TANZANIANS have learned that keeping what you have can be harder than getting it in the first place. Before their eyes, the achievements of generations are crumbling away.
Literacy, once universal, is now at 80 per cent and falling. Enrolment in primary schools, once over 90 per cent, is now 63 per cent and falling. Participation in secondary education remains minuscule at 4 per cent. A country of 29 million people produces some 1,000 university graduates a year.
In the northern district of Tanga, the schools founded by Irish fathers and nuns of the Rosminian order during the colonial era, and now under State control, are falling into disuse. Over at Kahanga, near the Burundian border, the hospital built by the Medical Missionaries of Mary has not been refurbished since it opened in the 1960s.
Throughout Tanzania's interior, forests are being stripped, land ravaged and the roads are disintegrating. By the coast, beaches are disappearing into the Indian Ocean and fishing stocks are being depleted.
A country which has taken but a few feeble steps forward since independence is now leaping backwards. Tanzania's agricultural exports are worth less today than they were 30 years ago. Civil servants earn in real terms one quarter of their salaries in the 1970s. The coastal strip around Dar es Salaam manages a modest prosperity but only because people work every daylight hour available.
Even a university professor, earning between £25 and £50 a week, is likely to knock off in the hot afternoon to work until dusk on the family shamba (allotment).
It sounds like a familiar tale of African woe but there is one important difference. Since independence, Tanzania has enjoyed a degree of peace and racial harmony unparalleled in the region. Dar es Salaam is blissfully free of the gun toting soldiers found in other African capitals - at the airport, rusting military aircraft have been laid to rest on wooden stilts.
The credit for building a cohesive state out of the former British and German colony of Tanganyika lies with Tanzania's inspirational first leader, mwalimu (teacher) Julius Nyerere, who is still active as a world peacemaker.
Dr Nycrere's idealistic legacy lives on in Tanzania, making it one of the most congenial African states in which to live. But his economic policies, founded on the principle of ujama'a (pulling together) by resettling rural Tanzanians in socialist villages, proved disastrous.
Peasants were crowded on land that soon wore out. Bureaucracy meant that no fertiliser arrived to restore it and crops never reached markets. Prices plummeted, the incentive to work disappeared and corruption flourished.
Today, Dr Nyerere's protege, President Benjamin Mkapa, is busy dismantling what is left of the ujama'a system. Dancing to the tune of the World Bank and the IMF, the government has introduced multi party elections, slashed public spending, privatised 30 per cent of semi state companies and started a drive against corruption which has already cost two ministers their jobs.
These policies have accelerated the decline in health and education. Secondary school fees are being increased by 50 per cent, to £60 a year. The University of Dar es Salaam opened two weeks late last autumn because there was no money available.
Tanzania spends 40 per cent of its income servicing its debt to foreign banks. A similar amount goes on state salaries, leaving only, 20 per cent for essential services.
The Foreign Minister, Mr Jakaya Kikwete, acknowledges the problems of the Tanzanian economy but says a turn around has begun. "We've stopped the decline. The economy is growing by 4 per cent a year and inflation has been halved to 14 per cent."
The increased emphasis on trade has ensured that the shops in Dar es Salaam are once again filled with Western luxury goods. However, this is of little use to most people in a country where the average per capita income is well under £120 a year.
The government will shortly seek a rescheduling of its £5 billion debt and is desperately seeking a way of increasing tax revenues. Tourism is seen as a bright hope and a doubling of visitors is foreseen over the next decade.
In spite of these problems, aid donors continue to be drawn to Tanzania like moths to a flame, Reviews of previous aid efforts have shown how money was often spent unwisely and served to discourage the government from introducing necessary reforms. As a result, donors have become more wary and are spending more cautiously.
Policy makers for Irish aid, which accounts for about 1 per cent of the total, have tried to learn from the errors made by other donors by ensuring that projects can be sustained once they are completed.
Education helped make Tanzania a civil and peaceful place. Now that standards are declining, the destructive pressures on society are set to increase. Only a rapid increase in income from trade or aid can ensure that the fruits of Dr Nyerere's dream are not squandered.
