Political Order and Political Decay (53 page)

The mechanism for cultural assimilation was education. Bahasa Indonesia was the language of instruction in public schools from the beginning, and the state introduced programs to train teachers and have them work (and often marry) outside of their home provinces. The Indonesians thus replicated an administrative system similar to the one employed by Chinese emperors to rule their provinces, or by the Ottomans to govern their
sanjaks
. One of the more important achievements of Suharto's New Order period was the expansion of primary education, where coverage rose from 55.6 to 87.6 percent of the population between 1971 and 1985. After Bahan had been taught in the school system for more than two generations, the number of its speakers has risen steadily and today approaches 100 percent of the population.
14

Indonesian national identity was entrenched in a way that Nigerian national identity would never be—through articulation of a clear integrative ideology, establishment of a national language, and the backing of both by authoritarian power based on a national army. The limits of this integrative process were made clear, however, in places like Timor Leste (formerly East Timor), West Papua (the former West New Guinea), Ambon, and Aceh, which never accepted the national narrative coming out of Jakarta.
15
West Papua and Timor Leste are both substantially Melanesian by ethnicity, largely non-Muslim, and were formally annexed by Indonesia only in 1963 and 1976, respectively. Sukarno in his 1927 essay referred to Ernest Renan's definition of a nation as a group that shares a common history and acts as a common community; by this standard, neither place ever thought of itself as part of the Indonesian nation. Neither belonged to the ancient Majapahit Hindu kingdom that preceded the Islamicization of Indonesia, a historical period that was sometimes evoked by modern nationalists as an imagined source of Indonesian identity. Both had other more proximate sources of identity connected to their Melanesian roots and, in the case of Timor, Portuguese overlordship. When early Indonesian nationalists visited the eastern parts of the archipelago, they found it to be an utterly foreign place, inhabited by tribal peoples and, as one put it, “cannibals.”
16
The Indonesian government moved transmigrants from Java and other parts of Indonesia into both places in an effort to change the ethnic balance, taught Indonesian, promoted Pancasila ideology through the school system, and relied on outright force to retain sovereignty in the face of armed local insurgencies. Timor Leste nonetheless voted for independence in a 1999 referendum, and became, despite terrible violence by pro-Indonesian militias, an independent country in 2002. West Papua has remained within Indonesia, but there is a continuing low-level insurgency and independence movement there.

Notwithstanding the clear limits to the radius of the national identity that the Indonesian state has been able to impose, the government has achieved a remarkable degree of national integration for a region that was not remotely a single nation one hundred years earlier. Indeed, Indonesian identity by the 1990s had become sufficiently secure that when the country as a whole transitioned to democracy after the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, it was able to permit a substantial devolution of power to its provinces and localities without fear of further fragmentation. Indonesia remains a highly fractured country, as communal violence against the Chinese and Christian communities and other minorities continues. Levels of corruption remain high as well. But all success is relative: given the kind of ethnic, religious, and regional fractionalization with which the country started, its nation-building success is quite remarkable. Indonesia could have looked much more like Nigeria.
17

Tanzania's record in nation building has been very similar to that of Indonesia, despite obvious differences in region, religion, and race. Tanzania is highly diverse ethnically, being divided into some 120 different ethnic groups; like Indonesia, it was ruled for many years by a strong one-party state that made nation building an explicit goal and, to a large extent, succeeded at that. Like Indonesia, it used top-down, authoritarian power to achieve this goal.

The country to which Tanzania can best be compared is the state to its immediate north, Kenya. Both were British colonies or mandates, and both are very similar with regard to climate and culture. Indeed, the border between the two countries is an unnaturally straight line drawn by colonial authorities running from Lake Victoria in the west eventually to the Indian Ocean, which artificially separates the peoples who straddled it.

During the cold war, the two countries were frequently compared because Kenya had adopted what Joel Barkan labeled “patron-client capitalism,” while Tanzania adopted “one-party socialism.”
18
For the first two decades after gaining independence in 1963, Kenya grew substantially faster than Tanzania, arguably demonstrating the superiority of market-based economics (see
Table 4
).

TABLE 4.
GDP Growth Rates, 1965–1990

But then, beginning in the late 1980s, the countries reversed positions, with Kenya suffering a precipitous economic decline relative to Tanzania (see
Figure 16
). More recently, Tanzania has shared in sub-Saharan Africa's overall strong growth with rates of around 6 percent in the period 1999–2011. Kenya by contrast has been racked, particularly since the presidential election of 2007, by violence among its ethnic groups. GDP growth has been lower and much more volatile during the 2000s, reflecting ongoing political conflict. Tanzania has remained much more stable. The reasons for this can be traced ultimately back to the fact that Tanzania's one-party dictatorship engaged in a policy of nation building, while Kenya's more liberal state did not.

FIGURE 16.
GDP Growth Rates, 1989–2011

SOURCE
: World Bank

Tanzania had certain preexisting advantages over Kenya in formulating a national identity. None of its 120 ethnic groups is large enough to potentially dominate the country, whereas Kenya has five major ones, constituting some 70 percent of the population.
19
An alliance of any two of these larger groups—Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Luo, Kamba, Luhya—is often sufficient to gain control of the government. Equally important was the role of Swahili as a national language in Tanzania. Swahili, a Bantu language borrowing heavily from the Arabic of the traders in Zanzibar and other coastal areas, is spoken throughout many countries in East Africa. It played a role similar to Bahasa Indonesia as a colonial-era lingua franca and language of merchants and traders. When Tanganyika was controlled by the Germans during the late nineteenth century, the colonial authorities made a much more concerted effort to turn it into a national language than did the British in their Kenyan colony. It was therefore more heavily used in Tanzania than in Kenya at independence.
20

Tanzania's founding president, Julius Nyerere, played a role similar to that of Sukarno in Indonesia. He explicitly built national identity around socialist ideology rather than ethnicity with his doctrine of
ujamaa
or African socialism, articulated clearly and at great length in his writings and in documents like the 1967 Arusha Declaration.
21
He argued that ethnic fractionalization was a grave threat to the socialist project and therefore made efforts to suppress what he labeled “tribalism.” Like Sukarno, he had little patience with Western liberal notions of pluralism and wanted one-party rule in order to restructure society. To accomplish this, he created a political instrument, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU, which evolved into the Chama Cha Mapinduzi), that would maintain Leninist discipline and centralized control over its cadres throughout the country. Unlike many other new African rulers, Nyerere focused not only on the cities but also sought to have TANU penetrate the countryside in what was still a heavily rural society.
22
In the process, Nyerere's government made a much stronger effort than did Jomo Kenyatta's to turn Swahili into a national language, making it compulsory in all secondary schools in 1965. In the words of Henry Bienen, “Swahili was an essential component of Tanganyika's national identity; it was equated with ‘Tanganyikaness.'”
23

Things were very different in Kenya. One large ethnic group, the Kikuyu, made themselves dominant after independence by virtue of their leadership role in both politics and the economy. The Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial authority was largely led by Kikuyus, who also contributed the country's founding president, Jomo Kenyatta. Although Kenyatta established his own nationalist party, the Kenya African National Union, this was conceived not as an ideologically based Leninist organization but as a patronage-distribution system. The state was not seen as a neutral arbiter standing above different ethnic groups; it was a prize to be captured. Thus when Kenyatta was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi in 1978, patronage shifted abruptly from the Kikuyu to the Kalenjin and other ethnic groups supporting Moi. While TANU sought to redistribute resources from rich to poor, the Kenyan government redistributed from one ethnicity to another. The open exploitation of patronage by ethnic groups arriving at political power was captured by Michela Wrong in the phrase “It's our turn to eat.”
24

Kenya's economic decline can be directly traced to Moi's ascendancy and increasing levels of patronage and corruption that followed. Since that time, much of Kenyan politics has revolved around a zero-sum game between the country's ethnic groups to grab the presidency and state resources. This culminated in mass killings in the wake of the 2007 presidential election between Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, and Raila Odinga, a Luo.
25
Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country's founder, was elected president in 2013 but is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his role in the 2007 communal violence.

The Tanzanian push for a national language, in addition to TANU's efforts to stamp out all manifestations of regionalism and ethnic identity, has meant that ethnicity over time has come to matter considerably less in Tanzania than in Kenya and other countries that did not make nation building an explicit goal. Economist Edward Miguel finds that despite similar levels of ethnic diversity in Tanzania and Kenya, the former provides higher levels of public goods, suggesting the lower salience of ethnicity there.
26

Strong national identity does not by itself create good outcomes; it must be linked to sensible policies as well. In the period from independence through the early 1990s, Julius Nyerere's effort to build African socialism in Tanzania was an utter disaster in every respect other than nation building. In economic policy, Tanzania destroyed incentives by seizing the commanding heights of the economy and redistributing wealth away from producers. It undermined the country's agricultural sector, which was the chief source of export earnings, in favor of import-substituting industries that were not sustainable over the long term. And it discouraged foreign private investment in favor of “self-sufficiency.” In the political realm as well, Tanzania made many serious early mistakes. It declared itself officially to be a one-party state, with TANU cadres seeking to oversee all aspects of political and social life. Not just other political parties, but civil society organizations also were banned or strictly controlled, and press freedom limited. Perhaps the worst policy to come out of the socialist period occurred between 1973 and 1976, when 80 percent of the rural population was forced into communal
ujamaa
villages. This effort at massive social engineering, like its counterparts in the Soviet Union and China, had predictably negative consequences for the economy as well as individual freedom.
27

These poor economic policies ended after Tanzania's debt crisis in the late 1980s and since then have been replaced by more sensible market-oriented ones. This shift, combined with the fact that it has avoided Nigerian- or Kenyan-style ethnic conflict, has given it an impressive rate of economic growth in the late 1990s and 2000s. No more than in Indonesia does this mean that ethnicity (or religion) has disappeared as a potential source of conflict and instability. The Muslims in Zanzibar have been increasingly mobilized in favor of a separate state. But both Indonesia and Tanzania have succeeded in creating more effective political orders as a result.