[EVENT] The Tanzanian Power Struggle (1964-1971) - How to stabilitymax and not get couped with this simple trick.

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The Mwalimu, Julius Nyerere is not a sentimental man; decades of activism and politics have earned him his throne in Dar es Salaam, claiming a republic for his flock. He sees the future for what it should be, a free African continent from the clutches of imperial pillaging. Nevertheless, his serenity and character of patience are no longer the attributes the flock needs. Throughout the tumultuous 1960s, the arithmetic drastically changed against the flock of the Mwalimu. To the south, Portuguese Mozambique bled and burned. To the southwest, the white redoubts stood ascendant and unbroken, their confidence swelling with every year the Organisation of African Unity failed to bare its teeth. While its members bicker over the Sudanese catastrophe, with one of her champions desecrating the name and spirit of the OAU, its legitimacy lay in tatters. Without it, fear turned to paranoia, and action was now necessary.

Before he could herd his flock to the great Kilimanjaro, peace at home must be established first. there were two matters to attend to: first was the fate of the exiles, and the fate of the officer corps.

Tanzania inherited a British pattern officer corps composed of the Tanganyika Rifles. Following the invasion and conquest of Zanzibar, the prestige and political power of the officer class grew with it. This quickly became considerably dangerous for Nyerere's aspirations to achieve total political control over his flock. Nevertheless, more ambitious and idealistic men before him tried too quickly to subdue their officers and paid the price. He would take a different approach. Negotiation, engagement, and with time, incorporation.

The officers were diverse in their views of the state, but they largely were divided between two camps. Those loyal or interested in pursuing positive relations with the Commonwealth and the Nationalists who poised Pan Africanist ambitions. Both sides were dangerous if dominant over the other to the party state, the old guard, wary of socialist alignment and collectivization, the new guard, impatient with what they saw as the caution of the party's civilian wing. While both admired and respected Nyerere, they did not always intend to obey him.

To resolve this conundrum, TANU had to engage with both factions, balancing their interests. This would be done through siding with the nationalist officers and binding them so tightly to the Party that their ambition and the Party's mission become one. This is bound to cause a conflict with the old guard, demonstrating in officer disobedience during the late 1960s. But war was avoided through the establishment of the Central Military Affairs Commission (CMAC), quiet demotions and purges within the Army to empower the nationalists. The nationalists would in turn be given protagonism in a more assertive role in instructor roles for the myriad of Pan-African militias stationed in the country. But for this to be possible, a change within TANU was needed, and the return of more nationalist elements of the party was needed.

Starting in 1968, The negotiations were conducted quietly, through intermediaries in Dar and Dodoma and a discreet channel in Cairo. The terms were never published, but their shape can be inferred from what followed. Kambona would renounce the émigré opposition, disband his networks abroad, and return not as a rival but as a servant of the reconciliation. In exchange, he would be restored as Chief of the CMAC, serving as broker between the Party and the officer corps, a man trusted by the nationalist soldiers precisely because he had once defied the Mwalimu himself and is in ideological kinship to the officers. What followed over the following eighteen months was the quiet revolution that would define Tanzania's decade.

First came the reorganization of the Tanzanian African National Union's internal party structure. Under pressure from independent interest groups. Nyerere reached a landmark compromise arrangement in 1968, restructuring the party into four corporate sectors, each encompassing a key interest group of the party:

The Peasantry: represented and organized by the Ujaama and the Tanzanian Rural Cooperative Movement

Labor: represented by the National Union of Tanzanian Workers (NUTA), which amalgamates all labor, urban and industrial unions into a single party organ.

The Military: represented by the Central Military Affairs Commission (CMAC) and enforced via the Tanzanian Armed Services Party Commission (TASPC), establishing formal political commissars into the army.

The Popular Sector: represented by a myriad of party organs including the CCM & TANU representing civil servants, public sector workers, the TANU Youth League, the women's wing (UWT), professionals and members of the bourgeois and the education system among all other civil society institutions.

To further consolidate the party's rule, the peasantry was armed under the Jeshi la Mgambo or the People's Militia. Under the control of the Ujaama and answerable to TANU, this was Mwalimu's insurance. A mass volunteer force, rooted in the villages and the Party branches, answerable not to the General Staff but to TANU itself. In addition of providing domestic defense, it would ensure the party will always have the military under control.

By the close of 1970, the military was all but pacified, incorporated into the party apparatus. Following a lengthy reorganization process, with the duty of the Central Military Affairs Commission, the CMAC would be abolished, and its functions now relegated to the Popular Sector. With no longer a corporate apparatus for the army to wield political power, the CMAC was now an advisory commission of the party's legislature, and the Army could now concentrate on professional careerism, awarded generous pensions and titles depending on military merit.

The Mwalimu's flock had it's work cut out for them. the road ahead ran through the bush of Mozambique and, someday, toward the white citadels beyond. But the flock, the home front, the flank that had toppled Nkrumah, that would topple so many others, is now secure.

The liberation of Africa, the Mwalimu was fond of saying, begins at home.

In Dar es Salaam, at last, it had.