The common front that TANU and trade unions forged ended immediately after independence, mostly due to a conflict of interests and unfulfilled expectations.
The bone of contention was the post-colonial state’s failure to dismantle the colonial economy and the exploitative structures created to facilitate the integration of local people into the international capital.
Lacking a clear ideology, the post-colonial state under the TANU government carried forward most of the colonial structures that ran contrary to workers’ interests. These disagreements split the TANU government and its former allies, the trade unions.
Trade unionists were frustrated because, on attaining independence in 1961, the TANU government did not alter the exploitative structures of the colonial era. The new leadership carried them forward instead.
Worker expectations were shattered as they saw no real improvement in their lot. Equally important, they lost confidence in the leadership, which now resided in the mansions once occupied by Europeans, drove expensive cars and enjoyed all the privileges of the former colonial bosses while their welfare was neglected.
Realising that independence was not for them, workers also lost the zeal to respond to the political rhetoric of “uhuru na kazi”. Meanwhile, a gulf between the working people (makabwela) and the new political elite (wabenzi) emerged as the common man was driven back to the caves as onlookers.
At the same time, a rift was emerging within the affluent class—mostly whites and Asians—who continued to dominate the business and professional sectors, including the civil service. No wonder the cry for Africanisation was getting louder and louder with each passing day. Trade unionists, parliamentarians and the media became its key advocates.
Meanwhile, the debate on Africanisation assumed racial tones. European administrators and technicians, feeling apprehensive for their safety, started resigning from government service.
Writing on the realities of Tanganyika’s independence, Colin Leys reports that towards the end of 1961 resignation had risen from 20 percent to 50 percent and that some government services were visibly run down.
Such developments were a headache for the TANU government. The party leadership, and specifically President Nyerere, would not agree to divorce citizenship from loyalty and marry it to colour. Similarly, he was not prepared to embark on the Africanisation programme for the sake of it.
He did accept in principle the demand for Africanisation in the public service but, even then, not at the speed and extent that its advocates championed.
This position widened the differences between the TANU government and trade union leaders who, besides differing with the government on the question of citizenship and Africanisation, also demanded greater autonomy for the unions.
This falling out led to a series of strikes in 1962. The TANU government did not take this lying low like an envelope. The first thing it did was to place trade unions under its control. It resorted to the same authoritarian methods of the colonial state to ensure that trade unions were in the firm grip of the new state.
It reacted by passing two pieces of legislation—one that virtually outlawed strikes without the permission of the minister for labour and another that facilitated official supervision by requiring all unions to become affiliates of the Tanganyika Federation of Labour (TFL) to retain a legal standing.
An outbreak of illegal strikes on sisal plantations during the latter part of 1962, which saw TFL Secretary-General Victor Mkello deported to Sumbawanga for three months, led to the dissolution of TFL, and the requirement that all workers belong to single trade union—the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (NUTA).
Interestingly, NUTA was a state-sponsored trade union established under the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (Establishment) Act No.18 of 1964.
As if that was not bad enough, the NUTA secretary-general was brought into the Cabinet as Minister of Labour while NUTA itself became an affiliate of TANU, with all its top leadership becoming presidential appointees.
Also worthy of mention is the Preventive Detention Act, 1962, which empowered the President to order the detention of any person who, in his opinion, was conducting himself in a manner prejudicial to the state.
The first victims of this law were the so-called stubborn leaders of TFL, Victor Mkello and Magongo.
The government was clearly set on snuffing out trade unions.
The late Sheikh Amri Abeid, then the Minister for Justice, urged the government in 1962 to get rid of the trade unions.
He was not pleased with the manner in which the government was dealing with stubborn leaders.
It is no wonder, then, that the trade unions became the first casualty of the post-independence struggle between what Professor Issa Shivji calls “intra- bourgeois”.
They were banned and their place taken by a state-sponsored and state-controlled single trade union.
And, as if that was not bad enough, workers were robbed of their most effective weapon of collective struggle—the strike—as this was made virtually illegal. Given such developments, it is clear to the working class independence meant very little and the uhuru honeymoon was over.
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