many people have been killed in this conflict so far is not yet known...