Let the People Speak: Tanzania Down the Road to Neo Liberalism

"This is an extraordinary record of one country’s descent into ’neo-liberalism’, which roughly translated means socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Issa Shivji’s shrewd eye concentrates on Tanzania, but his stories could be from almost anywhere in Africa, if not the world." - John Pilger, This book of 90 critical and thought-provoking essays, selected from over 150 written between 1990 and 2005 in three different newspapers, captures the richness of Shivji’s contributions as a public intellectual. It deals with the period when Tanzania under external pressures from donors and financial institutions was forced down the road of neo-liberalism. The local compradorial elites whose economic appetites had been suppressed under Nyerere’s radical nationalism now openly flexed muscles to get a place under the capitalist sun as nationalism, radical or otherwise, was abandoned, and neo-liberalism uncritically embraced. The essays are on varied subjects ranging from the politics of multi-party, the strains and stresses of the Union with Zanzibar, the deep-seated extra-constitutional behaviour of the ruling elite to the hopes, fears and resistance of the working people. In these essays, contemporary Tanzanian history is recorded in sweeping journalistic strokes without burying the commitment of a critical public intellectual in turgid scholarship. As a warning on the slippery slope that neo-liberalism constitutes, Let the People Speak will echo in many an African country. Hence the salience and relevance of Shivji’s renewed call for the resurrection of a radical, people driven Pan-Africanism.