KIDHIBITI CHA KUSHUKA KWA UCHUMI NA UFISADI WAKATI WA NYERERE
TANZANIA, IN STICKING TO ITS SOCIALIST PATH, STUMBLES
By ALAN COWELL, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: March 2, 1982
For the third year in a row, Tanzania is importing food donated by outsiders to feed mainly those city dwellers who do not have access to their country's own produce.
Of the vessels moored at Dar es Salaam last week, two were unloading corn onto rickety trucks, themselves in such short supply that it takes, on average, 20 days to transfer the food from ship to shore.
However, Westerners who have recently toured parts of inland Tanzania, away from the debilitating heat of the Indian Ocean coast, say that food shortages outside the cities are limited to some pockets of hunger.
The contrast between town and country is part of a tale of mismanagement, inefficiency and corruption that outsiders increasingly attribute to President Julius K. Nyerere's dogged commitment to a kind of socialism that his country does not have the manpower to sustain.
Leader's Resignation Demanded
The discontent that flows from Tanzania's parlous economic conditions found its most graphic expression when a group of Tanzanians hijacked an Air Tanzania Boeing 737 and flew it to Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Greece and Britain, broadcasting on the way a demand for President Nyerere's resignation.
The hijacking was led by an army officer, apparently substantiating the argument of a senior Western diplomat here that if discontent is to crystalize it will do so in the military.
The authorities' attempts to belittle the impact of the hijacking augmented popular dissatisfaction. The officially controlled news organizations here, while reporting the hijacking, made no reference to the demand for the President's departure. Many Tanzanians clustered around shortwave radios or a Western news agency ticker in the lobby of the Kilimanjaro Hotel learning what their own newspapers and radio refused to tell them.
President Nyerere has in the past attributed much of his country's economic misfortune to outside factors. As an eloquent spokesman for what is called the third world, he has complained that adverse terms of trade, burgeoning oil prices and his war against the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin have strangled the economy.
'The Future Is Ominous'
Unpublished figures, compiled by Scandanavian and Western embassies, however, show a different picture. According to one such analysis, whose authors requested anonymity, the losses incurred by Tanzania because of falling agricultural output are more than double those created by high oil prices. Another analysis, noting that ''the future is ominous,'' said that, even if Tanzania received all of its oil free, there would still be a huge gap between imports and its exports of agricultural commodities, mainly coffee.
Ever since 1967, when President Nyerere charted a socialist course for his country, Tanzania has been organized on highly centralized lines that give a huge slice of the economy to state-controlled companies, called parastatals, which have generally proved unable to meet their obligations and have cost more to run than they have earned.
Professor Simon Mblinye, the President's economic adviser, said in a recent interview, ''We moved to the socialist approach and then we created institutions, and maybe we were overzealous in creating institutions.'' Lack of Experience Cited
''There are too many for the quality and quantity of the people we can generate to run them,'' he said. ''We created 300 parastatals in 10 years. You cannot do this in 10, 20 years of independence. There is a lack of experience. Most of the executives are young and they need leadership.''
Some of the companies, he said, are now to be dismantled and replaced by cooperatives. Tanzania's woes are not simply a result of socialist mismanagement; adverse prices for export crops, grandiose foreign aid schemes that cost the country too much to run, or were unsuitable in the first place, and a costly stab at industrialization all took their toll.
But the upshot, according to Tanzanian and Western economists, seems to have been the creation of a society where many people live outside the formal economy, as subsistence farmers, or peasants selling their crops on the black market, or senior officials augmenting their meager salaries with vegetable plots at home, or bribes in the office. Backyard Farming Helps
''When the worst comes to the worst,'' Professor Mblinye said, ''the modern sector shrinks, but the subsistence sector cannot stop. Many people forget that the power in country like ours lies in the subsistence sector.'' Thus, he said, senior officials like himself would leave their offices at the end of the working day and return home to cultivate food crops in their yards ''so the kids get something to eat.''
This argument seems flawed by one of Tanzania's most marked achievements - a big increase in literacy and universal, free education. Students of African affairs have argued that education is incompatible with subsistence existence since it creates aspirations that the subsistence way of life cannot fulfil.
The importation of food this year displays some of the interaction between the official economy and reality. According to Western agronomists, farmers in the countryside are holding back their crops for the black market where they can get much higher prices. So the cities go short of food and famine warnings are issued, despite the availability of food in the interior.
Food Shortages Predicted
As long ago as March 1981, Tanzania's food supply specialists warned the Ministry of Agriculture that shortages were imminent and that food would need to be imported. The country, bedeviled by drought and other natural misfortunes, had called on the international community to help in previous years but Ministry of Agrivulture officials declined to make a similar appeal when the alarms began to sound in 1981.
Instead, they spoke publicly of plans to buy food on the commercial market, despite a chronic lack of foreign exchange, and the inference was that some officials were hoping for a 10 percent cut on food contracts.
Potential Western donors, aware of the imminent crisis in the cities, expressed readiness to provide food. But, Western diplomats said, without a formal request from the Tanzanian authorities, they could not act.
The request was not forthcoming until October 1981, when President Nyerere, claiming ignorance of the earlier warnings, ordered his officials to request international assistance and thus halted the plan to buy on the open market. A confidant of the President said that, at the time, he suspected corruption as a prime cause of the delay. A Jet Plane for Official
Donors came forward with promises of 260,000 tons of relief food, and famine is expected to be averted. The Reagan Administration, which has little affection for Mr. Nyerere's socialism, contributed 25,000 tons of corn. The anomalies remain, however. At the same time as the food gifts began arriving at Dar es Salaam, news of another import began to leak out, though not in the official Tanzanian press. The country's Vice President, Aboud Jumbe, who is the leader of Zanzibar, a part of Tanzania with control over its own economy, has ordered a $5 million executive jet to wing his way from the island to the mainland, a 10-minute flight.
