Ali Hassan Mwinyi, former president of Tanzania, dies at the age of 98

Ali Hassan Mwinyi, a teacher-turned-politician who led Tanzania as its second president after independence and helped dismantle the doctrinaire socialism of his predecessor, Julius K. Nyerere, died Thursday in Dar es Salaam, the country’s former capital . He was 98.

Tanzania’s current president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, announced the death in a hospital on X, formerly known as Twitter. She said Mr Mwinyi had been treated for lung cancer.

Mr Mwinyi was 60 when he took over the presidency in 1985 as the handpicked successor to Mr Nyerere, who had volunteered to step down after ruling his country since the inception of the independent nation as Tanganyika in 1961 and the merger with Zanzibar in 1964. creating the state of Tanzania.

At the time, the peaceful transition was seen as a precedent on a continent that had become known for political violence as the main driver of change or succession.

But critics said Mr Mwinyi – who went on to serve two five-year terms before resigning in 1995 – had little of the charisma and international stature of Mr Nyerere, an African statesman deeply involved in the struggle between independent nations to ending Portuguese and British colonial influence in Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe, and supporting the enemies of apartheid in white-ruled South Africa.

Among Tanzanians, Mr Nyerere was known as Mwalimu – Kiswahili for teacher. Mr Mwinyi, on the other hand, was nicknamed Mzee wa Rukhsa, loosely translated as an elder who allows almost anything.

But at the same time, Nyerere’s socialist rule – based on ideas of rural collectivization, nationalization of industries and bureaucratic centralism – had led to economic failure, including shortages of foreign exchange and essential goods, rising debt and dependence on foreign aid. , many of which come from Scandinavian countries. Tanzania had also waged a devastating war with neighboring Uganda, overthrowing the dictator Idi Amin but deepened its own economic decline.

Diplomats described Mr Mwinyi as a timid compromise candidate, in thrall to a predecessor who refused to give up the powerful post of party chairman at the same time he handed over the presidency. Mr Nyerere told his successor that after 24 years in office, he would continue to “whisper in his ear” to pass on the wisdom he had acquired.

It was not until 1990 that Mr Mwinyi became the leader of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the governing body in his one-party state. In 1992, he oversaw a special congress that endorsed constitutional changes, creating a multiparty political system.

Despite this formal change, Chama Cha Mapinduzi – the Revolutionary Party – remained the dominant political force for decades, and the presidency was held by a series of party figures, including Mr Mwinyi’s successor. Benjamin Mkapato the sitting lady. Hassan. Indeed, Mr Mwinyi himself seemed no stranger to dynastic politics: one of his sons, Hussein Ali Mwinyi, became president of Zanzibar in 2020, also representing Chama Cha Mapinduzi.

During his tenure, the elder Mr Mwinyi was credited with pioneering reforms, including allowing the sale of mobile phones, computers and television sets. He pushed for higher prices for crops grown by farmers and a greater role for private companies.

In 1986, on the brink of his country’s economic collapse, he signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to secure a standby loan of $78 million. It was Tanzania’s first agreement since an earlier deal collapsed six years earlier. A number of further agreements followed with the fund and the World Bank.

Mr Mwinyi’s decade in power was scattered with the events that led to the end of the Cold War – a struggle that had swept across Africa as opposing camps jostled for influence in states linked to distant sponsors in Moscow and the West. When the one-party regime was formally dismantled in 1992, Mr Mwinyi stated that the move to multi-party democracy reflected similar global developments.

Like other African leaders of his era, he criticized U.S. foreign policy in Africa, saying the Reagan administration’s unwillingness to approve broader sanctions against white South Africa had created a stumbling block in the effort to end apartheid to dismantle.

Despite this, his two terms in office were long associated with a deterioration in his country’s reputation for corruption, including schemes to defraud a government debt agency and distribute food deemed unfit for human consumption.

In the Mwinyi era, according to a scientific article in the 2002 African Journal of Political Science, “corruption was spiraling out of control.”

Ali Hassan Mwinyi was born on May 8, 1925 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s commercial center and main port, to Hassan and Asha Sheikh Mwinyi. His parents were both from Zanzibar, where he spent much of his childhood. said the Tanzanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He qualified as a teacher in Britain and taught in schools in Zanzibar before joining the government there as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education. He subsequently held a series of government posts and from 1972 to 1974 represented Tanzania as ambassador to Egypt, where he studied Arabic.

In 1960 he married Siti Mwinyi. One of their many children, Abdullah Mwinyi, a lawyer, credited his mother with supporting the family while his father was unemployed after serving as ambassador to Cairo.

“Our father was out of work for about two years,” Abdullah Mwinyi wrote in a 2020 article. “Soon the ambassadors’ savings would run out. At the time, there were limited opportunities in trade or any meaningful employment outside of government.”

He added: “Our mother decided to make popsicles (we had freezers from Egypt) and cook mondazis” – a kind of fried, doughnut-like roll – “for sale and maintenance. Our mother was the breadwinner through this business.”

Information about Mr Mwinyi’s survivors was not immediately available.

Mr Mwinyi became president of Zanzibar in 1984 before Mr Nyerere chose him as his successor the following year. He left office in 1995 after serving the maximum two terms prescribed by Tanzania’s constitution, following Mr Nyerere’s 24 years of near-absolute power. (Tanzania has regularly held multiparty elections since transitioning from a one-party state in the early 1990s.)

As a private citizen, Mr Mwinyi lived without ostentation and was photographed travelling with public transport.

In 2021, Mr Mwinyi published a memoir in Kiswahili with the title translated as ‘Mister Permission: The Journey of My Life’.

According to a review of the book published in The East African, a weekly news magazine, he said his most important legacy was in economic reforms that broke with the Nyerere era – a task, he said, that “was not easy at all, but change was a must.”

Abdi Latif Dahir reporting contributed.