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Ali Hassan Mwinyi (b. May 8,1925, Kivure, Pwani Region, Tanganyika Territory [now Tanzania] – b. February 29, 2024, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) was a Tanzanian politician who served as the second president of the United Republic of Tanzania from 1985 to 1995. Previous posts included Minister for Home Affairs and Vice President. He also was chairman of the ruling party, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) from 1990 to 1996.
During Mwinyi's terms, Tanzania took the first steps to reverse the socialist policies of Julius Nyerere. He relaxed import restrictions and encouraged private enterprise. It was during his second term that multi-party politics were introduced under pressure for reform from foreign and domestic sources. Often referred to as Mzee Rukhsa ("Everything goes"), he pushed for liberalization of morals, beliefs, values (without breaking the law) and the economy.
Mwinyi was born on May 8, 1925, in the village of Kivure, Pwani Region, where he was also raised. He then moved to Zanzibar and got his primary education at Mangapwani Primary School in Mangapwani, Zanzibar West Region. Mwinyi then attended Mikindani Dole Secondary School in Dole, Zanzibar West Region. From 1945 to 1964, Mwinyi worked successively as a tutor, teacher, and head teacher at various schools before deciding to enter national politics.
Concurrently, Mwinyi earned his General Certificate of Education through correspondence (1950–1954) and then studied for a teaching diploma at the Institute of Education at Durham University in the United Kingdom. He did not leave England until 1962, being appointed principal of Zanzibar Teaching Training College in Zanzibar West Region, upon his return.
President Julius Nyerere retired in October 1985 and picked Ali Hassan Mwinyi to be his successor. Nyerere remained chairman of the ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), until 1990, which would later cause tensions between the government and the party regarding economic reform ideology. When the transition of power took place, Tanzania's economy was in the midst of a slump. From 1974 to 1984, the GDP was growing at an average of 2.6% per year while the population was increasing at a faster rate of 3.4% each year. Rural incomes and urban wages had both fallen by the early 1980s, despite Tanzania's minimum wage laws. Furthermore, the currency was overpriced, basic goods were scarce, and the country had over three billion dollars of foreign debt. Agricultural production was low, and the general opinion was that Nyerere's Ujamaa socialist policies had failed economically.
Such policies included the nationalization of major production, the forced re-villagization of the rural population into communal farms, and the banning of any opposition parties. Nyerere's supporters were opposed to involving the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in domestic economic reforms, believing it would cause instability and conflict with their socialist values. Also, Tanzania's relationship with the IMF had been strained since Nyerere's government failed to meet the loan conditions from a 1980 financial package agreement.
Early in this political transition, many believed that Mwinyi was unlikely to deviate from Nyerere's policies since he was viewed as a loyal supporter of his predecessor. However, Ali Hassan Mwinyi and his followers called for economic and political reform to liberalize the market and review traditional socialist ideologies. He surrounded himself with reformists, even replacing three cabinet members and other ministers who were opposed to change. The Prime Minister at the time, Joseph Warioba, along with the finance minister Clement Msuya were also quite supportive of new policies. During his first address to Tanzania's Parliament in 1986, Mwinyi promised to resume negotiations with the IMF and World Bank, assuming that any resulting agreement would be beneficial to the citizens of Tanzania.
In 1986, Mwinyi made an agreement with the IMF to receive a $78 million standby loan, which was Tanzania's first foreign loan in over six years. Bilateral donors approved his austerity plan and agreed to reschedule Tanzania's debt payments. They agreed to do so for a period of five years, requiring that Tanzania pay only 2.5% of their debts in the meantime. In an interview, Mwinyi urged donor countries to use Canada as an example and write off Tanzania's debts all together. If this request was not possible, he asked instead for a minimum of ten years to pay off loans but said that twenty to twenty-five years was a more ideal range. He predicted that by this time, the country's economy would be recovered and that they would be in a position to repay their debts without it hurting them. In the same interview, he also asked aid donors for lower interest rates.
Mwinyi claimed that his negotiations with the IMF were on behalf of the people: for example, he agreed to the Fund's request that he decrease the number of public institutions, but only when doing so was necessary and could be done gradually. Furthermore, he declined their recommendation to freeze pay raises within the government and to cut free public services.
The following year, Mwinyi negotiated Tanzania's first structural adjustment facility (SAF) with the IMF, followed by subsequent agreements in 1988 and again in 1990. In addition to these developments, the World Bank provided structural adjustment credits for reforms in the agricultural, industrial, and financial sectors. In 1989, President Mwinyi began the second phases of his reform program with the intention of reforming social sectors, specifically by increasing government spending on education.
In 1991, the first stages of the transition towards multipartyism began when Mwinyi appointed Chief Justice Francis Nyalali to lead a commission to gage the amount of popular support for the current single-party system. This commission submitted their report to the President in 1992, recommending that the government transition into a multi-party system. They made this recommendation despite the fact that only twenty-one percent out of the 36,299 Tanzanians who were interviewed favored this change. However, fifty-five percent of the seventy-seven percent who supported the current system were in favor of some sort of reform. Justice Nyalali pointed to twenty specific laws that were in need of revision in order to comply with the requirements of a multi-party system. Mwinyi supported their recommendation and the CCM Extraordinary National Party Conference ratified changes through constitutional amendments in February 1992. However, not all twenty of these laws were revised, including the controversial Preventative Detention Act that was left-over from colonial times.
During the years of Julius Nyerere's presidency, corruption was viewed as a sort of oppression that undermined Tanzania's egalitarian values. However, reports of corruption increased along with the state's economic decline. Under Mwinyi's presidency, corrupt practices worsened under his economically liberal policies. It became so endemic that some donors froze aid in 1994 in response.
During the first multi-party election in 1995, the opposition parties used the people's resentments towards the ongoing corruption as political fuel. However, the CCM candidate Benjamin Mkapa was also able to use corruption in his favor, as he was viewed as untainted by any of the corruption scandals that marred the Mwinyi administration.
Brothers and well-known businessmen V.G. Chavda and P.G. Chavda received a $3.5 million loan from a debt conversion program (DCP) in 1993. They promised to use these funds to revamp rundown plantations in Tanga. This included upgrading worker housing, repairing old machines, and replanting farmland. They claimed their projects would create 1,400 jobs and would generate $42 million in foreign exchange money. In reality, they had diverted the funds outside of the country through the purchase of fake machines and parts. It was later uncovered that high-ranking politicians had covered for them, including the Minister for Home Affairs, Augustine Mrema. They were able to evade prosecution.
In early 1995, the well-known company Mohamed Enterprises was accused of allegedly distributing food that was unfit for human consumption. Mrema claimed he would punish the company but was demoted to Minister of Youth and Culture before he could take action. Mrema criticized Mwinyi's administration for tolerating high levels of corruption and being complicit about anti-corruption enforcement. He was then removed from the cabinet, and later became a candidate for one of the opposition parties, NCCR-Mageuzi.
In a 1989 interview, when asked about his views regarding apartheid, Mwinyi advocated for tough, comprehensive sanctions to be carried out against South Africa. He also called for Western nations to assist "frontline states" in dealing with any destabilization attempts made by the South African government against those who oppose them. Mwinyi said that practicing these measures concurrently would help to dismantle apartheid. He called the Reagan administration's hesitance to enact tougher sanctions a "stumbling block," and expressed his hope that future American leaders would take more action against South Africa's regime.
Ali Hassan Mwinyi married Siti Mwinyi in 1960, with whom he had six sons and six daughters. In retirement, Ali Hassan Mwinyi stayed out of the limelight and continued to live in Dar es Salaam.
In November 2023, Mwinyi was hospitalized for a chest illness. He died of lung cancer at a hospital in Dar es Salaam, on February 29, 2024, at the age of 98.
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Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Former President of Tanzania, Dies at 98
Handpicked by his socialist predecessor, Julius K. Nyerere, Mr. Mwinyi was credited with reforms, among them permitting the sale of mobile phones and computers.
Ali Hassan Mwinyi, a schoolteacher turned politician who led Tanzania as its second post-independence president and helped dismantle the doctrinaire socialism of his predecessor, Julius K. Nyerere, died on 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 of Mr. Nyerere, who had volunteered to step down after governing his country since its beginnings of independent nationhood as Tanganyika in 1961 and its merger with Zanzibar in 1964 to create the state of Tanzania.
At the time, the peaceful transition was seen as precedent setting in a continent that had gained notoriety for political violence as the prime agent of change or succession.
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But critics said Mr. Mwinyi — who went on to serve two five-year terms before stepping down in 1995 — had little of the charisma and international stature of Mr. Nyerere, an African statesman closely involved in struggles among independent nations to end Portuguese and British colonial influence in Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe, and to sponsor the foes of apartheid in white-ruled South Africa.
Among Tanzanians, Mr. Nyerere was known as Mwalimu — Kiswahili for teacher. Mr. Mwinyi, by contrast, was nicknamed Mzee wa Rukhsa, loosely translated as an elder who permits almost everything.
At the same time, though, Mr. Nyerere’s socialist rule — built on notions of rural collectivization, nationalization of industries and bureaucratic centralism — had led to economic failure, including shortages of foreign exchange and essential goods, ballooning debt, and dependence on foreign aid, much of it from Scandinavian countries. Tanzania had also fought a ruinous war with neighboring Uganda that toppled the dictator Idi Amin but deepened its own economic decline.
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Diplomats described Mr. Mwinyi as a shy compromise candidate, in thrall to a predecessor who refused to give up the powerful post of party chairman at the same time that he handed over the presidency. Indeed, Mr. Nyerere told his successor that, having governed for 24 years, he would continue to “whisper in his ear” to pass on the wisdom that had accrued to him.
Only in 1990 did Mr. Mwinyi become the leader of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the governing institution in his one-party state. In 1992, he oversaw a special congress that endorsed constitutional changes creating 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 occupied by a string of party figures, from Mr. Mwinyi’s successor, Benjamin Mkapa, to the incumbent, Ms. Hassan. Indeed, Mr. Mwinyi himself seemed to be 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 landmark reforms, including permitting the sale of mobile telephones, computers and television sets. He pushed for higher prices for crops grown by peasant farmers and a greater role for private businesses.
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 such agreement since a previous deal collapsed six years earlier. Several more agreements followed with the fund and the World Bank.
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Mr. Mwinyi’s decade in power straddled the events that led to the end of the Cold War — a contest that had rippled through Africa as the opposing camps jostled for influence in states aligned with distant sponsors in Moscow and the West. When single-party rule was formally dismantled in 1992, Mr. Mwinyi declared that the switch to multiparty democracy mirrored similar global developments.
Like other African leaders of his era, he criticized American foreign policy in Africa, saying that the reluctance of the Reagan administration to endorse broader sanctions against white-ruled South Africa had created a stumbling block 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 to distribute food that had been found unfit for human consumption.
In the Mwinyi era, according to a scholarly paper in the African Journal of Political Science in 2002, “corruption spiraled out of control.”
Ali Hassan Mwinyi was born on May 8, 1925, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s commercial center and main port, the son of Hassan and Asha Sheikh Mwinyi. His parents both came from Zanzibar, where he spent much of his childhood, according to the Tanzanian Foreign Ministry.
He earned qualifications as a teacher in Britain and taught at schools in Zanzibar before joining the government there as a permanent secretary in the Education Ministry. He went on to hold a series of government posts, and from 1972 to 1974 he represented Tanzania as its 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 jobless after his term as ambassador in Cairo.
“For a period of approximately two years our father was out of work,” Abdullah Mwinyi wrote in a 2020 article. “Soon the ambassadorial savings would run out. At the time, there were limited opportunities in trading or any meaningful employment outside of government.”
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He added, “Our mother decided to make ice lollies (we had freezers from Egypt) and cook maandazis” — a kind of fried, doughnutlike bun — “for sale and upkeep. Our mother through this venture was the breadwinner.”
Information on 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 next year. He left office in 1995 after serving the maximum two terms as mandated by Tanzania’s Constitution after Mr. 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 traveling by public transport.
In 2021, Mr. Mwinyi published a memoir in Kiswahili whose title translated as “Mister Permission: The Journey of My Life.”
According to a review of the book published in The East African, a weekly newsmagazine, he said his prime legacy lay in economic reforms that broke with the Nyerere era — a task, he said, that “was not easy at all, but change was a must.”
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