1. The
two leaders had been close political allies and personal friends since the days of the independence struggle when they were the main leaders of the independence movement. In fact, when Kambona got married to a former Miss Tanganyika at a cathedral in London, Nyerere was his best man.
2.
But the two leaders started drifting apart a few years after independence. The first rift occurred in 1964 during the army mutiny, and then in 1965 when Tanzania officially became a one-party state. As a cabinet member, Oscar Kambona supported the transition to a one-party state but did so reluctantly, only as a team player.
3.
He was opposed to the change because he said there was no mechanism guaranteeing change of government by constitutional means in a country dominated by one party. He also contended that there were no constitutional safeguards to make sure that the country did not drift into dictatorship.
4. The
next split with Nyerere came in February 1967 when Tanzania adopted the Arusha Declaration, an economic and political blueprint for the transformation of Tanzania into a socialist state.
Kambona was opposed to this fundamental change and argued that the government should first launch a pilot scheme to see if the policy was going to work on a national scale.
5. Tanzania's socialist policy was mainly based on the establishment of
ujamaa villages, roughly equivalent to communes or the
Kibbutz in Israel, so that the people could live and work together for their collective well-being and make it easier for the government to provide them with basic services such as water supply, medical treatment at clinics, and education by building schools which could be within short distance from the villages.
6.
Oscar Kambona argued that it was important, first, to show the people that living in ujamaa villages, or collective communities, was beneficial and a good idea. He said that could be done by establishing a few ujamaa villages in different parts of the country as a pilot scheme to demonstrate the viability of those villages and show the people the benefits they would get if they agreed to live together and work together on communal farms.
7. The debate,
conducted mostly in private when the delegates of the ruling party TANU were discussing in a public forum the document of the Arusha Declaration, was between Oscar Kambona on one side and Julius Nyerere as well as Vice President Rashid Kawawa on the other side. They were the country's three main and most powerful and most influential leaders and met privately away from the delegates at the conference in Arusha to resolve their differences.The private meeting and debate went on for quite some time during the duration of the conference and whenever the subject came up,
whether or not Tanzania should adopt socialist policies and establish ujamaa villages, Kawawa always supported Nyerere against Kambona.
8. The two (Kambona and Kawawa) became bitter enemies thereafter. In fact, they started going separate ways even before then because
Kambona saw Kawawa as no more than a "puppet" of Nyerere, manipulated at will, and who agreed with everything Nyerere said and wanted.
9.
Kambona was the only cabinet member who challenged Nyerere and stood up to him and saw him as his equal. There was probably another cabinet member, Chief
Abdallah Said Fundikira III, Tanganyika's first minister of constitutional affairs, who not long after independence left the cabinet over disagreements with Nyerere. Fundikira had known Nyerere since their student days at Makerere University College in Uganda in the early 1940s.
10.
But the differences between Kambona and Nyerere were fundamentally ideological and more than just a dispute over the way ujamaa villages should be established. Kambona was opposed to socialism. He was not a socialist like Nyerere. He was a capitalist. He was also opposed to Chinese communist influence in Tanzania and believed that Nyerere's brand of socialism would be patterned after Chinese communist policies. He also believed that Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung had undue and profound influence on Nyerere. He attributed that to Nyerere's first visit to the People's Republic of China in 1965, contending that it was after this trip that Nyerere decided to establish a one-party state after he returned to Tanzania.
10.
But Kambona lost. The Arusha Declaration, Tanzania's socialist manifesto and political blueprint, was adopted in February 1967 and socialism became Tanzania's official policy