Acha kuendelea kuungopea umma. Umeshasoma mkusanyiko wa hotuba zake mpya katika 'Africa Today and Tomorrow'? Pundit usitoe madai ambayo hayana uthibitisho!
Nyerere's
1991 INTERVIEW WITH ANA CAMACHO OF EL PAIS, MADRID
QUOTE: Our first recommendation (in the Report of the South Commission) is that if African countries want to develop in freedom, they must first put their own people, their own money and their own resources to maximum use. Another problem is that when our countries talk of external cooperation partnerships, they only think of the North. They never consider the possibility of SouthSouth cooperation, say between Southern Africa and Latin America.
COMMENT: In 1995, four years after the above interview, Nyerere and the highly respected Tanzanian permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, Amir Jamal, successfully negotiated with the Swiss authorities the establishment of the South Centre in that city. The main goal of this unique inter-governmental institution was to promote solidarity and cooperation among all the countries of the South and to strengthen their collective presence in the economic and commercial arenas of the UN. As the South Centre's first executive director, Mwalimu chose India's ManMohan Singh, now prime minister of his country.
If the never-ending, never-completed Doha Development Round concocted by the World Trade Organization, also based in Geneva, has achieved anything, it is surely the opportunity to teach the South some very important lessons about the NorthSouth gap or abyss. Since the Doha exercise began in 2001, the emergent, the developing and the very poor members of the South have seen at first-hand and under laboratory conditions the importance of the expert advice and analysis available at their own centre in order to face the Northern bulldozers disguised as trade talks and development rounds.
And today, at this moment of writing, the leading countries of the South China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela have at last got their act together to put into place some of the concrete forms of SouthSouth cooperation that Nyerere talked of years ago.
QUOTE: "Yes, now we see the birth of a new god, one called capitalism which supposedly has all the answers and At present we are living a moment of deception. But the conditions being created on the ground by this euphoria over capitalism gives me reason to believe that, in about 10 years or so, the ideal of socialism will return. And more forcefully than before.
COMMENT: It is difficult, this side of the worst crisis since 1929, or this side of the banking binge, to be more precise, to recall the gross, self-congratulatory triumphalism that gripped the mind of so many citizens and leaders when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall was brought down in 1989. Some very bizarre exaggerations were invented to promote the theory that three saints, Reagan, Thatcher and Milton Friedman held up the capitalist sky over all our heads for which we should be eternally grateful. And in any case, there was no alternative
Two years later, in 1991, Nyerere tells the Madrid journalist not to get carried away and even more, not to believe that the purpose is General Motors. He then goes on to point out that unregulated bouts of over-indulgence will inevitably lead to severe hangovers in about 10 years or so. And then what some call a mistake, that is, the ideal of a just society, socialism, will be back. And perhaps he is right.
QUOTE: I belong to a dying breed, one that resists reneging on its own ideals.
COMMENT: This is pure Mwalimu, laughing quietly at himself, using self-deprecating but gentle irony to drive home a very unpopular point in 1991, namely that history never ends, it only repeats itself. And that it is better to stand firm by your beliefs, if you have beliefs, and not to follow the herd and not to deny reality. And that has nothing to do with ideology.
Source: http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59516
