Ali Hassan Mwinyi
Ali Hassan Mwinyi was president of Tanzania for ten years, from 1985 to 1995, the Zanzibari schoolteacher Nyerere chose to succeed him and who then, with Nyerere still chairing the party and watching, took apart the socialism of the Arusha Declaration: the state shops, the fixed prices, the ban on private trade and the collectivised villages went, the IMF came back in 1986 with the structural adjustment Nyerere had refused, and the country moved from one party to many in 1992. Tanzanians called him Mzee Ruksa, the old man of permission, because under him everything was allowed, which was praise and then, as the corruption grew, was not. He was born in 1925 on the mainland and raised on Zanzibar, trained as a teacher at Durham, and taught and ran the island's schools until the revolution of 1964, after which he was a minister of the union government in health, home affairs and natural resources, ambassador to Egypt, and from 1984 president of Zanzibar, where he calmed a separatist quarrel in a year. Nyerere stepped down in 1985 with the economy in ruins after the war with Uganda, the oil shocks and twenty years of ujamaa, and the party picked Mwinyi as a safe pair of hands from the islands who would not be a rival. He was elected with ninety-two per cent as the only candidate. The first term was the reform: the Economic Recovery Programme agreed with the IMF in 1986, the shilling devalued, the private traders licensed, the cooperatives restored, and the growth that followed the first the country had seen in a decade. The second was the politics. Nyerere, chairman of the party until 1990, told it in 1991 that one-party rule had run its course, the Nyalali commission recommended multi-party democracy though most of those it asked did not want it, and the constitution was amended in 1992; the first contested election was held in 1995, at the end of his second term, which the constitution he had amended barred him from extending. His last years in office were marked by the scandals the opening had made possible, tax exemptions for friends and the collapse of the revenue, which the donors suspended aid over in 1994 and which his successor Mkapa was elected to clean up. He lived in retirement in Dar es Salaam and died there in February 2024 at ninety-eight.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: Tanzanian
- Roles: president, politician
