Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (25 page)

Lots of things are started in Tanzania. Not much is finished. Scattered everywhere are roofless masonry walls—literally a few bricks shy of a load. Paint appears on the fronts of buildings but never on the sides or backs. The country seems as if it was built by hippies. And in a sense, it was.

Julius Nyerere was born two years after Timothy Leary. Nyerere, called
Mwalimu,
“the teacher,” was elected president of Tanganyika in 1962, just when Professor Leary began advocating LSD use at Harvard. Nobody has ever accused Nyerere of being a “head.” He’s lived an abstemious life (although he does have twenty-four grandchildren). But some of the same generational fluff filled the skulls of both Julius and Tim.

Nyerere embraced the collectivist ideology that has run riot in our century, and from this embrace was born a particularly spacey and feckless socialism call
ujamaa,
or “familyhood.” Excerpts from Nyerere’s writing sound like a 1969 three-bong-hit rap from somebody going off to found an organic tofu-growing commune: “Our agricultural organization would be predominately that of cooperative living and working for the good of all…. Some degree of specialization would be possible, with one member being, for example, a carpenter.” Dig it. “If every individual is self-reliant…then the whole nation is self-reliant.” Heavy.

The 1967 Arusha Declaration, a government manifesto cataloging the right-on goals and groovy ideals of
ujamaa,
states that agriculture and animal husbandry are where the Tanzanian economy is at. Industrialization would mean a bummer money trip. In the words of the tuned-in
Mwalimu,
“We make a mistake in choosing money—something we do not have—to be the big instrument of our development.” Development being something else they don’t have.

Issa G. Shivji, a law professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, has written an article summing up
ujamaa.
He says, “There were two central premises of this ideology: equality of human beings and developmentalism.” Equality is the thirty-five cents a day mentioned earlier. Developmentalism sounds like some even worse offshoot of Scientology. “The problem,” Shivji continues, “was that the ideology of
ujamaa
was not supported by any explicit social theory,” and that the Tanzanian government “pursued this policy logically and consistently.”

In other words,
ujamaa
made about as much sense as most things in the 1960s. Slogans were coined, such as the Hitlerish “
Uhuru na Kazi,
” which sounds even more Hitlerish when translated: “Freedom and Work.” Price controls were instituted, lasting until 1986. In 1981 farmers were being forced to sell corn to the government for 20 percent of market value, and that market value is nothing to write to Iowa about. In Mto-wa-Mbu, price-uncontrolled corn now sells for twenty-three cents a pound. Local industries were nationalized, foreign companies were expropriated, and compensation for these takings was, in the words of the U.S. State Department, “extremely slow and ponderous.” Much of commerce met the same ponderous, if not so slow, fate. East Indian and Arab minorities were the targets. The history textbook used in Tanzanian public high schools blandly states, “The monopolistic position of Indian wholesale traders was abolished.”

A program of “villagization” was begun, which sounds benign enough: “Hey, get a picket fence.” The idea was to persuade rural Tanzanians to move to 8,000 “familyhood villages,”
ujamaa vijijini,
where the government could provide them with water and education, and, by the way, keep an eye on everybody. The planned communities did not come up to plan: The water didn’t arrive; neither did the education, nor the people who were supposed to move there. When persuasion wouldn’t work, force was used. By the end of the ’70s, more than 65 percent of the population in the Tanzanian countryside had been deported to the
ujamaa vijijini
gulag. But, this being Tanzania, the population just wandered away again and built houses of their own in the bush.

Other vaporous ideas were being tried. According to
Ideology and Development in Africa,
a terribly fair-minded book published by the Yale University Press in the early ’80s, “There was a sharp reorientation of medical outlays away from high-cost, Western-model, curative medicine and toward rural, paramedical, and preventive health care. By 1974 the fraction of the health budget allocated to hospitals had dropped from 80 percent in the late 1960s to 50 percent,” with results such as the hyena hole/fractured spine crisis I overheard on the shortwave radio.

Meanwhile, the Tanzanian economy went concave. Tanzanian National Accounts figures indicate that the per-capita GDP has yet to return to its 1976 level. And the purchasing power of the legal minimum wage fell 80 percent between 1969 and 1987. So another answer to the question, “Why is Tanzania so poor?” is
ujamaa
—they planned it.

They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy. There’s a certain kind of gullible and self-serious person who’s put in charge of foreign aid (e.g., ex-head of the World Bank Robert McNamara. I rest my case.). This type was entranced by modest, articulate Julius Nyerere and the wonderful things he was going to do. American political-science professor Ali Mazrui dubbed it “Tanzaphilia.” In the midst of the villagization ugliness, Tanzania was receiving Official Direct Assistance (or ODA, as it’s called by the sucker/succor professionals) of $300 million a year in big, fat 1975 dollars. That was twenty dollars a head, and it wouldn’t surprise me if twenty dollars was about what it cost to build a
vijijini
hovel, catch a Tanzanian, and stick him inside.

Countries such as Sweden were particularly smitten, seeing in
ujamaa
a version of their own sanctimonious social order, but with better weather and fewer of those little meatballs on toothpicks. By the beginning of the 1990s, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark were sending Tanzania more than $320 million a year—nine times the amount of American aid.

Then there is the aforementioned World Bank, financed by the United States, Japan, and other wealthy nations. Its purpose is to loan money to underdeveloped areas, and I can’t understand why it won’t loan money to me, as I am in many areas as underdeveloped as it gets. The World Bank charges interest rates like your dad does when you borrow a twenty. Thirty-three percent of the projects funded by the World Bank are considered failures by the bank itself. The World Bank thus operates on the same business principles as a Reagan-era savings and loan. And apparently on the same moral principles—because villagization was just fine with the World Bank; in fact, it had already proposed something on that order in the reams of busybody economic advice with which international organizations pester the globe. How would we like it if the Organization of African Unity told us to get out of our suburbs and move downtown?

The World Bank loaned Tanzania oodles of money. Further oodles were loaned by other kindly aid agencies. Tanzanians now have a total foreign debt equal to almost two years’ worth of everything produced in the country. Tanzania is $7.4 billion in hock. The money will be repaid…when Rush Limbaugh becomes secretary general of the UN.

But don’t worry, the International Monetary Fund is on the case. If a country gets in trouble by borrowing too much from places like the World Bank, then it qualifies for an IMF loan. As long as Tanzania promises to abide, more or less, by free-market guidelines and doesn’t print more worthless paper money than it absolutely has too, the IMF will “help.”

Tanzania has been smothered in help. It’s received loans, grants, programs, projects, an entire railroad from the Chinese government (running 1,200 miles to nowhere in particular), and just plain cash. In 1994, by World Bank tally, foreign aid made up 29.1 percent of the Tanzanian GDP, more than the budget of the Tanzanian government. Whatever that government does, we better-off citizens of the world foot the bill. And we’ve been doing it for thirty-seven years.

Tanzania is said by Africa scholar Sanford Ungar to be “the most-aided country in all of Africa.” In the period immediately after independence, Tanzania was getting half a billion dollars a year in aid. Between 1970 and 1989, the CIA estimates, another $10.8 billion arrived. According to the World Bank, $5.4 billion more was given between 1990 and 1994. This is more than $20 billion, without even trying to pump the figure by adjusting for inflation.

John told me that good farmland in Tanzania sells for a million shillings an acre, about $1,650. Since there are 29 million Tanzanians, $20 billion would have bought each family a larger-than-average farm plot, and everybody could have gone back to doing what they were doing before
ujamaa
was thought of. One more reason that Tanzania is poor is that we’ve paid them to be.

John and I took the hammering ride back across the Rift. When I got green from being jiggled, John said, “
Safari
means ‘hard journey.’” Dust devils the size of major-league ballparks roamed across the Maasai homesteads. The Maasai didn’t bother to glance at these swirling circles of debris, which hit us with high-speed curtains of dirt and filled our van like a window planter. The Rift Valley is the work of continental drift. Africa is being pulled apart. Some day, Tanzania will float away from Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and Uganda. And Tanzanians deserve the move. Tanzanians deserve a lot of things.

Tanzanians certainly don’t deserve what they’ve had since 1961. The scum tide of
ujamaa
has receded, but it’s left behind such things as the awful road to Makuyuni we were on.
Ujamaa
woozy thinking has also left the Tanzanian public mind strewn with intellectual jettison. The national budget, in its “Agriculture” section, asserts that the government is encouraging “private sector participation in production,” and, in its “Land” section, claims that the government seeks “to ensure equitable distribution and equal access to land by all citizens.” So you’re encouraged to farm your private plot, and everyone else is encouraged to farm it, too. The high-school history book gives a disapproving economic analysis that’s a combination of marxism and Ross Perotology: “General Tyre Corporation built one tyre factory for the whole of East Africa in Arusha. But soon after this decision, another corporation, Firestone, built a similar factory in Nairobi. This meant the competition of imperialist capital.” And even John, who was completely sensible, said, “We have lots of bananas, but we don’t do anything with them—just use them for food.”

I said, “Huh?” John did tell me, however, that nobody even thought about trying to put the Maasai into
ujamaa
villages. Say what you will against the blood sports, people who spear lions for fun are well-prepared for political rough and tumble.

And Julius Nyerere apologized, which is more than most ’60s icons have bothered to do. When he relinquished the presidency in 1985, he said, in his farewell speech, “I failed. Let’s admit it.”

We drove on from Makuyuni to the Tarangire River basin on the far edge of the Maasai Steppe. The Maasai are fit and towering, despite what is—by the standards of Tanzania itself—a life of extreme hardship. They customarily knock out a couple of their children’s teeth so that the kids can be force-fed when they get lockjaw. Administering a liquid diet is easy enough, because Maasai cuisine is nothing but, basically, gravy. It would be food suicide for any other people and may cause even the Maasai a certain amount of indigestion. They call Europeans
iloredaa enjekat,
“those who confine their farts with clothing.” The Maasai try to avoid pants and other items of Western apparel. They stick to their tartan wraps. From toddler to granny, they possess a martial bearing. No Maasai man goes outdoors without a lance or quarterstaff. As a result of this public dignity, seeing a Maasai engaged in any ordinary activity—riding a bicycle, walking down the road with an upside-down dishpan on the head, drinking a soda pop—is like seeing a member of the Joint Chefs of Staff skateboarding. But the Maasai do know how to wear plaid-on-plaid. So Ralph Lauren is history if the Maasai ever get start-up capital and a marketing plan.

This brings us to a question much sadder than, “Why are the Tanzanians so poor?” which is, “Why do we care?” An economist would answer that a Maasai line of Lion Kill sportswear would drive down the price of Ralph Lauren Polo clothing and that we, as consumers, would profit. But the idea that the increased productivity of others benefits ourselves is not something most noneconomists understand or believe. It would be nice to think that we worry about Tanzanian poverty out of some
ujamaa
-like altruism—or maybe not, considering the results of
ujamaa.
Anyway, altruism toward strangers is mostly a sentimental and fleeting thing, a small check dashed off to Save the Children. Twenty billion dollars’ worth of it is rare. In the cold war days, of course, we were giving money to Tanzania on the theory of: “Pay them to be socialist so they won’t be communist and figure out what the difference is later.” But now, I’m afraid, the ugly truth is that we care about Tanzanians because they have cool animals.

And they do. John and I spent most of our days together driving around and looking at them. The minivan had a kind of sunroof on legs that, instead of sliding out of the way, popped up to form a metal awning. Thus, while John drove, I would stand in the back and, holding the awning’s supports, be bounced and jiggled around like some idiot of the raj in a mechanical howdah. Then, John would shout things such as, “Elephant!”