The Communist Party of China, CPC has remained at the helm of the political and socio-economic development of the 1.4 billion people since it was founded in 1949.
After leading the Chinese people to freedom following a protracted war against its occupier, Japan, it took the CPC barely 60 years to replace its former occupier as the second leading economy in the world!
China’s life span as an independent nation is older by ten year to that of Tanzania (which marked its 50th independence anniversary on Friday, December 9th, 2011).
Yet in almost the same life span as an independent nation, China’s socio-economic development has not only surpassed by over 100 times that of Tanzania, but is now threatening to overtake United States as the number one economy in the world!
The question is why has China succeeded where developing countries like Tanzania have failed?
The secret lies in the nature and modus operandi of their ruling parties whose visions and missions are implemented by their respective governments.
For instance, in the case of China, the CPC supervises the country’s socio-economic development plans from their inception to their implementation.
Planning of anything in China starts at the lowest level (village) to the top.
Such plans are worked on by best experts the nation can lay its hands on.
With China 9m square kilometers, China has 32 regions, and for its socio-economic plans to be approved and finally given a nod by the Central Committee of the CPC, they (plans) must have had the approval of the entire population through their representatives.
This is extremely important because apart from final approval by the Central Committee of the CPC, the validity of the country’s socio-economic plans is heavily dependent on its (plans) ownership by the people.
One of the last stages of such plans are discussed by members of every region in their respective assemblies in Beijing before the plans are finally presented to the Central Committee of the CPC for further discussions and final approval.
And once the Central Committee of the CPC has approved the socio-economic plans, implementation work starts.
But in order to ensure that nothing goes wrong, as far as implementation of socio-economic plans are concerned, the CPC has machinery in place that reviews implementation work after every set period.
The objective is to manage the development process for socio-economic wellbeing of their people
In short, no CPC or Chinese government leader can promise people about construction or provision of anything outside what has been approved by the CPC.
Therefore as a ruling party, the CPC through the peoples’ representatives works on the country’s socio-economic development plans and after which the government is finally directed to implement what has been decided on.
What this means is that there is no room for populism, no leader, no matter what position he or she holds in the country or the party is above the CPC.
Dissent of opinion during discussions on the country’s socio-economic development plans at any level of the ruling party’s sitting, is tolerated.
This what the Chinese refer to as their democracy with Chinese characteristics.
The aim for espousing such democratic practices is very simple, people must be given opportunity to discuss whatever doubts they have on the proposed socio-economic plans before decisions are made.
Therefore claims usually made by some people that there is no democracy in China’s ruling CPC is not true because people are given every opportunity to air their opinion on important their country’s economic plans.
But once whatever plans that the Central Committee of the CPC has approved, then they have to be implanted to the letter, there are no two ways about it.
As already noted, there is nothing is approved by the Central Committee of the CPC that is not reviewed after a given period of time in order to find out whether or not it is still valid.
For instance, one pertinent question that Tanzanians ought to ask themselves is having decided to implement the policy of Socialism and Self-Reliance-after the promulgation of the Arusha Declaration in 1967, was there any attempt by the then ruling party, Tanu (Tanganyika African National Union) to review, after every given period of time, implementation of the Ujamaa program?
When they finally decided on the implementation of the market economic policies did they have any explanation as to why they had dumped Ujamaa or were putting the policy on hold?
Did they have any explanation for dumping, in 1992 the leadership code in under what would later come to be known as the Zanzibar Declaration?
Has the party (this time around CCM) responsible for the re-introduction of market economic policies (after dumping leadership code) reviewed implementation of its new policies with the express purpose of finding out whether or not Tanzania was on track?
Honest response by Tanzanians to these questions is critical in understanding why Tanzania has not succeeded as much as their Chinese counterpart after clocking almost the same number of years after independence.
Addressing Tanzanian leaders a few years after stepping down both as Union President and party chairman, the Founding Father, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere said only a mad man would continue to cling on to Ujamaa when the latest leadership had decided they would have nothing to do with it!
He said: “When leaders went to Zanzibar and dumped the policy along with the leadership code, some of us who thought otherwise were quick to understand that (Ujamaa) had finally been laid to rest.”
Mwalimu said it was fine with him if Tanzanians were no longer interested in Ujamaa.
“But what about self-reliance?” he asked,” are you also not interested in the policy,” Mwalimu asked.
Therefore Tanzania’s present economic problems are to large extent due to the clumsy manner with which successive governments handled its economic policies.
And this includes the way it implemented villagisation program and its decision to dump the leadership code.
A Chinese professor from Beijing Normal University told the visiting African group at the Zhejiang Normal University in Anzhu that he had read Mwalimu’s books on Ujamaa and Self-Reliance and found nothing wrong with them.
Although the professor did not take his argument further, but judging what the CPC has done for China in the last 60 years, it is not difficult to appreciate the Chinese professor’s argument.
That had Tanzanians reviewed, from time to time, implementation of their ujamaa policy with the objective of improving it, they would not have given Kenya’s Professor, Ali Mazrui the luxury of describing Mwalimu as an heroic failure.
In a nutshell, that is where the main difference (call it problem if you like) lies between China and Tanzania.
In fact, there was absolutely nothing wrong with Ujamaa.
However, what went wrong was the ruling party’s failure to review the policy’s implementation after every stage of its development.
Had the ruling party, in this particular case, Tanu, reviewed ujamaa now and then, it would not have reached where it reached.
The same thing could be said about the dumping of the leadership code.
We have all borne witness to the destruction the exercise has led Tanzanians to after dumping the leadership code in Zanzibar.
All of a sudden, a section of members of the ruling party, CCM, have discovered the folly of mixing politics with business!
But for most of them who had literally grown both in Tanu and CCM for over 30 years as party cadres, surely their discovery is not news!
The point is, they should have known a long time ago that the end result of dumping the leadership code would have eventually led them to the present volatile political climate!
That once one mixes politics with business, it goes without saying that politicians would use their political position to enrich themselves.
The increased number of public institutions that politicians have lately been trying to own, illegally, through various tricks is just a tip of the iceberg of the political El Nino that is likely to engulf Tanzania sooner than later if efforts are not urgently made to avert it!
The main problem with such wayward politicians is that know that once they own such public institutions no one would question them, least of all the government of the day since there is no divide, legally, between politics and business.
The fact that the Chinese have succeeded in turning around their country’s economy does not mean that they were free from problems, far from it!
They faced numerous implementation problems which forced them to review each and every stage of implementation of their socio-economic plans.
For instance, after the founding of the Chinese nation in 1949, the country was awash with feudalism with the poor tilling the land they did not own!
This situation was changed, making peasants owners not only of the land they tilled on, but also what they produced on it.
Later the CPC led government introduced collectivization program which did not last long.
The ruling party scraped it off, replacing it with personal ownership of land on which one tilled on.
The latest move was introduced by the CPC after discovering the disincentive nature of the collectivization program.
The CPC was going back and forth, between 1949 and 1986 in its land reforms, until it reached a more acceptable agricultural development model with Chinese characteristics.
China would therefore not have succeeded in feeding all its 1.4 billion people had it had allowed problem to rear its ugly head in its agricultural sector.
It was due to the soundness of China’s agricultural sector coupled with implementation of its tailored education system that would by 2006 transform the country into one of up and coming industrial nations.
By Attilio Tagalile
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