Abstract

Between 1980 and 1986 Tanzania, in the throes of a serious economic crisis, engaged in a tug of war with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which refused to provide funding to the country until the government of Julius Nyerere, committed to the socialist policy of ujamaa, had not agreed to implement a comprehensive package of market reforms. The failure to reach an agreement with the IMF gradually deprived Tanzania of new development aid, as one by one all Western donors decided not to make new financial commitments to the Tanzanian government until a compromise with the IMF had been reached. While the arm wrestling between Nyerere and the IMF has been mainly explained by scholars as an ideological clash, this essay puts it within the wider framework of Southern African politics in the first half of the 1980s and shows that both Great Britain and the United States refused to put pressure on the IMF to reach an agreement with the Tanzanian government because they wanted to undermine Nyerere’s political leadership in Southern Africa and opposed his socialist vision. By so doing, this essay shifts the focus of the analysis from the clash between the Tanzanian government and the IMF per se to the redefinition of the power relations between the regional and international actors in Southern Africa, a process which saw a gradual weakening of the influence of Nyerere at the regional level. In 1985 Nyerere left the presidency, thus paving the way to the conclusion of a standby agreement between the new goverment of Ali Hassan Mwinyi and the IMF and the abandonment of ujamaa.