Ali Hassan Mwinyi, a schoolteacher-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 former capital of the country. He was 98 years old.
The current president of Tanzania, 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.
Mwinyi was 60 when he became president in 1985 as the hand-picked successor to Nyerere, who had offered to step down after ruling his country from its beginnings as an independent nation as Tanganyika in 1961 and its merger with Zanzibar in 1964 to create the state of Tanzania.
At the time, the peaceful transition was considered a precedent in a continent that had gained notoriety for political violence as the main agent of change or succession.
But critics said Mwinyi, who served two five-year terms before resigning in 1995, had little of the charisma and international stature of Nyerere, an African statesman closely involved in struggles between independent nations to end Portuguese and colonial influence. British in Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe, and to sponsor the enemies of apartheid in white-ruled South Africa.
Among Tanzanians, Nyerere was known as Mwalimu, which is Kiswahili for teacher. Mwinyi, on the other hand, was nicknamed Mzee wa Rukhsa, which loosely translates as an old man who allows almost anything.
At the same time, however, Nyerere’s socialist government (based on notions of rural collectivization, nationalization of industries, and bureaucratic centralism) had led to economic failure, including shortages of foreign exchange and essential goods, growing debt, and dependence on foreign aid. , many of them from Scandinavian countries. Tanzania had also fought a ruinous war with neighboring Uganda that toppled dictator Idi Amin but deepened its own economic decline.
Diplomats described Mwinyi as a timid compromise candidate, in thrall to a predecessor who refused to relinquish the powerful post of party president while handing over the presidency. In fact, Nyerere told his successor that, after ruling for 24 years, he would continue to “whisper in her ear” to pass on the wisdom he had accumulated.
It was only in 1990 that Mwinyi became leader of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the ruling institution in his one-party state. In 1992, he oversaw a special congress that passed constitutional changes that created a multiparty political system.
Despite that 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, from Mwinyi’s successor, Benjamin Mkapa, to the incumbent, Mrs. Hassan. Indeed, Mr Mwinyi himself appeared to be no stranger to dynastic politics: one of his sons, Hussein Ali Mwinyi, became president of Zanzibar in 2020, and also represented Chama Cha Mapinduzi.
During his tenure, Mr Mwinyi Sr. was credited with landmark reforms, including allowing the sale of mobile phones, computers and televisions. He pushed for higher prices for farmers’ crops 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 guarantee a reserve loan of $78 million. It was the first such deal in Tanzania since a previous deal collapsed six years earlier. Several more agreements with the fund and the World Bank followed.
Mwinyi’s decade in power straddled the events that led to the end of the Cold War, a contest that had spread across Africa as opposing sides fought for influence in aligned states with distant patrons in Moscow and the West. When the single-party government was formally dismantled in 1992, Mwinyi stated that the shift to multi-party democracy reflected similar global developments.
Like other African leaders of his time, he criticized American foreign policy in Africa, saying that the Reagan administration’s reluctance to support broader sanctions against white-ruled South Africa had created an obstacle in the effort to dismantle apartheid.
For all that, his two terms in office were long associated with a worsening of his country’s reputation for corruption, including scams to defraud a government debt agency and distribute food that had been deemed unfit for human consumption.
In the Mwinyi era, according to an academic article In the African Journal of Political Science in 2002, “corruption got out of control.”
Ali Hassan Mwinyi was born on May 8, 1925 in Dar es Salaam, the commercial center and main port of Tanzania, to Hassan and Asha Sheikh Mwinyi. His parents both came from Zanzibar, where he spent much of his childhood. according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tanzania.
He earned teaching qualifications in Britain and taught in schools in Zanzibar before joining the government there as permanent secretary to the Ministry of Education. He then held a series of government positions and from 1972 to 1974 he represented Tanzania as ambassador to Egypt, where he studied Arabic.
In 1960 he married Siti Mwinyi. One of his many children, Abdullah Mwinyi, a lawyer, credited his mother with supporting the family while his father was unemployed after his tenure as ambassador in Cairo.
“For a period of about two years, our father was out of work,” Abdullah Mwinyi wrote in an article in 2020. “The embassy savings would soon run out. At that time, there were limited opportunities in trade or any meaningful employment outside of government.”
She added: “Our mother decided to make ice pops (we had freezers from Egypt) and cook maandazis” (a type of fried doughnut-like bun) “to sell and support them. “Our mother, through this company, was the breadwinner of the family.”
Information about Mr. Mwinyi’s survivors was not immediately available.
Mwinyi assumed the presidency of Zanzibar in 1984, before Nyerere chose him as his successor the following year. He left office in 1995 after serving the maximum two terms as provided by Tanzania’s Constitution following Nyerere’s 24 years of near-absolute power. (Tanzania has held regular multiparty elections since its transition from a one-party state in the early 1990s.)
As a private citizen, Mr Mwinyi lived without ostentation and was photographed travel by public transport.
In 2021, Mwinyi published a memoir in Kiswahili whose title translated as “Mister Permission: The Journey of My Life.”
According a book review Published in The East African, a weekly news magazine, he said his main legacy lay in the economic reforms that broke with the Nyerere era, a task, he said, that “was not easy at all, but change was essential.”
Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reports.
