Mkapa embodied Tanzanians’ innate modesty, peacefulness

There could not have been a nicer way for our dear Ben Mkapa to say goodbye. Just a few days before his death, he participated actively in the ceremony in Dodoma, where Tanzanian President John Magufuli presented his papers for the Chama cha Mapinduzi’s nomination for the October election. Also present were the country’s two other former presidents — Hassan Ali Mwinyi and Jakaya Kikwete.

So all the living Tanzanian presidents were there at the pivotal moment that occurs every five years in Tanzania, when the CCM party renews its democratic legitimacy.  

Then on Friday July 22 , Ben Mkapa was gone. He has left us all so much the poorer.

As for millions of others, Ben’s death was a painful moment for me. I had been close to him since 1973, when he was the editor of the government-owned Daily News and I of the Sunday Post, Kenya’s only politically independent mainstream newspaper then.

He had called me out of the blue late in 1973, introduced himself and said he relied on the Sunday Post for independent information on Kenya, and we arranged to meet on his next Nairobi visit. We hit it off right away as we shared a socialist orientation then and a passion for change and the use of communication. Our friendship intermittently spanned the next four decades across the countries and continents our lives took us to.    

Ben always had a smile, was upbeat and warm, a poetry lover who cared deeply for people and their needs. He was extremely savvy politically and was genuinely committed to pan-Africanism and Africa’s liberation struggle, in the mould of Kenneth Kaunda and Thabo Mbeki. He was repeatedly asked to help mediate peace across the continent because of his mediation skills, and ended up being a board member of the International Crisis Group. 

Mkapa was also a member along with Graca Machel of the African mediation team led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that helped bring Kenya back from the brink of becoming a murderous failed state in 2008.

One reason Mkapa was effective as a peace maker was Tanzania’s not being a hegemonic political or economic power. He could focus entirely on what was needed to achieve peace without simultaneously trying to seek a way to promote his country’s interests, or indeed his own. 

None of this is to say Ben Mkapa was stain-free, or that Tanzania is totally democratic and upright. Still in politics, as we genuinely strive for perfection, we must also distinguish between gross malfeasance and murderous greed, and a lesser order of misdeeds, which, of course, are still unacceptable. We cannot use the same kind of brush to paint the terrible and the bad. That will often lead no one to vote for someone who can win.  

Thankfully, Mkapa’s legacy is widely known and freely discussed. He buttressed this legacy before his death with a rare, compelling African presidential memoir, “My Life, My Purpose:  A Tanzanian President Remembers.” In it, he acknowledges important personal failures. His decisive intellectual sharpness and writing skills, plus his love of language, make it a truly readable memoir.  

MKAPA AND CCM

Ben was devoted utterly to the party, and his 10 years as President from 1995 to 2005 were as successful as they were because “he followed Mwalimu’s discipline of regular meetings of the party organs and free discussions within the party”.

Ben helped build this formerly sole political party to compete for the first time in the tumultuous rough and tumble of democratic competition. That Tanzanian’s comportment is not as rough, corrupt and no-holds-barred as its neighbours is a testament to Tanzanians themselves and to most of its leaders, among whom Ben Mkapa stands out.       

Soon after I met Ben, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere made Mkapa his press secretary in 1974. Thus began his slow, steady rise that is the hallmark of Tanzanian politics. No overnight sensations there, nor billionaires jumping in out of the blue: Tanzanians want to get to know their leaders before they put their trust in them.

Our interactions grew in the late 1970s, as Ben sought to understand better the Kenyan financial interests behind the campaign to break up the East African Community. A member of the East African Legislative Assembly in Arusha and a committed pan-Africanist, Mkapa fought valiantly to save what was one of the most advanced economic unions in the world then, with three sovereign countries sharing the same currency and jointly owning all major transport infrastructure, including EA Airways, Railways and Harbours. While he and Mwalimu Nyerere lost that battle, Ben was thrilled that as President of Tanzania, he was able to help reconstitute the EAC in 1999.   

Benjamin Mkapa had no airs about him. Like his mentor Mwalimu, he was an incarnation of Tanzania itself with its innate modesty, commitment to peaceful competition and disdain for rank. One particular event captured this powerfully. It was 1982, and I thought he was doing a superb job as Foreign Minister when I heard on the news that he had been appointed High Commissioner to Canada. I was stunned and crestfallen. I called him.

“What happened, Ben?”

He laughed heartily. “You mean my demotion?”

"Yes," I said!

“You must get to know Tanzania and Mwalimu better, Salim. There are some key bilateral issues with Canada that need to be addressed and Mwalimu thinks I am the best person for it. We do not stand on rank and titles in our place.”

I was aware that that might not be the entire story, but being close to Ben, I knew the essence of it was true. Within the year, Ben was appointed Ambassador to the United States. Soon he was back in the Cabinet and in 1995, he won the country’s first multiparty presidential election.

MEDIATION EPIPHANY

I could only marvel at how different Tanzania was from us in Kenya.  

Later in 1982, I had to flee Kenya when my journalistic 'independence' became too much for President Daniel Moi. I ended up in the US and found a job with the UN in NY.

A memorable Mkapa moment for me came in the first days of January 2008, when a group of African statesmen led by former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano, including Ben Mkapa, jetted into Nairobi to deal with the exploding violence over the tainted December 30 election results.

As the group came out of their first meeting, Ben took me aside and told me my New Year’s article in the UK Independent just as the violence was breaking out, ‘The Lights Went Out On Kenya Last Night’, had made him realise why things were so much worse than he had thought. And why there was so much anger in Kenya, for which the tainted presidential election was like striking a match.  

Ironically, I had tried to put off writing that article because in those tense, violence-filled days, I was simply overwhelmed as Raila Odinga’s spokesman and hardly even sleeping. Thankfully, the Independent’s Nairobi correspondent, who had asked me to write that article, kept pressing me on the telephone, and eventually I frantically penned the fastest 750 words I have ever written.

Ben’s comment again brought home to me how important such articles and their speed of publication are, as is one’s journalistic credibility.

There was a surreal coincidence in the Kofi Annan-led mediation that followed  and brought Kenya back from the brink: I knew well all three members of the negotiating team, Kofi Annan, Graca Machel and Ben Mkapa. I also had worked closely at the UN with Lord Mark Malloch Brown, who was then Foreign Affairs minister in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet and a major player in the negotiations that led to the Kenya Accord.

That closeness to the major negotiators led Martha Karua, who led President Mwai Kibaki’s team in the Accord negotiations and forcefully championed his interests - to ask that I be removed as ODM’s liaison with the Annan group. Raila and I agreed that was a good idea.

In My Life, My Purpose, Mkapa recalled that Martha and William Ruto, then on Raila’s ODM team, were very difficult people to deal with. He narrates that talks proceeded much more smoothly once the Annan team managed to lock the two out of discussions with President Kibaki and Raila. President Mkapa also wrote that Ugandan President Museveni played a disruptive role in the negotiations.

Ben Mkapa was an articulate, lively speaker, and given his political and intellectual strengths, he could hold the attention of international leaders. Issa Shivji, the renowned Tanzanian professor, told me:

“Mkapa’s success lay in his following Mwalimu’s discipline of regular meetings of the party organs and free discussions within the party. This serves an important function of ‘check and balance’, particularly in a situation where the President has constitutionally enormous powers, the opposition is weak (or repressed) and the ruling party is hegemonic. Of course, this works only if the party is not packed with handpicked yes men and women."

This openness to debate led to one of Mkapa’s most enduring achievements: transforming Tanzania into a functioning multiparty democracy during his presidency and handing over a stable nation to his successor Jakaya Kikwete. In that period, Mkapa also substantially liberalised the economy with help from the World Bank and the IMF, and initiated the controversial privatisation programme.  

AFFINITY TO TANZANIA

While I am Kenyan, I have felt close to Tanzania since I was a young boy because my father was born in Moshi and my mother in Tanga, and we had more relatives in Tanganyika than in Kenya. That youthful affection multiplied when Mwalimu Nyerere took the helm and pursued his Ujamaa (socialist) policies.

Mwalimu kept the country united despite severe economic hardship, without resorting to repression and use of state violence, earning worldwide respect for that stability in a continent filled with political upheavals.

It was ironic that Tanzania, which has had bristling relations with Kenya, played a critical role in helping the Annan mediation succeed in early 2008. That was through Mkapa and subsequently, when the negotiations deadlocked, through President Jakaya Kikwete. In addition, President George Bush was then in Tanzania on a state visit, and he dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Nairobi to meet Kibaki and Raila — no doubt with a briefing from President Kikwete.

Conciliation is deep in Tanzanian DNA, even when dealing with a thorny neighbour! 

The great Benjamin Mkapa was not free of blemish. While he steered the country to a stable democratic multiparty system free of election rigging, corruption grew in the multiparty, privatised Tanzania. Accusations were made against President Mkapa himself. And in his 2000 election victory, police killed 21 protesters on Pemba island.  

Mkapa set Tanzania on a successful free market trajectory without the upheavals other African countries suffered from this change. This rare African achievement belongs to Mwalimu Nyerere first and foremost, but his protégé Mkapa played a crucial role during the reforms he implemented.

In a deeply troubled world full of extreme inequality and deprivation, there are not many models anywhere that one can recommend. But Tanzanians and their leaders have managed to maintain peace and relative unity through turbulent times. I am happy to salute them and their leaders, including my now departed dearest friend Ben Mkapa.   

NOTE: Talking of Mkapa's love of language and poetry, Prof Simon Gikandi of Princeton University has been trying to locate Mkapa’s writings from his Makerere days for the Clarendon lectures he is delivering at Oxford University this year on the use of English in the British colonies. Ben read English at Makerere. I would like to appeal to any who might have copies of his writing to forward them to me.