“TUMESAHAULIKA”: PERFORMING DEVELOPMENT IN POST-CONFLICT MTWARA By Rachel E. Elbin A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Anthropology—Doctor of Philosophy 2021 ABSTRACT “TUMESAHAULIKA”: PERFORMING DEVELOPMENT IN POST-CONFLICT MTWARA By Rachel E. Elbin Following the discovery of sizable offshore petroleum deposits off the southeastern coast of Mtwara region in Tanzania, state and private-sector representatives assured Mtwara residents that they would see intensive government investment in local infrastructure and industry. In light of these pledges, Mtwara residents anticipated that gas refineries, processing plants, and new infrastructure would soon bring employment opportunities to the historically underdeveloped southeast. By 2012, however, state plans to transport the gas from Mtwara to metropolitan Dar es Salaam via a pipeline threatened expectations of regional revitalization. Following official state confirmation of the pipeline in May 2013, residents mounted a series of demonstrations to oppose the government plan from which they had largely been excluded. In response to the protest, the central government deployed the national guard in an unprecedented exercise of military power. In this dissertation, I argue that the 2013 protest reflect the existence and influence of two national development imaginaries that evoke conflicting understandings of development, citizenship, and the state. On one hand, many government workers and civil society organization officers promoted images of the state as unbeholden to citizen demands for widespread, enduring development as entailed within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. In line with the social- development imaginary, however, Mtwara residents interpreted government promises of natural gas wealth as state recognition for Mtwara’s sustained underdevelopment and past nationalistic sacrifices. Through their protests, Mtwara residents challenged the central government’s vision for national development through state authorization of global capital investment in natural resource extraction. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and focus group sessions conducted from February 2015 to March 2016 in Mtwara and Dar es Salaam, I trace Mtwara residents’ invocations of the two development imaginaries across three critical settings: the development work of three Mtwara-based civil society organizations; the bureaucratic procedure and protocol of local government offices; and residents’ memorialization of the 2013 violence. According to literature (Ferguson 2005, 2006), concentrated areas of global capital investment in extractive projects form enclaves, dis-embedded from the historical and moral contexts of their host countries. Communities in Mtwara, however, sought to complicate the production of a dis-embedded mineral enclave by continuing to make development claims on the state. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Countless individuals contributed their energies and support to me as I completed my dissertation. Throughout the entire process, my Graduate Guidance Committee members Laurie Medina, Mara Leichtman, Laura Fair, and Najib Hourani dedicated their time, wisdom, and experience to my project, even as a global pandemic distorted life around us. Laurie Medina, my adviser, graciously volunteered to offer feedback on several iterations of this project. Her generous support and insight made this dissertation possible. Mara Leichtman’s wise counsel, even in the midst of her own demanding writing schedule, prepared me to tackle edits with confidence. Dissertation research would not have been possible without the cooperation I received from the regional and district officers in Mtwara’s local government. Most of all, however, I would like to credit the different individuals and civil society organizations based in Mtwara Town, Tanzania, who made this work possible through their willingness to participate and trust in my project. Douglas McFalls, Phillippo Lulale, Allan Mkopoka, and M. Bright Msalya afforded me amazing opportunities to learn more about the civil society scene in Mtwara. I am also grateful for the friendships I made with Chilumba, Grace and the Bamboo family, Sabrina, Mr. Raphael Mgaya, and Mr. Msalya. The dedicated guidance and expertise of Roger Bresnahan and David Wiley made this dissertation research possible. Roger Bresnahan’s adept navigation of granting institutions allowed me to translate a research plan for Kenya into a project based in Tanzania in the wake of a travel ban. The following institutions financed the undertaking of this project: the Fulbright- Hays Foundation, the MSU Anthropology Department, the MSU College of Social Sciences, the iv Center for Advanced Study of International Development at MSU, and the MSU African Studies Center. I cannot thank friends and colleagues enough for their encouragement, insight, and kindness during this journey. Carolyn Pratt van Wyck, April Greenwood, Brian van Wyck, Deon Claiborne, Fayana Richards, Alison Kolodzy, Paul Herbert, and Dana Angood humor, wisdom, and pastries. During the final stages of editing, Jess MacLeod served as an invaluable sounding board and accountability-holder. And last, an impressive number of canines contributed their energies and enthusiasm to the writing process. The Baumgartner women have helped make this dissertation a reality. My grandmother, Elizabeth Baumgartner, raised me to enjoy writing and accept the perils of editing. Throughout her life, Helen Baumgartner, instilled in me a deep passion for seeking out and understanding perspectives beyond my own. The intellectual curiosity and dedication with which Ruth Anne Baumgartner and Al Kulcsar approach their lives have always impressed and inspired me. The two contributed invaluable advice throughout the entirety of this endeavor. Ruth Anne, in particular, dedicated her time and expertise to editing several chapters. I would be remiss in not thanking my loving husband, Dan, for holding me together with encouragement and popcorn during this stretch of our shared lives. Admittedly, I am perhaps most grateful for his entertaining dramatizations of the films and television that I either missed or slept through over the past year. My kids Ro and Ada (aka Wonder Woman) continue to fascinate me with their incredible imaginations and curiosities. The focus and discipline I have been able to marshal for this project is a testament to my admiration and love for them. Finally, my parents, Susan Baumgartner Elbin and Greg Elbin, have provided enthusiastic, unmitigated v love and encouragement to me and my family. Ada can recognize several different birdcalls thanks to their caring, inspired tutelage. I cannot thank them enough. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER 1: IMAGINING NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND THE STATE IN POST-CONFLICT MTWARA ............................................................. 1 Prologue: Predictions of Regional Revitalization .................................................................. 1 The May 22-23, 2013 Protest ................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 8 Theorizing Development and Development Imaginaries .................................................... 13 Nyerere in Tanzanian Politics ................................................................................................ 23 Social Differentiation and Development in Mtwara ............................................................ 26 “Tumesahaulika”..................................................................................................................... 29 Methodological Orientation ................................................................................................... 32 Fieldwork ................................................................................................................................. 33 Dissertation Layout................................................................................................................. 40 CHAPTER 2: THE CONFIGURATION OF MTWARA'S UNDERDEVELOPMENT DIALECTIC ................................................................................................................................ 46 On the Road from Dar es Salaam to Mtwara ...................................................................... 46 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 48 German East Africa (1885-1918) ........................................................................................... 50 The British Colonial State (1919-1961) ................................................................................. 54 Underdevelopment and the Third World (1940s–1960s) .................................................... 57 Nyerere, Pan-Africanism, and Ujamaa (1950s–1970s) ........................................................ 61 The Social-Development Imaginary (1970s–mid-1980s): Development, Citizenship, and the State ................................................................................................................................... 66 The Roles of Government Administrators, NGO Members, and Rural Citizens During Nyerere’s Administration (1964-1985).................................................................................. 72 Democratization and Decentralization in Post-Socialist Tanzania (1985-2005) ............... 75 The Neoliberal-Extractivist Imaginary (2005-2021): Development, Citizenship, and the State .......................................................................................................................................... 79 The Roles of Government Administrators, NGO Members, and Rural Citizens During the Magufuli Administration (2015-2021) ............................................................................ 85 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 88 CHAPTER 3: PLANNING, PERFORMANCE, AND KNOWLEDGE RESTRICTION WITHIN THE NATURAL GAS SECTOR .............................................................................. 90 Run-Ins with the Tanzanian State: Mtwara’s Bureaucratic Layout ................................. 94 An Overview of Bureaucratic Planning ................................................................................ 99 The 2015 Bills Debate ........................................................................................................... 104 Scenes of the Neoliberal-Extractivist Imaginary ............................................................... 111 Scene 1: The Dangote Cement Factory Inauguration .......................................................................................................... 111 Scene 2: Knowledge Restriction and the Neoliberal-Extractivist Imaginary .............................................................. 122 Scene 3: Development Imaginaries in Contestation ............................................................................................................. 132 vii Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 139 CHAPTER 4: FOSTERING THE NEOLIBERAL-EXTRACTIVIST STATE IMAGINARY IN MTWARA’S POST-CONFLICT CSOs .................................................. 140 Waiting ................................................................................................................................... 140 Mtwara’s Civil Society Landscape ...................................................................................... 149 Advocacy CSOs and the Neoliberal-Extractivist State ..................................................... 155 ADEA and the Neoliberal-Extractivist State...................................................................... 164 Conclusion: Waiting on the State ........................................................................................ 172 CHAPTER 5: FROM SACRIFICING TO SACRIFICIAL: MOURNING DEVELOPMENT IN MTWARA, TANZANIA .................................................................... 174 Development in the Aftermath of Violence ........................................................................ 174 “Tumesahaulika,” Revisited ................................................................................................ 182 Narratives of Suffering and Sacrifice: Mtwara on the Forefront of Liberation Efforts 184 Narratives of Suffering and Sacrifice: Mtwara as the Model Rural Region ................... 190 Greedy Enemies: Wana Mtwara in the Shadow of Protest................................................ 197 Violence .................................................................................................................................. 201 The May 22 Anniversary and “Amani” .............................................................................. 206 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 211 Looking to the Future ........................................................................................................... 217 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 221 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Map of Dar es Salaam and Mtwara along the Tanzania Coast ..................................... 46 Figure 2: Map of Administrative Units in Mtwara Region........................................................... 95 Figure 3:The organizational structure of the regional- and district-level tiers of local government in Mtwara, Tanzania ................................................................................................................... 101 ix CHAPTER 1: IMAGINING NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND THE STATE IN POST-CONFLICT MTWARA Prologue: Predictions of Regional Revitalization In May 2013, protests erupted in southeastern Tanzania in opposition to a state- engineered pipeline that would transport natural gas from its source in the underdeveloped southeastern port town of Mtwara to the northern financial center of Dar es Salaam (hereafter referred to as Dar). Confirmation of the central government’s Mtwara–Dar es Salaam Pipeline Project had inspired feelings of betrayal and confusion among residents of Mtwara (wana Mtwara), as state and private-sector representatives had promised intensive government investment in local infrastructure following the discovery in 2010 by the BG Group (since acquired by Royal Dutch Shell) of sizable offshore petroleum deposits. At that time, President Jakaya Kikwete’s (2005-2015) bold proclamation that “Mtwara will be the new Dubai” had lent major credibility to predictions of the region’s transformation into a hyper-capitalist hub of global commerce (Blair and Ng’wanakilala 2014). Mtwara, it seemed, would play a vital role in realizing Kikwete’s development vision of national industrialization powered by domestically produced energy sources. Throughout colonial and postcolonial Tanzanian history, sustained periods of government negligence had contributed to the territory’s relative underdevelopment in comparison to the rest of the country (Seppälä 1998). Colonial and postcolonial administrations had targeted Mtwara as an object of development, then, at least in part because of the southeastern territory’s challenging geographic conditions. The port city of Mtwara Town is situated on the southern coast of Tanzania, 167 miles from the Ruvuma River and approximately 350 miles from the Mozambican border to the south; Mtwara’s regional boundaries respond to naturally-occurring geographic 1 barriers in the southeast—Rufiji River to the north, Ruvuma River to the south, the Lumesule River to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the east. Within the region, terrain is divided by numerous rivers and two expansive plateaus that can complicate travel throughout the territory’s six administrative districts: Mtwara Municipal, Mtwara Rural, Masasi, Nanyumbu, Newala, and Tandahimba (2012 Population and Housing Census 2014, 7). Mtwara’s large tracts of arid land are sparsely populated by people from three major ethnic groups, the Makonde, Makua, and Yao.12 Overall, the territory’s rural districts exhibit some of the highest rates of poverty and lowest rates of urbanization in present-day Tanzania (World Bank 2019). Within this socioeconomic context, politicians’ early predictions of gas extraction’s industrializing impact gained particular traction among wana Mtwara. As a consequence, wana Mtwara met rumors regarding government plans to transport gas to Dar via pipeline with disbelief and anger. Many southeasterners feared that if the Kikwete administration were to refine gas in the north, then Dar—not Mtwara—would reap the benefits of increased government and corporate investments in the sector. Once the central government had prioritized Mtwara in national development plans after years of perceived neglect, though, increasing evidence of pipeline plans proved particularly destabilizing for the region’s residents. But dashed development expectations cannot fully account for the intensity with which government officials’ promises of revitalization took root and the hostility with which residents responded to pipeline news. In this section, I have highlighted the evidence that state officers’ initial guarantees of local benefits upheld a shared, regionally based understanding among residents. These beliefs centered on the assumption that their region would one day be 1 Makonde groups comprise 86% of the total regional population (Kamat 2018, 248). 2 Under German and British colonialism, Makonde groups gained the reputation of being heavily traditional due, in part, to populations’ use of ritual in resisting and subverting colonial authority (Killian 1998, 147). 2 recognized for its contributions to legitimating and promoting national development projects throughout Tanzanian history. In the following section, I provide an overview of key events during the May 22-23 protests as identified by Mtwara Town residents. The May 22-23, 2013 Protest According to many Mtwara Town-based supporters of Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM)— Tanzania’s ruling party345—external agitators from rival political parties visited the southeast to stoke gas tensions and challenge the offices of CCM local politicians.6 Newspapers and popular accounts claim that parties such as the Civic United Front (CUF) did, in fact, arrange discussions with southeasterners on the regional prospects for gas development.7 CUF representatives, in fact, collected 30,000 signatures from residents of the Mtwara-Mikindani Municipality for a petition to block pipeline construction in January 2013 (“Maelfu Wajiandikisha” 2013).8 Following the organization of the petition, CUF Secretary in Congress, Margaret Sakaya, stated 3 CCM has occupied the presidency and the majority of parliamentary seats since Independence. 4 CCM is the successor to two earlier iterations of the ruling political party—the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and the Tanzanian African National Union (TANU). 5 Although numerous southeasterners do support CCM, the party’s wealth and influence is largely situated in the urban north, in particular Dar. 6 Local government officials suggested that opposition party representatives like (CUF) and Chama cha Demokrasia (ChaDema) visited Mtwara in the lead-up to May in order to weaken the political influence of local CCM politicians such as Member of Parliament (MP) Hassan Murji before the next election cycle (“Kiini cha Mgogoro” 2013). 7 Several opposition members confirmed that representatives did visit the region to speak on the subject of gas. A Cha Dema member in his mid-thirties recounted: Any revolution can start from one person. If it’s true that someone came to the communities in Mtwara, and tried to give the real education to the community in Mtwara, that natural gas should benefit you, and the situation as it is? There is no benefit for you, we communities, we start to understand, “oh! This is not good," and we start to react. So, maybe it is true that this situation is started from somebody far away from Mtwara. But he tried to help us, the community, understand how the government was going to run the natural gases. So maybe it was true, yes. (2015) According to a majority of residents, the question of the involvement of wageni (guests) in organizing demonstrations did not matter; residents’ outrage was warranted (mid-twenties male ChaDema member 2015). 8 CUF holds moderate support in Mtwara, where the region’s historical and political peripheralization has encouraged residents to challenge the historical monopolization of political power by CCM. 3 that she would bring the concerns of Mtwara to the attention of the nation’s members of parliament (MPs). At the same time, however, representatives from groups such as NCCR- Mageuzi received word that they would no longer be permitted to hold meetings with Mtwara residents on the subject of natural gas benefits. In a late-stage attempt to ease tensions, opposition representatives arranged to meet with several Mtwara-based religious leaders and Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda in Dar to resolve the gas conflict. Several demands from opposition representatives, however, went unmet: 1) the restoration of opposition party actors’ rights to hold meetings on the subject of gas extraction, 2) the resignation of regional commissioner General Joseph Simbakalia who often verbally attacked community members opposed to pipeline plans, 3) and a series of meetings with experts from the Ministry of Energy and Minerals such as Minister Dr. Sospeter Muhongo (“Kiini cha Mgogoro” 2013). The same article that covered the CUF-organized petition mentioned three different individuals’ perspectives on the cause of the gas issue. For Fatma Sinani, an Mtwara-based member of the opposition party NCCR-Mageuzi, violence resulted from the lack of civic education throughout the region. Vice Chairman for NCCR-Maguezi, Mohamed Salim, stated that violence broke out over the inability for the central government to see to the terms requested by opposition representatives (“Kiini cha Mgogoro” 2013). Weeks before the actual protest, individuals passed out leaflets and sent anonymous phone messages to organize in anticipation of the budgetary announcement from the Minister of Minerals and Energy. Printed flyers stated that Mtwara residents should rise up during the budgetary announcement from Parliament. Additionally, these messages also called for services including shops, markets, daladalas (small commuter buses), and motorcycles (“Kiini cha Mgogoro” 2013). The motivation that inspired these particular efforts, according to an 4 anonymous source of the independent newspaper Mwananchi, was “to ensure that the gas project get blocked by any means possible” (“Kiini cha Mgogoro” 2013). Although political affiliation and competition among parties may have contributed to the breakout of violence in late May, participant and newspaper accounts present the protest as a loosely organized endeavor. Urban residents’ testimonies suggest that the confrontations provided people an outlet through which to express a range of frustrations (e.g. challenging CCM and halting progression on the pipeline construction). Accounts generally agree to a basic chronology of events, beginning with former Energy and Minerals Minister Dr. Sospeter Muhongo’s confirmation on May 22, 2013 that the project to build a pipeline and transport gas from Mtwara to Dar for processing would move forward. For rural villagers who mainly relied on the radio rather than the television for the transmission of news, an interruption in electricity service delayed their knowledge of events. Residents concede that electricity in Mtwara District had died suspiciously when Parliamentary proceedings turned to a review of the Ministry of Energy and Minerals budget. While electricity cutting in and out is not uncommon throughout the southeast, this particular disruption during Parliamentary proceedings served as evidence to Mtwara residents of the central government’s collusion with the parastatal electric company Tanzania Electric Supply Company (TANESCO) to delay the spread of pipeline news throughout the southeast. In particular, many residents suggested that the announced pipeline plans confirmed a long-standing northern agenda or "plot" against the South.9 For many rural villagers in Masasi rural, news of the confirmation only arrived once relatives or friends in town had texted them the news. 9 The plot against the South is typically traced back to the German colonial administration’s response to scattered uprisings waged by Africans throughout the southeast in the early twentieth century. German colonizers responded to these revolts by withdrawing food aid and funding from the region. Many southeasterners view this punitive measure as having contributed to the region’s entrenched state of underdevelopment. Elsewhere, scholars have noted 5 Following the budgetary announcement, mainly young men set up blockades of burning tires at critical intersections near the downtown markets to stop traffic. According to male residents of Mtwara Town in their thirties and forties, groups of mostly young men soon after gathered in the streets in front of the markets to occupy the streets and voice their opposition to government plans. Two older men employed by civil society organizations (CSOs) claimed that the protest and an organized strike of businesses near the main market was largely peaceful. Some of the small shops that sold clothing, cell phone accessories, and stationery items outside the main market on Sinani Street had immediately closed their businesses following the broadcast. It was difficult to tell whether businesses had shut down in response to the previously circulated flyers or if shop owners mainly closed to prevent damage in light of the growing number of young men in the street. According to the men who participated in this early stage of the protest, marching on May 22, 2013 remained mostly peaceful. Once local police arrived on the scene, confrontations between young male protesters and officers escalated into scattered units of fighting. A local reporter in his early forties stressed that the police escalated confrontations with peaceful protesters only after it became clear that residents were planning to continue business shutdowns into the following day. A younger participant in the protest recalled that these early bouts of fighting proved violent but not brutal, as the local police only carried batons. In some accounts, however, fighting and acts of arson seemed to spontaneously erupt across scattered confrontations or “battles” on the street (“Kiini cha Mgogoro” 2013). Tanzania Daima, an that southeasterners believe Germans communicated this strategy of impoverishment to the British colonial administration once the League of Nations entrusted the territory to them following World War I. Rumors persist in present-day Mtwara as to the plot’s continuation under postcolonial administrations (Ahearne and Childs 2018, Poncian 2019). 6 independent newspaper, also characterized the violence as “running battles” on the streets of Mtwara and Mikindani (May 27, 2013). In addition to marching, urban residents took part in scattered acts of arson. Protest participants attempted to set fire to a police station along with CCM party offices and the homes of local CCM politicians. The buildings targeted for arson suggests that anti-ruling party sentiment did, in fact, motivate these specific acts within the broader protest. In addition to the homes of notable CCM politicians, however, the house of at least one prominent local journalist was razed to the ground. This individual was run out of Mtwara by men who were said to have had ties to local government. Government officials indicated that confrontations between police and protesters mounted considerably upon the arrival of caravans of protesters from the inland rural districts of Tandahimba and Masasi (“Tanzanian Shot” 2013). A majority of urban residents, however, claimed that the violence only reached its peak once the national guard arrived. On May 23, the central government’s Minister of Home Affairs, Emmanuel Chimbi, deployed the People’s Defense Force (PDF) to enforce “law and order” when confrontations between police and community members continued to intensify. Once on the scene, the PDF used live ammunition against scattered protesting crowds. The sight of PDF riding through the main streets of Mtwara Town in military tanks terrified many residents, including those who waited out the conflict in their homes. A CSO employee in his thirties said that soldiers launched smoke bombs into the room where his small daughter had been playing. Another reporter, based near Ligula Hospital, said she had rushed to the scene of violence on May 23, 2013, to gather research but was soon after attacked by a soldier. In a terrifying encounter, he struck her with a rock. She only just managed to escape him 7 by hiding in a stranger’s nearby home. By the end of the day on May 23, news had spread of a pregnant woman had died in Ligula Hospital after having been shot seven times by a soldier. 10 The purported ferocity of the PDF culminated in the loss of at least eight civilian lives and many instances of assault (Kamat et al. 2019). Town residents also mentioned that soldiers from outside of Mtwara raped women during their seizure of the town. A young ChaDema (“The Party for Democracy and Progress”) member blamed the CCM-led government, in particular, for the escalation of violence and targeting of women in the protest: “Why are women raped by soldiers? Why is a pregnant woman shot? It’s because citizens want this, and the government wants that” (2015). In the wake of protest violence, the central government made no alterations to their pipeline construction plans, and political figures such as President Kikwete, former Minister of Minerals and Energy Dr. Sospeter Muhongo, and Minister Mchimbi continued to frame the country’s nascent gas industry as the path toward rapid economic growth. Regional commissioner Simbakalia imposed a State of Emergency on Mtwara Region that set severe limits on the mobility and speech of its residents. Post-conflict government portraits of development painted Mtwara protesters as uneducated and even “betrayers of the nation,'' disloyal to the project of Tanzanian nation-building (''Gov't: We’ll Pursue the Inciters” 2013). Introduction At first glance, Mtwara’s civil conflict in 2013 seems to support an increasingly familiar scenario documented in social science literature: the postcolonial state’s dismissal or violent 10 International coverage of the protests foregrounded a southern journalist’s version of events in emphasizing a pregnant woman’s death to paint the Tanzanian state as cruel and brutal: “Tanzania Mtwara gas riots: 'Pregnant woman killed'” (BBC 2013). 8 seizure of subnational communities at sites of resource extraction (De Oliveira 2007; Ferguson 2005, 2006). These authors suggest that in a bid to protect the interests of the global corporate elite in the aftermath of the Cold War, international lending agencies increasingly crafted policy reforms that privatized economies and liberalized trade in postcolonial governments. These reforms, often attached as aid conditions, essentially stripped national governments of their institutional capacity for inclusive nationwide development. Such shifts weakened the governing capacity of the postcolonial state, repurposing its function from primary purveyor of inclusive development to enabler of individualistic economic growth through the facilitation of global capital (Ferguson 2005, 2006; Gardner 2012). Often, the limitations and restrictions placed on national governments throughout the Global South forced regimes to rely upon governing tactics deemed corrupt and undemocratic by multi-lending agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to Ferguson (2005), so-called corrupt African nations such as Angola serve as ideal hosts to the predatory ventures of multi-national corporations and foreign oil companies. As Ferguson notes, “countries with raging civil wars and spectacularly illiberal governments have, on a number of occasions, proved to be surprisingly strong performers in the area of economic growth” (380). Corporations’ focused investments in mineral wealth produce “extractive enclaves” at sites of extraction that are governed in the interest of global capital rather than inclusive visions of state-led development. Capital availability becomes the government’s main determining factor for decision-making. In managing the prospects of capital investment within their borders, national governments often neglect to protect the best interests of subnational communities within these enclaves. Altogether, these patterns produce the effect of enclaves 9 being removed or isolated from the social and political contexts of their host countries (Ferguson 2005, 2006). Recent accounts of the Mtwara 2013 protests claim that residents’ perceived detachment and alienation from the state-directed project of national development in Tanzania spurred hostility (Ahearne and Childs 2018; Must and Rustad 2018). Ahearne and Childs (2018) argue that the central government has historically neglected the infrastructure of the southeast and the considerations of its residents. They see the violence as having resulted from differentiated forms of citizenship (Ong 2006), in which groups experience belonging in a state differently depending on their ethno-racial differences and involvement in development interventions (Ahearne and Childs 2018, 697). My research on the May 2013 protests suggests that these two development scenarios do not fully account for the unfolding situation in Mtwara, Tanzania. I argue that the intensity of the 2013 protests derives from southeasterners’ understanding of Mtwara region as fundamental to the historical constitution of national development in Tanzania. I interpret citizenship as how individuals make sense of their parts in Tanzanian nation-building through regionally specific development contexts and shared understandings expectations, and obligations. In Mtwara, development-centered expectations and obligations centrally feature into residents’ relationship to the state. The 2013 demonstrations reflected efforts on the part of residents to articulate two different sets of development imaginaries that entail distinct understandings of development, citizenship, and the state. Through their protests, Mtwara residents challenged the central government’s vision for national development through the state’s authorization of global capital investment in natural resource extraction. Two years following the protests, I found evidence of an alternative, historically informed development imaginary in community members’ continuing 10 efforts to contest dominant conceptualizations of development, the state, and citizenship as evidence. This regionally informed imaginary initially gained traction in early independence as a dialectic of underdevelopment between Mtwara region and the central government and continued through the time of my research in 2015. At independence, founding President Julius Nyerere had attempted to mobilize Tanzania’s rural base of agrarian smallholder farmers through implementation of a collectivized national development policy, Ujamaa (familyhood). The minimalist platform laid ideological groundwork for ruling-party officials’ involvement of citizens in several iterations of village resettlement schemes aimed at reconfiguring communities into self-sufficient cells of collective, communitarian production. The postcolonial government viewed southeasterners as ideal objects of state intervention due to their region’s isolating geography and low population density. Throughout early independence, moderate gains in southerners’ agricultural productivity validated state development policy that encouraged collectivized relations of rural production through village resettlement programming. Furthermore, the region’s sustained underdevelopment provided the postcolonial government with an illustrative model of regional sacrifice that could be used to deny wealthier regions’ requests for funding (Lal 2012). Southerners, in turn, adopted the government’s association of underdevelopment with nation- building in their later claims on state resources (often without success). Throughout Tanzania’s socialist and post-socialist history, Mtwara experienced economic and infrastructural decline that residents increasingly identified as resulting from the region’s past nationalistic sacrifices. In present-day Mtwara, residents’ personal recollections and exchanges on the subject of natural gas development often centered on expectations of recognition the central government. Expectations of state-funded development often refer to wide-reaching infrastructural change 11 such as the mending of the area’s notoriously rough roadways. Recognition could also entail, however, government acknowledgement that the region has suffered for the nation, and, therefore, is deserving. Claims for recognition are reflected in such phrases as “tumesahaulika” (we’ve been forgotten). I interpret the residents’ invocations of government neglect (tumesahaulika) and efforts to memorialize the anniversary of 2013’s protests in 2015 as an entry point for considering how Mtwara residents understand their roles as contributors to conflicting definitions of the state, citizenship, and development. In the wake of state violence, charges of governmental neglect reaffirm a specific development relationship with the central government and articulate the investment of Mtwara residents in a state capable of ensuring their inclusion in national development. My assessment of their perspective challenges Ferguson’s (2005) assumption that the government prioritization of capital investment at extractive enclaves leads to the waning significance or relevance of political and national culture at sites of mineral extraction (Ferguson 2005, 2006). Mtwara residents call upon inclusive definitions of citizenship and development informed by government practice and ideology in early independence to assert their own claims on the content of Tanzanian national development. Along with Mtwara community members, local government representatives and CSO officers draw from regionally informed structures of meaning to lay claims on national development. I structure my research on the shifting roles and perceptions of development within the context of natural gas extraction around the following question: How do government representatives, civil society officers, and community members in Mtwara region understand development in the aftermath of natural gas extraction and pipeline construction? In order to address this question, I will first characterize the emergence and content of two distinct development imaginaries that actors in local government, CSOs, and Mtwara communities often 12 invoke in post-conflict Mtwara. Within the contexts of local government bureaucracy, CSO work, and the anniversary of 2013 protest violence, Mtwara residents engage national imaginaries to forward conflicting models of development, the state, and national belonging. Theorizing Development and Development Imaginaries In early political history and anthropology, scholars often framed development as an external intervention that reinforced colonial schemes of rule. Using western techniques of representation and moralizing discourses11, colonial states introduced development programs to African societies in order to legitimate and manage their imperialistic ventures. The British, for instance, drew upon the discourse of moral internationalism to justify their interventions in East Africa as a civilizing mission in the late nineteenth century. Such missions often used the pursuit of progress to justify race- and gender-based systems of social differentiation such as the British tripartite racial system.12 More recent literature complicates the portrayal of development as western discourse, however, by focusing on the role of participants and recipients in development schemes (such as villagization) and bureaucratic practices (Becker 2019; Green 2014; Lal 2012; Phillips 2018). Scholarship demonstrates that local groups often adapted forms of organization such as community participation programs and styles of bureaucratic management to meet their own collective goals (Green 2014). The newly independent, economically vulnerable government of 11 The discourse of moral internationalism claimed that colonial authorities had a moral imperative to help less civilized people attain progress. This discourse underwrote British schemes of colonialism and will be explored in Chapter 2. 12 This system assigned rights12 and responsibilities to created three legal categories of race: Asian (usually including people of Arab descent), White, and African (Aminzade 2001). 13 postcolonial Tanganyika occupied dual roles13: recipients of international development aid from their former colonizers and multilateral lending agencies and wielders of political and economic influence through their capacity to administer development.14 Government officials often organized the distribution of development to underlying citizens through specific projects and planning (Hirschmann 1967). National development frameworks included village resettlement directives and community participation strategies. Lal (2010, 2012) complicates the portrait of villagization as a state tool enforced upon passive populations by highlighting the lived experiences of villagization participants. For instance, members of the pre-independence political party the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) interpreted villagization as opportunities to build support for TANU rather than to participate in a state (Lal 2010). Looking at postcolonial Africa, Ferguson (1994) and Scott (1998) re-emphasize that state and global elite implement development as a western imperialistic set of knowledge practices.15 Ferguson, in particular, views state planners’ implementation of development techniques as entrenching the bureaucratic power of the state and obscuring the decision-making that engenders social inequality.16 Altogether, historical and anthropological descriptions of Ujamaa contend that participants in village resettlement did not always assume that a coherent, rational state was at the helm of community projects (Ferguson 1994). 13 Colonial states such as Britain attempted to integrate local authority figures as officers within the administration of development. Through exchanges, African representatives assumed the dual roles of agents and objects of development interventions (Cooper and Packard 1997). 14 In Tanganyika, state actors often defined development in relation to rather vague vision of socialist modernization through rural collectivization. 15 By knowledge practices in this context, I mean the transformation of social relations into calculable statistics and equations. 16 Scholars recognize postcolonial governments as having adopted these knowledge practices from their former western colonizers and aid donors such as the World Bank. 14 Green (2014) and Becker (2014, 2019) revisit Ferguson’s perspective that the government elite entrenches the bureaucratic power of the state through their administration of development. They explore bureaucratic practices from two perspectives that broaden understanding of social actors’ development experiences: 1) development exchanges as negotiations of political reciprocity between government officials, rural villagers, and even central state actors and 2) development as a diffused social form that citizens can use to bypass entrenched government-based hierarchies in order to seek social advancement. These two conceptualizations of development offer unique perspectives on the mapping of development, the state, and citizenship in Tanzania. Both ethnographies explore how government, CSO actors, and villagers, in turn, make sense of these shifting meanings within the context of daily life in rural Tanzania. Green (2014), in particular, views development as central to residents’ efforts to style themselves as modern economic actors in Tanzania. This portrayal stems from her acknowledgement of a citizenship paradigm in which Tanzanians are expected to act as entrepreneurs in seeking out economic opportunities for their own development rather than relying on the state. Fieldwork from Mtwara in 2015, however, suggests that residents still contest the definition of development, citizenship, and even the character of the state through claims on the future of the gas sector. The postcolonial government adopted bureaucratic methods of representation and, in the wake of liberalizing reforms in the ’80s and ’90s, CSOs adopted bureaucratic modes of administration as well. Through the increasing funding channeled to CSOs by western donor agencies at the national and local levels, citizens increasingly find opportunities to access global CSO networks through their proximity to bureaucratic representations of development (e.g., professional funding proposals). Development, according 15 to Green, seems attainable and close at hand: Residents are able to ability to draft proposal letters or funding requests or at least position themselves in proximity to material representations of development. On the other hand, villagers and even government administrators can no longer access infrastructural funding or material tools as they had been able to under the socialist government. Green (2014) takes this as evidence of the potential for all members of Tanzanian society to act as agents of development. This premise also suggests Tanzanians may find opportunities through development networks and materials (e.g., funding letters) to bypass state- based client-patron networks in their attainment of social opportunities. In present-day Tanzania, government and CSOs structure their relationships with members, recipients, and outside donors through bureaucratic styles of management that represent development practices and relationships. Also building off of Ferguson (1994), Becker (2014) returns to the theme of bureaucracy to demonstrate that administrative officials often use the language of standardization and quantification embedded in development discourse to forge political connections and foster commonality with rural constituents. Government actors qualifying development planning to appeal to the interests and priorities of rural villagers. Villagers, in turn, may participate, support, and adopt the development plans as their own. As a whole, officials’ performances then contribute to the effect of a “local political practice emerge from the efforts of provincial planners and their audiences” (Becker 2014). In doing so, government administrators implicate a wide range of actors, from central government officials to rural smallholder farmers, in the production of a state. In reframing development as performance, Becker (2014) suggests that government officials make concerted efforts to involve rural audiences in performances of bureaucratic 16 efficiency introduce an element of reciprocity to development exchanges that residents might play off of to better negotiate their own development options. For instance, an administrator may need to curry favor with rural constituents by emphasizing how a particular plan or politician will benefit villagers’ local environments. Otherwise, a crowd of villagers might voice their disagreement with a development platform or administrator. Research on development in Tanzania, however, has yet to explore state actors’, CSO members,’ and villagers’ navigation of development roles within the context of extractive industry ventures. Even as the central government limits expenditures on social welfare-related services in favor of encouraging citizens to pursue their own economic opportunities, appointed administrators of local development policy and discourse in rural Tanzania must still work to convince constituents to support and invest in local development programs (Becker 2019; Philips 2018). Until now, this dynamic of development performance has mainly focused on small-scale exchanges between officials and rural audiences (Becker 2014, 2019). Development’s mediation of national expectations in neighboring Kenya sheds light on a critical distinction in how rural Tanzanians and rural Kenyans view the relationship between development and the state. According to Smith (2008), Kenyans lean on development as a creative means of imagining that bypass the state especially once reliable means of support— "such as state patronage and formal employment—have been thrown asunder” (187). In other words, Kenyans have been able to seek career and self-improvement opportunities through non- governmental organizations (NGOs) and religious networks when state institutions are no longer capable of providing such options within the post-neoliberal reform environment. In Tanzania, however, wana Mtwara have continued to view the state as a key authority over development 17 (Green 2014; Jennings 2008). Over time, development has come to function as a prism through which individuals “reimagine order and progress.” (Smith 2008, 4). In Mtwara, development features as an imaginative project through which residents project idealized moral orders, political relationships, and futures in relation to historically relevant political schemes and promises. Development as an imaginative project often involves citizens’ construction of social boundaries, as they draw from salient ideas of political and social differentiation to distinguish between specific configurations. For instance, I view “tumesahaulika” as distancing rural villagers and urban residents from efforts of government officials to assert a commonality in political purpose among them in line with the national government’s national development vision of inclusive growth. Many Mtwara residents position themselves in line with the early independence of conceptualization of national development and the relations of reciprocity between state authorities and villagers for which it stood. Citizens understand the state and their roles within it through their experiences of development. As such, residents experience development in relation to historically and regionally informed backgrounds and modes of national belonging. In post-conflict Mtwara, I use the term development imaginary to stand in for a specific configuration of development, citizenship, and the state.17 I define development imaginaries as shared beliefs, expectations, and relationships with national and transnational communities centered on development. In draw on two contrasting development imaginaries—the social-development imaginary and the neoliberal- extractivist imaginary—to provide evidence for the following questions: How do government 17 The term “imaginary” is frequently used to refer to groups whose membership is defined by shared worldviews and experiences rather than conventional political boundaries. Development scholars, for instance, tend to use the term to stress how shared development histories and relationships foster collective senses of identity and purpose. Green (2014) and Becker (2019) use “development imaginaries” to mark the imaginative dimension of development as a social category and national project 18 representatives, civil society officers, and community members in Mtwara region understand development in the aftermath of natural gas extraction and pipeline construction? How has the rise of the natural gas sector informed relationships between these groups? The social-development imaginary emerged out of Nyerere’s efforts to ease reliance upon capitalist means of production at independence. Specifically, he sought to empower rural populations through economic practices of self-reliance and food self-sufficiency at the village level. Ruling TANU party officials implemented a range of strategies to achieve self-reliance, including the nationalization of industries, weakening of reliance upon foreign aid, and collectivized village resettlement programs (especially in the guise of what has become known as "villagization"). As a whole, Nyerere and TANU intended for such measures to uplift the country’s agrarian base and ultimately delink the nation from exploitative relations of capitalist production. Citizen participation in nation-building entailed labor and the seeking out of their own projects within the collectivized village context. Additionally, Nyerere aimed to produce material and ideological support for ongoing anti-colonial liberation struggles across the continent through development intervention. In the years following the introduction of Ujamaa ideology, the southeast’s status as an underdeveloped place allowed it to serve as a signifier of development. Beginning in the late 1960s, TANU officials used Mtwara region’s marked improvements in cashew production to legitimate the purpose and presence of the state. Overall, Mtwara’s relative state of impoverishment compared to other regions simultaneously rationalized central government decreases on funding for public works and legitimated the Tanzanian state. Tanzanian state officers’ legitimation of Ujamaa through the representative example of Mtwara established the conditions of residents’ evolution into moral adjudicators in the project of nation-building. 19 Framing underdevelopment and sacrifice as evidence of nationalistic intent and credibility evolved into a central social practice through which Mtwara residents asserted their moral contributions to nation-building. This dialectic produced evidence of the state’s administration of development contributed to Tanzanian self-reliance at the national scale. At the global scale, self-reliance would allow Tanzania the autonomy to realize a pan-African vision of liberation from colonialism and imperialism. When Nyerere stepped down in 1985, this marked the end of the socialist government and the early stages of the redefinition of development into a matter of choice on the part of citizens (Green 2014; Mitchell 2005).18 As donor agencies increasingly sought to invest in private-partnership opportunities with recipient countries, Tanzania increasingly embarked upon an accelerated path of growth. This tone is laid out in the Development 2025 Vision which positioned 2025 as the target year for the country’s qualification for Middle Income Earning Country status. I identify the national government’s response to the 2010 natural gas discoveries as a central feature in the formation of a neoliberal-extractivist imaginary for Tanzanians. According to the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary, political belonging relies on the actions of the individual. Citizens seek out their own opportunities for growth and economic advancement. In sharp contrast to this perspective, politicians increasingly frame the implementation of development programs and projects as nationalistic efforts. Through the organization and management of scientific knowledge, state officers and governmental policy position the state, itself, as the critical lynchpin of development and the governance of extractive projects 18 In the 1990s, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) introduced the definition of development as the “process of enlarging people’s choices” in a further move toward securing the hold of international donors and lending agencies over national priorities (Rist 2019, 10). The central government of Tanzania employed this logic to counter citizens’ pleas for more services and funding following the implementation of privatization of formerly government-funded industries. Pulling from the Ujamaa-era edict of self-reliance, they often encouraged citizens to self-fashion their own opportunities through entrepreneurial activities (e.g., raising chickens). 20 Development policy and propaganda positioned natural gas as the critical catalyst that would empower Tanzania to reach the 2025 growth milestone. In this conceptualization of development, the state paves the way for private business, to—as the title of Tanzania’s Five- Year Development Plan 2011/2012–2015/2016 reads “unleash Tanzania’s latent growth potential” (Government of Tanzania 2011). Politicians explicitly attached this promise of growth to the natural gas findings. In this most recent iteration of rapid economic growth, development presents as the organization and structuring of scientific knowledge through private-public partnerships. Sketching the social-development imaginary and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary offers insight as to how government actors, CSO officers, and villagers understand development and how their roles have changed following the rise of the natural gas sector in Mtwara. In my analysis, I gauge development exchanges as efforts, often on the parts of district officials, to produce an effect of political commonality between the heights of central government office and underlying rural villagers. In line with Becker, I also do not assume that the state exists as a unitary entity. Rather, a wide range of actors implicate different states in various development performances. I extend her analytical framework, however, to consider three participant groups’ development interactions. Unlike Becker (2014), I foreground rural residents’ efforts to articulate development-based relationships with local and central government actors in ways that conflict with the current model of national belonging embedded in the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. During fieldwork, local government officials19 and CSO members often invoked the neoliberal-extractivist development imaginary in which individuals are expected to pursue 19 By local government officers, I refer to local officers includes district officials, district council members, municipal officers, and municipal council members. 21 development through entrepreneurial opportunities brought about by natural gas extraction. State actors and CSO members generally referenced the state as a capable driver of business dealings. Government officers’ restriction of knowledge regarding natural gas policy contributes to distinguishing the state as the specific entity authorized to manage the extractive sector. As Green (2014) explores, the lines between civil society and actors have been historically blurred in practice. Central government propaganda that positions the state as the primary agent responsible for cultivating the natural gas sector. Central government agents promote this image amidst sizable gaps in institutional and technical expertise regarding the large-scale domestic production of petroleum by presenting the knowledge as exclusive and secret. Government officers’ efforts to restrict knowledge pertaining to natural gas governance allow them to appear authoritative even if they lack relevant information concerning the gas sector. National and global-level CSO networks conceive of NGO roles as agents capable of holding state actors accountable to good governance20 standards of democratic practice within the context of the natural gas sector. These roles are very difficult for CSO members to fulfill in practice, however. In Mtwara, CSOs workers position themselves as distanced from knowledge concerning natural gas policy. CSOs that are in anyway related to the issue of natural gas must become objects of government surveillance in order to operate. CSO members are key to production of distinctions between the conceptual fields of the state and civil society in Mtwara. I emphasize how state actors practice the strict gatekeeping of policy development knowledge in the wake of natural gas extraction. This does not challenge Green’s emphasis on the centrality of 20 This World Bank agenda assumes that “development is achieved by the effective integration of the state, market, and civil society, wherein civil society, represented by formal NGOs and pressure groups, represents the interests of the poor, contributes to service delivery and development activities, and holds government to account” (Green et al.2010, 9). 22 development forms to government and NGO practices but complicates her portrayal of development as something that is accessible to everyone. Most urban and rural residents, meanwhile, foregrounded regional neglect in order to hold the state accountable for a widespread, collective form of development entailed in the social-development imaginary. “Tumesahaulika” often distanced rural villagers and urban residents from efforts of government officials to assert a commonality in political purpose among them in line with the national government’s national development vision of inclusive growth. Many Mtwara residents position themselves in line with the early independence of conceptualization of national development and the relations of obligation between citizens and the state for which it stood. Nyerere in Tanzanian Politics Even as political actors perpetuate pro-capitalist, business-friendly policy, references to the nation’s founding socialist father, Julius Nyerere, loom large in present-day Tanzania. In Mtwara, such references evoke interpretations of development and the state as realized within the social-development imaginary. Under the unifying leadership of President Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s post-independence government inculcated a strong nationalist ethos in its population. Through the implementation of Nyerere’s socialist Ujamaa ideology,21 the government involved rural residents in bureaucratic, moral, and material exchanges. Interactions centered on development projects like well construction contributed to the substantiation of a coherent Tanzanian state (Green 2014; Lal 2012; Phillips 2018). In present-day Tanzania, rural residents often reference Nyerere and his memory to evoke an idealized moral order and form of 21 Chapter 2 explores experiences of Ujamaa in Tanzania’s southeast in greater detail. 23 honorable leadership. These invocations often portray present-day politics as immoral in relation to Independence-era government leadership (Fouéré 2014). Tanzanian intellectual Issa Shivji poignantly summarized the effects of neoliberal reforms on Tanzanian political culture in the eyes of its citizenry at a 2008 legal conference: Globalization chickens are rapidly coming home to roost while neoliberal eggs are cracking up one after another. SAPs and subsequent privatization and liberalization policies have severely undermined the welfare of our people. The indices of education, health, sanitation, water, life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy have all fallen. Privatizations have thrown thousands of people out of work and increasingly privatization projects are being exposed as big scandals. In my own country, all the four big privatizations—bank, water, electricity, telecommunication and mining—have proved to be utterly one-sided in favor of [multi-national corporations], if not outright fraudulent, costing the country billions of shillings. (8) In Mtwara, residents refer to Nyerere, or “Mwalimu” (teacher), to condemn the economic and infrastructural inequalities between the southeast and wealthier centers of commerce in the north. Within the context of Mtwara’s development history, however, such references also project an expectation for recognition of residents’ roles in development. In attempting to direct an extractive industries-fueled industrialization agenda, former President Kikwete (2005-2015) relied, in part, upon the invocation of Nyerere’s strong leadership (Barasa and Athumani 2015; Bofin et al. 2020; Green 2015). Kikwete made sure to situate Nyerere as a paternal figure early into his own presidential campaigns (Green 2015; Barasa and Athumani 2015; Bofin, et al 2020). Patrimonial imagery and tokens of political lineage stemming from Nyerere carry great weight in contemporary politics. This can be evidenced in public political performances such as the bestowal of Nyerere’s Bible on Kikwete by the first president’s widow on the 2005 Presidential Election campaign trail (Phillips 2010). As president, Kikwete adopted Nyerere’s anti-imperialistic language against “mabeberu” (capitalists), positioning himself as a strict defender of Tanzania’s national resource wealth 24 against international mining companies in the 2010 Mining Act. His legislation carved out a greater role for the Tanzanian state to play in the mining sector by allowing the government to hold stakes in mining operations.22 In addition, Kikwete raised royalties on metallic minerals and expanded local content requirements. Following sizable natural gas discoveries in 2010, Kikwete oversaw the rushed passage of petroleum policies such as the 2015 Petroleum Act which promoted domestic capital interests and stipulated strict local content requirements (Pedersen and Bofin 2015). Kikwete undertook these political measures, in part, to invite comparisons to Nyerere. Under President John Pombe Magufuli (2015-2021), the central government implemented policy that even more firmly established state authority over the petroleum sector. For instance, the 2017 Petroleum Regulations Act introduced stricter local content policy such as the requirement that arbitration between external companies and the state take place in Tanzania. Magufuli’s policy positions the state as driver of the economy. In his personal style of politics, Magufuli modelled his no-nonsense, anti-imperialistic character after Nyerere. Magufuli entered office with the reputation of a no-nonsense pragmatist. One of his campaign slogans, “Hapa Kazi Tu!,”23 conveys his popular characterization in media as a focused worker. Kikwete, meanwhile, was often spoken of someone who enjoyed hobnobbing. Further into Magufuli’s presidency, he took to overtly framing his business dealings in accordance with Nyerere’s anti-imperialist discourse. In a conflict with Canadian-owned company Acacia Mining, he charged the business of falsifying cargo records to avoid taxes. After Acacia denied any wrongdoing, Magufuli declared he was waging an economic war: 22 The state’s right to hold stakes in mining operations had been repealed in the 1998 Mining Act under President Benjamin Mkapa (Jacob and Pedersen 2018). 23 This phrase translates into English as “only work” and “strictly business.” 25 There is rampant looting in the mining sector,” says Magufuli one day; “We are in an economic war (…) billions in revenue have been lost,” he will say the next. And another: “Even the devil is laughing at us over our own self-inflicted level of poverty amid natural wealth given to us by God.” (Norbrook 2019) Nyerere’s memory functions as a moral language in national politics, but Nyerere also bears particular significance in Mtwara. Within the context of his collectivizing vision for rural empowerment, Mtwara gained a central role in promoting and representing national development. In 2015, Mtwara residents invoked Nyerere’s memory as a means of assessing the current political climate and the state elite. Social Differentiation and Development in Mtwara Tanzania’s founders are portrayed by late twentieth-century social science scholarship and international development policy as having fostered a stable, peaceful citizenry through the introduction of unifying political ideology and language policy. Recent bodies of work, however, emphasize how religious influence, geography, gender, and age have heavily informed how different populations experience their relationships with the Tanzanian state and development (Aminzade 2013; Hunter 2015).24 In Tanzanian history and development literature, Mtwara stands out for its centrality to a number of colonial and postcolonial development interventions and its status as an underdeveloped region. Under British colonialism, authorities viewed the southeast as a “Cinderella Territory,” meaning it was often overlooked and neglected in terms of development funding. More fertile land of the north and the maize-producing southwest that included Rukwa, Mbeya, Iringa, and Ruvuma attracted infrastructural investments and government spending (Seppälä 1998, 10). 24 This section is not meant to serve as a comprehensive description of social difference in Mtwara Town but highlights broad categories of difference that will inform ethnographic scenes I present in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. 26 Christianity, Islam, and indigenous religions are all practiced along the southeastern coast, but Islamic culture and institutional infrastructure have particularly informed the region’s development status in postcolonial Tanzania. Apart from Zanzibar, the southeastern coast of Tanzania has the highest Muslim population density in the country (Mampilly 2013). When Islamic traders first arrived along the East African coast in the eighth century, they introduced Islam to the Bantu ethnic groups that are thought to have migrated from northern Mozambique. From its earliest manifestations on the southeastern coast, Islam featured as more than a set of religious practices. Early Islamic caravans transmitted new material, economic, and ideological forms of engaging the world. As only elite and well-connected men initially had access to Islamic education, the religion gained status as an elite signifier along the coast. The Islamic city of Mikindani, part of the Mtwara-Mikindani urban municipality in present-day Tanzania, served as an important of seat Islamic influence in the nineteenth century. When Roman Catholic and Anglican missionaries arrived in the late nineteenth century, historians viewed their settlements as “islands of Christianity” amidst the predominantly Islamic coast (Seppälä 1998, 29). The different manner by which the colonial and postcolonial governments integrated Christian and Islamic institutions into their own administrations has also affected Mtwara’s reputation as undereducated and underdeveloped. Whereas schools of Quranic education, madrasas, often proved to be “small, poor, and transient” in southern Tanzania (Becker 2010, 115), Christian schools and missions often received government subsidies for providing services, such as healthcare. In 1971, the postcolonial government transformed missionary schools into secular schools for the new nation. Because missionaries largely avoided establishing schools along the Islamic coast, however, there were fewer buildings in the region that the postcolonial 27 state could transform into secular schools. The relatively small number of schools in Mtwara when compared to other areas of the country has contributed to the region’s low education rates. When democratizing reforms required the central government to create larger roles for NGOs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, newer organizations aligned with established Christian service organizations in order to benefit from their resources and experience. Difficulties in accessing education and key civil society networks in Tanzania has led Muslims to charge the postcolonial state of educational and political institutional bias against the religious group. During decolonization, the postcolonial government had transformed former missionary educational outposts into the nation’s new public schools. Institutional policies such as the prohibition of religious-affiliated political parties (Heilman and Kaiser 2002, Mandivenga 2007) have led to the peripheralization of Islam in politics and civil society networks. Many political associations and networks are centered on mainstream Christian values and donor relationships (Bakari 2007; Becker 2007; Green et al. 2010, 723). Civil society, in general, is associated with Christianity and the middle-class (Becker 2007; Green et al. 2010). During fieldwork in Mtwara Town, all but one of the CSO workers with whom I worked was Christian. Since the advent of multipartyism in 1992, opposition parties have made efforts to gain support among the politically, economically, and religiously peripheralized communities in Tanzania. The increasing popularity of opposition parties such as the CUF and Chadema in Mtwara has stoked anxiety in central and local ruling-party government officers in recent years (Phillips 2018). For instance, government administrators portrayed opposition party officials as steering the sentiments of the undereducated, impoverished southeasterners in the lead-up to the 2013 Protest. Muslim and Christian religious leaders served as causes for concern among state actors, as they carried great influence in urban and rural Mtwara region. Government officials’ 28 attempts to lay blame on these figures both minimized the political concerns of southeasterners and portrayed the region’s religious communities as impenetrable and irrational. Several articles from the independent newspaper Mwananchi suggested that religious leaders had their hands in fueling the passions of protesters against the central government, “The conflict of gas turned another page after religious leaders in Mtwara province joined with citizens to oppose the transportation of gas to Dar es Salaam.... They are opposing it because they don’t see the ways in which the residents of Mtwara will be benefit from it.” (“Viongozi wa Dini” 2013). Differences between Christians and Muslims emerged occasionally in casual conversations with urban residents from Chikongola neighborhood, but participants rarely spoke of the distinction in relation to political affiliation. A driver for the Nalindele Research Institute in his mid-40s pointed to the exclusivity of Muslim funerary practices but then affirmed his membership in the ruling party, CCM, to reinforce the unified image of the region: We all are supporters of the Party of the Revolution. Even me, because of two things: religion and tribe. In this region, they don’t matter. I’m a Muslim. I’m not allowed to go to the funeral of a Christian. (But) if you’re familiar with the father of the nation, Nyerere, you know that we look out for each other (Masoudi 2015) In my interviews and casual conversations, residents evoked the memory of Nyerere to affirm an inclusive vision of Tanzanian development. The region’s Islamic roots influenced Mtwara’s postcolonial political and economic trajectory, but religious differences did not emerge as points of conflicts within the context of natural gas development among urban residents. “Tumesahaulika” By the start of my fieldwork (February 2015), the pipeline and a small gas refinery in the village of Madimba had been completed; evidence of their operations manifested in increases on the price of goods, taxes, and the cost of land in urban Mtwara Town (Chilumba 2015; Phillippo 29 2015). Neighbors of mine would gather near the main market off near Sinani Street’s bus station to trade news. They attributed material improvements such as the increasing number of stone buildings to foreign investments attracted by the promise of natural gas profits. According to the testaments of urban residents, construction on the Mtwara branch of the Bank of Tanzania off Makonde Road and the imminent inauguration of the Dangote Cement Factory provided clear evidence of maendeleo25 (progress). Despite the increasing number of bank branches and stone businesses lining downtown Mtwara, maduka makubwa (big shops), residents of Mtwara region’s rural and urban districts often employed the phrase “tumesahaulika” (we’ve been forgotten) to indicate that they remain underdeveloped in certain respects. Chilumba, a northern-born university graduate employed at a CSO in urban Mtwara Town, pointed to evidence of development from gas on the busy street where he curated his organization’s museum of cultural artifacts: “Maendeleo? Kuna sana— ukiangalia majengo. Pale jengo hilo ni mpya. Ni tofauti kabisa na nyumba za zamani. Vyuo vimekuja. Gesi, gesi... Inafanya maendeleo kwa haraka. Lakini sehemu hili lilisahaulika kabisa serkali.”) (Development? There’s a lot—if you look at buildings. That building there is new. It’s completely different from houses of the past. Universities have come. Gas, gas... it will make development happen fast. But this area has been completely forgotten by the government) (May 19, 2015). In his commentary on Mtwara’s urban landscape, Chilumba sees evidence of maendeleo as not necessarily evidencing government investment in the region. Maendeleo, as it is often used in popular discourse, often relates to “the actions and institutions associated with foreign 25 Maendeleo is the conjugated form of the Swahili verb, ku-endelea, meaning to progress. This word can be used to refer to individual self-improvement, foreign intervention, and also general forward movement (Green 2014; Ahearne 2016). 30 interventions justified in the name of social and economic progress and to a range of local and nationally initiated endeavors directed at social transformation” (Green 2014, 10). Given the depth of development’s roots in Tanzanian political and social culture, it is no wonder that maendeleo carries multiple connotations26 and applications. Chilumba’s reference to a government that does not seem to have delivered on its obligations informs my own understanding of development. Residents repeatedly informed me of their sustained neglect by the state, focusing my attention early on in my fieldwork. In the rural village of Lengo, in Mtwara region, elders and young men prefaced their responses to my inquiries? on changes in the wake of gas extraction with the phrase, “Unajua, tumesahaulika” (You know, we’ve been forgotten). Although the phrase may register as lamentations, I eventually learned to interpret them as political claims to a specific relationship with the state and model of citizenship based in a dialectical relationship of underdevelopment formed in early independence. Building on Smith’s (2008) conceptualization of development based in rural Kenya, I recognize the concept as “an imaginative project that manifests in the construction of social boundaries in context defined by crisis and flux” (700). Smith’s depiction of development, however, suggests that rural Kenyans imagine possible futures that do not necessitate recognition or authorization from the state. In contrast, I argue, many Mtwara residents tie lasting development to their regionally informed expectations of recognition from an idealized state. 26 Green (2014) points out that maendeleo is also often objectified in conversations as an item that an individual may attain. 31 Methodological Orientation When I arrived in Mtwara Town in February 2015, I was prepared to analyze how government officers, NGO members, and residents understood their roles in the production of natural gas-based development. I soon discovered, however, that the onset of natural gas extraction had brought about new challenges for certain groups such as CSO workers. Following the Cold War and the 1980s Debt Crisis, international financial institutions (IFIs) had encouraged NGOs to act as key conveyors and translators of state directives on behalf of the Tanzanian citizenry.27 Even more, lending agencies expected NGOs to hold vilified African states accountable to global democratic norms of governance (e.g., transparency). In the context of Tanzania’s burgeoning natural gas sector, however, members of advocacy CSOs have met many obstacles. In particular, government efforts to restrict knowledge on natural gas policy complicated and stalled the work of advocacy CSO workers. In the wake of 2012’s economic recession and 2013’s protests, many CSOs attempted to secure funding. Their roles as prescribed intermediaries between state and citizens proved had also appeared to have undergone shifts. CSO members relied upon formal and informal measures of state authorization to take part in international and regional civil society conversations on popular policy points such as transparency within governance of the extractive industries. Actors’ efforts to secure funding amidst Mtwara’s challenging post-conflict setting formed a critical focal point of my observations amongst CSOs. After having received several dismissive responses to my attempts at securing meetings with government officers, I realized I needed to adapt my methodology to view state bureaucracy as it functioned. For instance, government officials’ acts of knowledge restriction produced the 27 These events will be more fully explored in Chapter 2. 32 effect of a knowledgeable state. Officials’ attempts to cancel meetings, control residents’ mobility, and censor language projected the illusion of key gas knowledge that had to be guarded. Gas policy and contract information often amount to notoriously secretive agreements, even among institutions tasked with governing the respective extractive sector. In the absence of content on natural gas policy, I understand officers’ acts of knowledge restriction (such as refusals to meet or release information on gas to residents) as evidence that there is knowledge to be withheld and guarded. Most importantly, I observed participants invoke two conspicuous development imaginaries (the social-development and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginaries) while negotiating their roles in natural gas development. Each imaginary connoted distinct visions of the future of natural gas in Tanzania. For instance, the phrase “tumesahaulika” invoked the social-development imaginary. Residents often referenced this imaginary to make moral claims on the state by holding it accountable for the region’s past contributions to key projects of nation-building. I focus on how members of the three categories invoke development imaginaries across three critical scenes of development exchange in Mtwara—the development work of three Mtwara-based CSOs (Chapter 3), the bureaucratic procedure and protocol of local government offices (Chapter 4), and residents’ observation of 2013’s protest violence (Chapter 5) Fieldwork I analyze specific, situated negotiations of development interests and Tanzanian state authority drawn from dissertation fieldwork conducted in Mtwara and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from February 2015 to March 2016. With the aid of Prof. Faustin Maganga at the University of Dar es Salaam and Mtwara-based contacts with ties to the non-profit organization African Development through Economics and the Arts (ADEA), I positioned myself on Sinani Street in 33 Chikongola neighborhood. This area is situated close to a main market and the urban district’s major bus station. Most importantly, I made this section of town into my base because it had been the setting of much of May 2013’s violence. While in Mtwara, I observed how Tanzanians interacted with state representatives and development offices across 38 interviews, 9 focus groups, and varying political and bureaucratic scenes. I explored how people in Mtwara viewed the role of the state in delivering particular visions of natural gas development. Of the 38 interviews conducted, I spoke with 13 government representatives, 10 CSO members, 12 community residents, and one affiliate of the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corporation, Tanzania’s parastatal oil company. Participant observation in civil society sector offices, neighborhood markets, and audiences for political presentations proved particularly effective as opportunities in which to identify situated examples of state production and performance. Prior to arriving in Mtwara, I had prepared a series of structured questions to ask development experts and actors within the field that centered on understanding how wana Mtwara across rural and urban contexts pursued their development interests within the context of the growing gas industry. In particular, I enquired as to how wana Mtwara perceived the relationship between development and the government within the context of natural gas extraction. During my 12 months of fieldwork, the template of my structured interview questions provided a useful baseline to gauge government office interviews. In addition to the kind of information gleaned from standardized questions, respondents often contributed insight into the minutiae of daily office work in the aftermath of the protest and promise of gas development. After broaching the subject of how gas development might alter daily office life, the District Administrative Secretary of Masasi’s shorter responses lengthened into discussion of his vision 34 for infrastructural and political development in the region. My structured interview with Masasi’s DC transformed into a boardroom meeting in which the entire district staff ran interference and eagerly contributed to the questions I had to ask. In addition to the DAS, I was able to interview the planning officer, the environment officer, the welfare officer, the agriculture officer, and the facilitator of the women’s group. In administrative district offices, my questions on gas policy often produced circular and curt responses. In general, officers leaned on protocol to maneuver around the subject of natural gas extraction. Throughout fieldwork, I continued to observe local government officers’ adoption of circuitous, technical language when questioned on the gas sector. I later came to recognize this trend as enactments of knowledge restriction to evince a kind of authoritative state and to invoke policy or information that may or may not exist. Although I had initially planned to rely on structured and unstructured interviews with a wide range of residents from villages situated near the gas reserves, contrasting how rural communities as well as urban communities from Mtwara urban district experienced shifting in social relations in the context of gas development, I soon learned that this would not be possible due to the violence and political controversy tied to the gas protests. Mtwara Urban officials informed me that accessing the more rural, inland reaches of Mtwara region would prove grueling, if not impossible, and require several rigorous measures of government approval and procedure. Throughout the organization of research visits to the districts of Masasi, Tandahimba, and Newala, I experienced cancelled meetings, absent government officials, and heightened bureaucratic hurdles. These interactions and delays came to heavily shape my understanding of Tanzanian bureaucracy and flesh out my understanding of the centrality of restriction in evincing a capable, authoritative state. 35 Southern Mtwara’s discontent with the North’s preferential treatment and attention from the central government, in combination with the popularity of political opposition party candidates in the South, also influenced local and central government entities’ decision that I should not visit or even travel through the more rural communities and villages of Mtwara during the lead-up to the general election. In the form of verbal warnings and bureaucratic acts of obfuscation, Urban District officers conveyed their concerns about the recurrence of the 2013 violent protests. Since the start of research in Mtwara Town, I had learned that government concerns and censorship would structure my work. Government actors framed the (explicit and implicit) restriction of my mobility as preventative measures for discouraging the potential outbreak of violence in the lead-up to 2015’s Presidential Election. They feared, in particular, that my interview questions might stoke tensions pertaining to the pipeline project. As a result, they restricted me from travelling to inland rural Mtwara, far from the government oversight of Mtwara’s regional urban center. The permission eventually granted to me by the district government resulted from the familiarity of my research associate Dennis, a former district employee, with specific government officers and their style of bureaucratic performance. Dennis, a part-time pastor, historian, student, and retired government engineer and plumber, also bypassed many government obstacles through his association with cultural activities in the region. We ultimately found the opportunity to visit two villages in Masasi district in November 2015 (Lengo and Nanyumbu) and the location of the single gas refinery located in Mtwara District (Madimba). Over time, these rare field work opportunities allowed me to witness keen displays of bureaucratic performance and gatekeeping across several key positions in community and local government hierarchy. The setting and structural model of the meeting as arranged with local 36 government arteries positioned me within a common model for development-centered exchange often used to navigate relations among participants (the assumed civic body) and government representatives (the Tanzanian state). As local government and/or community officers felt it necessary to sit in on these sessions, I was able to witness the policing of expectations as they occurred in real time. I doubt I would have been able to witness such phenomena if such limits and strictures to my mobility and social interaction had not been put in place. Once Dennis and I attained permission to travel to the interior of Mtwara province, we attempted to schedule as much time in the inland districts and interviews with their government officers as possible. By bus we travelled first to Masasi, home to several monuments to early southerners’ efforts to repel colonial German rule. As a condition of our visit, I had agreed to remain within the bounds of local government offices in my travels. As such, in each district we followed a very particular procedure of visits interspersed with long stretches of waiting within our guest houses. Our progress in Tandahimba and Newala hit many obstacles such as the sudden disappearance of government officials shortly following our entrance to town. From interviews with local government officers and focus groups in rural Mtwara region attended by local government representatives, I gained valuable insight into how state actors faced pressure to deliver soaring premonitions of future development to the area while rendering “technical” questions about political inequality bureaucratic and providing overwhelmingly self- referential, bureaucratic solutions to questions of social and economic inequity (Ferguson 1999). Focus groups, in particular, allowed me to witness rural village members and appointed government facilitators engage on questions of access to development profits and government transparency. 37 The sampling of Masasi rural village participants rested entirely upon the preference of government officials. The requested meetings could only logistically take place once Masasi’s central government officers had agreed to call ahead to their own contacts in these particular villages, inform them of my identity and research, and ask them to put out a request for people to attend these sessions. Well-versed in the work of arranging workshops and focus groups at the behest of the government, businesses, researchers, and non-profit organizations, the officers at Masasi set in motion a chain of favors and procedures that allowed me the opportunity to speak with elders, youth, and women (common participant groups in development research) during a clearly tense, politically wrought time. I had the opportunity to meet with five individuals from each group at a time. Overall, I was able to sit down with three groups in each village, amounting to nine groups in total. Having had my research time and content so consciously filtered through the channels and avenues of government bureaucracy allowed me unique insight into and experience of heightened performance of state production which I would not have otherwise gained exposure. Facilitated focus groups composed of Masasi’s rural district residents on the topic of government relations and expectations alongside actual high appointed local government representatives allowed me to witness heightened performances, negotiations, and refusals of authority. Every three months, I travelled to Dar es Salaam to follow up on participants and sources regarding the natural gas sector’s burgeoning, contentious legal infrastructure. My meetings with civil society members in Mtwara had connected me to key players and dramas unfolding within developing legislation on petroleum extraction. I traced the growth of policy through the lens of the national Tanzanian newspapers such as Mwananchi and Habari Leo and observed the more personal reactions and concerns of Dar- and Mtwara-based lawyers and legal activists. At the 38 time of natural gas extraction in Tanzania, domestic and foreign political and business bodies were acting in concert with the Tanzania Natural Gas Policy of 2013. This piece of legislation was obviously unable to facilitate extraction and monitor the extractive activities and interests of foreign large oil companies such as Statoil and Shell. The Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) that had been in place since the 2013 Natural Gas Policy stipulated that the national oil company, the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC), should act as trustee of the resources, meaning any party wanting to drill natural gas in Tanzania must first enter into agreement with TPDC prior to receiving a license. In 2015, when I arrived in Tanzania, many business figures viewed this piece of legislation as antiquated. In order to accommodate the expected large-scale activities of the growing natural gas industry, representatives from the ruling party CCM introduced three new bills—The Petroleum Act, the Tanzania Extractive Industry (Transparency and Accountability) Act and the Oil and Gas Revenue Management Act. The Petroleum Act divided regulation of upstream petroleum activities between the Petroleum Upstream Regulatory Authority (PURA) and TPDC. The Tanzania Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (TEITI), meanwhile, established a protocol and rubric for gauging transparency and accountability in the national extractive sector, and the third act on oil and gas revenue outlined management of an Oil and Gas Fund (Bofin and Pedersen 2015, 15-16). Although the focus of legal discussions regarding natural gas remained centered on Mtwara region, Dar es Salaam served as the seat of legal disputes. While in Dar, I tried my utmost to visit pioneers of the Tanzanian legal sector concerning natural resource policy, so as to hear their opinions on the latest in the gas news and legislation. Eventually, I secured a meeting with a lawyer representing TPDC, Raphael Mgaya, who did not approve of the way in which the 39 2015 bills were passed and clearly supported an oppositional party in the national election. His opinions on the growth of Tanzania’s natural gas industry, along with writings on the country’s being burdened with what potentially could surmount to Resource Curse allowed me unique insight into the structural growth of the natural gas industry, on the whole. Employees and officers of TPDC seemed to be most informed of the goings-on in the evolution of the natural gas sector. Overall, my experience of Tanzanian bureaucracy and heavy government supervision informed the evolution of my arguments. At first, I had viewed these conditions as obstacles that might hinder my understanding of “the state” in Tanzania. Government officials’ restrictions, however, allowed me key opportunities in which to view actors’ production of a particular kind of extractive state. This pattern of performance then drew my attention to Mtwara residents’ willingness to affirm, tolerate, or critique such productions. Such exchanges also encouraged me to view critiques and affirmations of Tanzania’s current development project as invocations of particular regionally relevant development imaginaries. Dissertation Layout Chapter 1 introduces 2013’s protests between community members in Mtwara, Tanzania and the central government over development plans for the region’s natural gas reserves. Apart from introducing conflict, I present important context on how ethnicity, gender, and rural identities have historically shaped experiences of development in Mtwara. I then lay out my approach to development as an imaginative project through which residents make sense of future opportunities and imagine reciprocal relationships with the state. Building off of development as an imaginative project, I situate two development imaginaries—the social-development imaginary and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary—within the context of key development 40 interventions in Tanzanian history. These imaginaries entail envisioned relationships between development, the Tanzanian state, and citizenship in Mtwara through which community members, government officers, and civil society actors assert and critique their roles in the project of national development. Viewing contestations and affirmations of these imaginaries highlight how the positions of government workers, CSO members, and community members have shifted in the wake of natural gas extraction in Mtwara. Chapter 2 traces, in detail, changes to the meanings of development, citizenship, and the state over time. Within this context, I identify the conditions that contributed to the emergence of Mtwara’s development imaginaries. In addition to the shifting definitions of development, citizenship, and the state, I also highlight the construction and evolution of three groups of social actors—government representatives, CSO members, and community members—across time. Through this historical overview, I establish key associations and regionally informed popular associations such as Mtwara residents’ interpretations of underdevelopment as a claim on resources and a particular relationship with the state. Chapter 3 introduces planning and knowledge restriction as particularly dynamic strategies adopted by local government officers in their articulation of development within the context of natural gas extraction. In particular, central and local government actors promoted visions for development that aligned with and promoted the entrepreneurial character of the state as conceived within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. I highlight acts of knowledge restriction as key opportunities for state actors to indicate and guard state expertise over natural gas governance. Meanwhile, the invocation of a neoliberal brand of pan-Africanism by elite state actors at the Dangote Cement Factory inauguration in Mtwara also supported the image of the state as dedicated domestic defender and business promoter. Drawing from focus group data in 41 the second half of the chapter, I then assess government representatives’ attempts to enlist rural villagers in the production of a state based in the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. These interactions did not always succeed and oftentimes accentuated the relevance of an alternative imaginary, the social-development imaginary. Chapter 4 highlights shifts in the roles of cultural and advocacy CSOs in post-conflict Mtwara. In particular, I focus on three organizations—ADEA, the Mtwara Region Non- Governmental Organizations Network (MRENGO), and the Forum for Conservation of Nature (FOCONA). Historically, the lines distinguishing between the roles of government representatives and CSO officers have proven ambiguous and blurred in practice. Since increased government restrictions on the distribution of knowledge following gas discoveries, however, CSO officers have faced various kinds of pressure to produce the neoliberal- extractivist state as a broker of international business dealings and facilitator of development opportunities. Within the professional industry of development of post-conflict Mtwara, the government’s roles in deciding legal dramas and facilitating funding requests affected advocacy and cultural CSOs differently. For instance, state representatives restricted the access of advocacy CSOs to knowledge on gas policy in order to conceal insecurities in the government’s handling of the extractive sector. State actors’ efforts to maintain the image of the state as invested with expert knowledge, as realized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary, have created challenging circumstances for advocacy CSOs. ADEA, the cultural organization, found opportunities to facilitate relationships with inland populations and present a specific neoliberal-extractivist vision of the state on behalf of Mtwara’s local government. At the same time, ADEA supported the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary by encouraging its members to find opportunities to profit from burgeoning markets 42 as cultural entrepreneurs. Since their establishment in 2003, ADEA has supported Mtwara-based artisans in their production of artwork uniquely associated with Mtwara’s majority ethnic group, the Makonde. After having provided business education, training, and design assistance to artisans for several years, ADEA’s activities expanded to include the Performing Arts Initiative MaKuYa that entailed two projects—the MaKuYa cultural festival (2008—2010) and documentation project (2010). MRENGO is a CSO coalition whose work deals with environmental sustainability and/or agricultural livelihoods. In the wake of 2013’s protests. They received funding from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) from February-August 2014 to facilitate baseline surveys of Mtwara region residents’ experiences of gas and oil development. They also conducted capacity-building workshops for coalition steering committees and government officials on the extractive industry’s influence on Mtwara’s environment. In the 1990s, many western lending agencies such as the World Bank prescribed NGOs to act as accountability-holders of vilified African governments through a good governance agenda centered on democratic norms of rule such as transparency. In the context of natural gas governance in Tanzania, however, CSOs such as MRENGO found their access to extractive industry information heavily curtailed and restricted by the local government. Halted timelines, censored language, and restricted access to institutional and legal knowledge, however, often stunted CSO members’ prospects and funding opportunities. When the government did permit MRENGO to convey information regarding natural gas activities, CSO officers often described the state as it functions within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary: capable of setting an optimal business climate for investments and unbeholden to ensuring that Mtwara residents experience widespread development. In order to remain relevant to NGO networks and state actors, CSO 43 officers often adopted a neoliberal-extractivist model of development and the state’s role within it. Even though they occasionally appealed to social-development interpretations of development as the responsibility of the state in exchanges with community members, MRENGO’s members largely projected evidence of a neoliberal-extractivist state. Since FOCONA’s establishment in 1993, the organization has functioned as a local-based intermediary in government-global NGO partnerships projects on environmental sustainability such as the environmental assessment for the Mnazi Bay Ruvuma Estuary Marine Park. FOCONA remained largely inactive during my fieldwork. Its leader focused on securing a contract with WWF to administer workshops on sustainability to communities near sites of gas extraction. Chapter 5 explores how community members reinforced regionally informed ties to the Tanzanian state through performances in development exchanges and staged acts of mourning in order to critique the state as realized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Residents’ refusal to take part in daily activities (e.g., work and shopping) associated with personal and professional means of development on the May 22 anniversary further established development as a critical platform for the performance and critique of politics in Tanzania. Community members at sites of extraction made political claims and contest exploitative conditions through fostering relations of dependency on the state and engaging national idioms of morality. Residents’ continuing invocation of the social-development imaginary suggests they are not willing to give up their roles as co-creators in the national project of Tanzanian development. The conclusion highlights that Mtwara’s natural gas project became a critical setting for residents’ assessment of the role the state should play in development. Urban and rural residents invoked regionally situated, nationally informed imaginaries to make sense of the opportunities that the central government had initially would extend from the country’s burgeoning gas sector. 44 The roles of state representatives, CSO workers, and community members have shifted in line with central and local government officers’ heightened adherence to projecting the future of development and the state as realized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Altogether, however, residents demonstrate that nationally fostered imaginaries are key to contestations over the meaning of the state, development, and national belonging in Mtwara region. 45 CHAPTER 2: THE CONFIGURATION OF MTWARA'S UNDERDEVELOPMENT DIALECTIC On the Road from Dar es Salaam to Mtwara As we pulled away from the Temeke Bus Stand in Dar es Salaam on an early morning in July of 2015, two men in business suits were discussing their plans upon arrival in our destination, the port city of Mtwara. The subject of bus breakdowns along the infamous unpaved patches of Dar es Salaam-Mtwara Road soon dominated discussion, each man proffering escalating anecdotes of roadside misfortune.28 Flat tires and leaky gas tanks frequently punctuated travel along the route linking the northern metropolis of Dar to Mtwara’s more geographically isolated southern setting. When our own tires hit the ruts imprinted in Dar es Salaam-Mtwara Road’s red-clay coastal soil with such impact that passengers bounced high off their seats, conversation flowed, uninterrupted. Treacherous travel conditions had proven routine. Figure 1: Map of Dar es Salaam and Mtwara along the Tanzania Coast 28 See Figure 1. 46 While bus breakdowns are far from uncommon throughout predominantly agricultural Tanzania, the subject of Dar es Salaam-Mtwara Road’s unfinished portion forms an especially critical talking point and moral reference point for southerners. Except for those rare residents with funds to travel exclusively by plane, travellers from varying economic and social backgrounds have had to suffer the rough roads connecting Mtwara to Dar. Indeed, the hazardousness of regional travel despite Independence-era government promises to provide “barabara za lami” (paved roads) often serves as a critical entree for Mtwara community members to engage the theme of state neglect and regional suffering. When I first arrived in Mtwara by plane in February 2015, my manner of travel contributed to my outsider status. When asked, I could not respond to community members' interest in my own experience of the treacherous Mtwara roads. My limbs ached at the conclusion of this eleven-hour bus journey to Mtwara, but I took heart in the fact that I would finally be able to contribute to conversations regarding the road. One of my earliest opportunities arose in February 2015, on a trip to Mtwara Municipal District’s markets and bus stand. M. Bright Msalya, a paralegal, CSO leader, and historian of Mtwara in his mid-forties, invited me to discuss recent development milestones in his office that occupied the Anglican church across from my guest house. In the midst of our first semi-structured overview on regional development history, Msalya interrupted his summary of notable government intervention to invite comment on the poor state of roads. My acknowledgement of the unpaved, rough route added weight and recognition to his discussion of the decrease in central government funding to the area following the collapse of the state’s early development schemes: M: They started the government scheme— they built the railroad line, the pipeline, the project in Chongwe, but in later years the railroad was uprooted, and the pipeline went under de(con)struct(ion). In terms of infrastructure, it was no secret that in those days it 47 was very difficult. How did you get to Mtwara? Did you take the bus? R: (nods) M: Then you’ve seen—so, part of it, naturally, when there was these discoveries, people expected more. (Msalya 2015) Residents’ expectations of state-facilitated, gas-based development for past regional sacrifices culminated in feelings of betrayal following the government’s decision to pipe natural gas to Dar es Salaam. Msalya’s question about travel, situated within the explanation of regional expectations, invited me to also acknowledge the debt the national government owed the southeastern harbor town. While emphasizing the injustice of the long stretches of unpaved road did bemoan persistent underdevelopment born out of regional neglect, but it also articulated a moral dialectic with the state that hinged on the acknowledgement of historic sacrifices made and sustained for the sake of nation-building. The central government’s repositioning of Mtwara in the political topography of Tanzania in the early dawn of 2010’s gas speculation suggested that these requests would soon be acknowledged if not met. Once I came to view exchanges on road travel as moral reflections on regional ties to the state, I acknowledged the injustice of the tedious, bumpy drive from Dar to Mtwara whenever the opportunity presented! The back and forth of this historically informed dialectic of sacrifice and recognition (or lack thereof) between Mtwara and the state presented itself in many of my daily activities and research in 2015. Introduction Critical shifts in the relationship between development and the Tanzanian state over time inform present-day contestations over claims on national development. A guiding question anchors analysis of development history in Tanzania: how has the relationship between 48 development, the state, and citizenship changed throughout Mtwara’s successive development paradigms? To highlight the birth of two distinct imaginaries in postcolonial development, I sketch the roles of government officials, civil society workers, and rural citizens in the two paradigms of postcolonial development laid out in Chapter 1: the social-development imaginary and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. The formation of these two imaginaries sheds light onto different actors’ contrasting visions of national development in contemporary Tanzania. Within discussion of the social-development imaginary, my research highlights the formation of an underdevelopment dialectic based upon government recognition of the southeast as a successful model of socialist development due to its status of underdevelopment. In the transition to independence, Nyerere constructed the “village” as the organizing social unit of his development philosophy of Ujamaa (Green 2014). Based off the village as social unit of government, Nyerere urged Tanzanians to resettle themselves into collectivized villages and work towards a communitarian vision of self-reliance29. Historically underdeveloped, sparsely populated Mtwara came to serve as a model region for the implementation of this particular plan. In the early 1970s, ruling-part y members recognized Mtwara as a model for achieving moderate improvements in agricultural productivity without demanding added central government funding. State officials described Mtwara as exemplifying Ujamaa morals and called upon other regions to view them as an example. In early independence, the government recognized Mtwara residents as loyal contributors to nation-building. The relevance and use of this dialectic shifted over time, however, in relation to transformations in state-prescribed development discourse. In stark contrast to their roles as loyal contributors, former Minister of Home Affairs Emmanuel Mchimbi referred to Mtwara residents as “betrayers of the nation” in the aftermath of 29 The content of self-reliance within village life will be explored later in the chapter. 49 the 2013 protest (''Gov't: We’ll Pursue the Inciters” 2013). Such accusations from central government actors evidence the emergence of a neoliberal-extractivist imaginary that took root in the wake of neoliberal reforms from the 80s and 90s. Residents have shifted their own understandings of development from an inclusive project overseen by a state responsible for citizens’ welfare to an exclusive project reliant upon state-directed extractive business dealings. In the latter model, each individual is responsible for creating their own economic opportunities. I explore this shift in development meanings, relationships, and roles in the following section. German East Africa (1885-1918) The roots of development thinking can be traced to ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, but development as a legitimating discourse originated from technocrats’ efforts to manage social ills in the aftermath of nineteenth-century industrialization (Ferguson 1994; Rist 2019). The political and scientific elite of Europe rendered social life according to specific schemes of rationalization (e.g., statistics and demographics) that represented social phenomena as quantifiable problems that could only be resolved through the same scheme of logic (Escobar 1995). To varying degrees, colonizing countries such as France, Britain, and Germany adopted this form of justification in their colonializing projects. Although German colonialism did not introduce bureaucratic systems of representation to the degree of the British colonial state, their implementation of community organization establishes a critical foundation upon which Tanzanians later create their own objectives for community-based action. Furthermore, an overview of German colonialism offers insight into the regional impoverishment of southeast Tanzania. On the whole, the administration of the German East Africa Colony proved tenuous, uninformed, and intent on fueling German development. German businessman and explorer Carl 50 Peters first visited East Africa’s Mrima Coast (the portion of East African coast facing the archipelago of Zanzibar) in 1884 to scout territory for the Society for German Colonization. Recognizing the potential for raw material exploitation in the region’s tropical geography, Peters formed the German East Africa Company in an effort to form an administrative basis for rule over the territory. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, however, ordered early explorers to prioritize extracting natural resources for the metropole (Germany) over other competing interests. When German East Africa Company administrators implemented taxes and land policy, they did so to optimize raw material extraction for the benefit of the German empire rather than to contribute to indigenous societies (Green 2014). To lend legitimacy to their largely uninformed administration of East African territory, early German administrators such as Peters based contracts and treatises with indigenous East Africans upon German interpretations of territorial authority (Pesek 2007). Ambiguous contracts with local coastal leaders served as “juridical legitimization of the founding of a colony” (Pesek 2007, 239). In one case, Peters arranged the exchange of German protection for East African land ownership around an elaborate ceremony with a local leader referred to as the “Sultan of Nguru” (2007, 241). Historians later assumed that Peters constructed the ceremony and title of Sultan to lend an idealized African authenticity to the exchange (Pesek 2007). In light of early administrative blunders by the German East Africa Company and increasing military competition from Britain and France, Otto von Bismarck declared the East African land a protectorate of Germany. In the midst of this transition, the East Africa Company entered into hostile negotiations with the Omani Sultanate over a narrow strip of coastal East Africa across from Zanzibar. The Anglo-German Agreement of 1886 alleviated political competition, but several coastal Muslim populations loyal to the Islamic Sultanate launched 51 revolts against the German East Africa Company’s ineffective, harsh style of rule shortly thereafter. In 1891, the German state intervened to assume full authority of the territory from the German East Africa Company. This transition transformed the protectorate into a colony of German East Africa. Historically, German colonizers in East Africa gained reputations as brutal, punitive rulers. A 1982 pamphlet organized by CCM celebrating Mtwara’s agricultural prowess and contributions to the Tanzanian nation by CCM member P.E. Ladda reflects popular views of German colonizers in the southeast, in particular: In 1895 they entered Mikindani and created the German Boma (fort). It was used as police station, court, and prison. In 1907, they built forts in Newala and Masasi. They were awful, cruel rulers. They made people pay taxes for services they would never receive. The people of Newala were all forced to carry cement blocks on foot to Lindi. In the bomas there was awful torture. (12) This characterization stems, in part, from German colonizers’ scientific and systemic approach to the implementation of development schemes in German East Africa. As Green (2014) summarizes, “The ultimate objective of the German colonial state was to develop the colonial economy through systematic modifications in the operation of production and the social organization of labor” (20). The state introduced property rights inspired by the General Prussian Land Code and set production quotas on cash crops to cultivate an agricultural-export economy in the region (Becker 2019, 302-303; Mihalyi 1970). The German state viewed Tanganyika as a social and financial development project meant to bolster their own nationalistic interests, prioritizing the introduction of basic bureaucracy such as the ‘commune system’ to collect revenue and manage the development planning and programming of the territory (Green 2015, 22). They also introduced unpopular practices such as compulsory labor and incentivized participation in community development projects. 52 Although German officers intended their tactics to discourage populations from emulating acts of rebellion, colonial state-directed violence often encouraged resistance from local populations and exacerbated domestic disputes between indigenous groups (Becker 2019). By the start of the twentieth century, the German colonial state had violently suppressed resistance from the Hehe people and inspired new waves of protest across the southern Rufiji Valley. Prophet Kinjikitile Ngwale’s mobilized southeasterners to act on their hostility towards the Germans, in part, by preparing a spiritual medicine that transformed German bullets into water (“maji”). The scattered revolts that broke out across the southeast are now commonly referred to as the 1905 Maji Rebellion. after having claimed (Greenstein 2010). In response to these uprisings, the German colonial state harshly punished the ethnic groups involved and murdered many of the movement’s leading figures, including Ngwale. In their attempts to weaken and murder the southeastern men of influence who had led attacks against them, Germans eradicated and upset numerous patronage networks upon which southerners depended for trade, resources, and their livelihoods (Becker 2019). These tensions created harsh conditions for the East Africa Colony’s southeast. Although the Germans had introduced development schemes to African populations along the southeastern coast, their style of rule prioritized fueling German industrialization and military capability rather than encouraging localized development in indigenous groups. Many colonizers affirmed the tenets of social evolutionism, a nineteenth-century social theory that situates all societies on a unilinear scale of social progress ending in the stage of civilization.30 As such, they may have viewed colonialism as a civilizing mission, but they did not interpret this 30 Industrialized European nations, of course, determined and occupied the high watermark of western progress. colonizers did not attempt to enable indigenous Africans in their own forms of development. 53 mission as a moral duty. While Germans did introduce community participation-based policy, the form of social organization would not gain real value among southeasterners until the British introduction of bureaucratic administration (Green 2014). The British Colonial State (1919-1961) At the start of the nineteenth century, the western discourse of moral internationalism justified western colonial states’ interventions as offerings of moral guidance to uncivilized populations throughout the Global South (Green 2014). In the reorganization of political territory following World War I, the League of Nations formed southeastern German East Africa into a British mandate. This approach allowed colonizing authorities to compete internationally for economic territory, frame race-based policies as civilizing measures, and maintain national integrity in a way that was legitimated by the international authority of League of Nations (Rist 2019). The international agency lent credibility to the supposed universal nature of morals upon which colonizers claims to act. During British colonial rule, colonial authorities launched a series of projects to mobilize the territory’s agricultural base and modernize the region that entailed enhancing the Southern Province’s31 profitability (Green 2014). The state introduced a new approach to policy formulation and implementation under the umbrella of “indirect rule.” Within this scheme, the colonial authority devolved certain powers to its governed population. This system encouraged the colonized population to govern in the interests of the colonial state through the creation of native administrations and the promotion of self-reliance through community development programs. Such programs tended to center on topics such as education, information campaigns, 31 This territory comprises modern-day Mtwara and Lindi Regions. 54 community cinema, and self-help projects (Green 2015, 28). In contrast to the Germans, however, British colonial administrators framed their efforts as a means of helping the southeastern populations to “help themselves.” Following neglectful and punitive German policies, the Southern Province had earned a reputation as the economic and social backwaters of British Tanganyika by the first half of British colonialism. This same underdevelopment, however, led colonial development planners to view the southeast as an ideal setting for social and infrastructural experiments. Mtwara emerged as a municipal entity through the British colonial government’s efforts to introduce the wide-scale cultivation and production of groundnuts through a development intervention widely recognized as the 1948 Groundnut Scheme (Hogendorn and Scott 1981; Wembah-Rashid 1998). Colonialists’ poor grasp of the region’s geographical and social realities aggravated the expansive scheme’s implementation, however. British authorities had initially assumed that importing complex agricultural machinery such as tractors to Mtwara would help foster the necessary industrial atmosphere required for a growing agricultural economy. The region, however, lacked the social, industrial, and economic capacity to sustain such an operation (Coulson 1982; Rizzo 2006). For instance, the colonial ground operations failed to collect adequate intelligence on expected regional rainfall and soil composition. Furthermore, administrators could not maintain the advanced farming equipment in the south’s tropical climate. Most significantly, the interests of smallholder farmers seemed to conflict with the larger agricultural workforces the British colonial state had initially intended for the fledgling groundnut market. Historians suggest that the southeast Africans who did take part in wage labor preferred to do so to supplement or expand their subsistence farming activity (Rizzo 2007, 229). 55 At the start of the Groundnut Scheme, many southerners had already been engaging in seasonal wage labor on the territory’s numerous sisal plantations. After having continuously failed to meet groundnut production quotas, the British formally closed the project in 1951. Upon its conclusion, the development scheme had harvested fewer groundnuts than the seeds the British had initially imported (Rizzo 2007, 208). Although the project produced positive effects (e.g., the initial expansion of the employment opportunities in the southern province) as well as negative results (the purported discouragement of grand- scale agricultural investment in the area), the scheme’s end culminated in the cementation of Mtwara’s reputation as the backwaters of Tanganyika (Seppälä 1998). In the project’s aftermath, colonial officers decided to salvage their investment in the collapsed development project by encouraging sisal production and transforming the port into an administrative center for government. With the passage of the Local Government Ordinance of 1953, such development changes included shifts to “territorial rather than tribal administration, the introduction of district development plans and the provision of grants for small-scale local projects as well as larger technically designed development schemes” (Green 2015, 24). The infamous Groundnut Scheme featured as one such territorially administered development scheme. Colonial administrators leaned on the creation of distinct social units for the implementation of this new scheme of rule. Each unit (district) fell under the purview of a district committee charged with administering centralized development policy at the local level. The 1953 ordinance also created councils to administer development over municipal and town units. This model for political exchange reinforced development’s interstitial role as mediator between the colonial state and underlying politics units. 56 New bureaucratic forms of administration accompanied and organized this devolution of governing. Material forms such as district plans and accounts served as representational forms of local relations and conditions among southeasterners. Through their participation in the creation of documents and plans at the district level, rural Tanzanians could contribute to the direction of politics at overarching levels of the centralized state. The representational nature of these bureaucratic systems, in effect, also legitimated development as a mediated vision between underlying villages and the colonial state. The British colonial state’s early agenda, argues Green (2014), served as the germs of organizational thought and practice that Tanganyikan residents later transformed into community formation, mobilization, and practice. British colonialism implemented community participation schemes and introduced mediated bureaucratic forms such as district planning that gained meaning through their relevance to southeastern populations. In this period, officers and residents experienced found access to different levels of government through their involvement in development planning. Overall, villagers’ bureaucratic, ideological, and material experiences of development informed their understandings and expectations of the postcolonial state. Underdevelopment and the Third World (1940s–1960s) Many historians of development credit President Truman’s post-World War II address on April 12, 1945, with having introduced the qualifier “underdeveloped” as a stand-in for the non- industrialized world. This distinction legitimated new methods of managing and intervening in foreign nations’ governments by providing a target or problem to be managed by the capitalist, industrialized west (Rist 2019, 72). Furthermore, the emergence of a distinction between development and underdevelopment attributed development a transitive property that positioned industrialized nations as agents with the authority to “develop” the underdeveloped reaches of 57 the world. At this time, the United States of America (US) and the United Nations (UN) invested the fields of economics and statistics, in particular, with an even higher degree of significance in representing and resolving the “problems” of underdeveloped nations. This reorientation added weight to economists’ suggestions that unindustrialized nations should adapt their economies to the policy advice of industrialized nations and international lending agencies such as the World Bank (Rist 2019, 74). The emergence of underdevelopment, however, also laid critical groundwork for the mobilization of “underdeveloped” countries under the collective banner of the “Third World.” This construction would prove vital in fostering intellectual exchanges that inspired Nyerere’s development vision for inclusive growth in postcolonial Tanzania and Africa. During the 1950s, many nations that did not fit into the dominant categories (capitalist bloc v. community bloc) of Cold War hostilities drew attention to their concerns and interests under the umbrella of the “Third World.” Within the assemblage of Third World theorists, activists, and politicians, members produced generative, groundbreaking models of progress that did not conform with contemporary capitalist relations of production. In general, Third World nation-states petitioned for increased development benefits and a more just model of their integration into the world economy (Rist 2019, 82). Although Third World members often held ideological differences, they largely viewed development as a unilinear trajectory. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, representatives of the Third World frequently challenged international development normative discourse. Latin American Dependency theory, in particular, proposed that core (developed or industrialized) nations drew resources from peripheral (underdeveloped) countries in order to prosper. This relationship prohibited the modernization of peripheral nations as long as they remained dependent on core nations. This perspective positioned western-born structures and systems as responsible for incapacitating peripheral nations. 58 Although revolutionary strands existed, dependency theory often manifested in policy efforts such as import substitution industrialization (ISI). In countries like Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, governments attempted to foster domestic markets by stoking national industrialization. In encouraging nations to cultivate their industrial sectors, theorists intended to avoid export-led growth in which developing country citizens relied upon profits from agricultural goods to purchase industrial goods. Instead, governments implementing ISI often introduced tariffs to lower dependence on imports. These strategies allowed the Dependency School to industrialize in a manner that engaged with capitalist modes of production but did not heavily rely upon western industrialized powers. The strategy ultimately proved challenging, however, as Third World national markets did not have the capacity or size to sustain larger industrial sectors such as automobile manufacturing (Rist 2019). In light of the contentious political atmosphere fostered by Cold War hostilities, international governance agencies such as the UN increasingly funneled their resources into development spending. In order to better assert their claims to development, a group of mainly Asian state representatives met in Indonesia at the 1955 Bandung Conference to convey the terms of this vision to lending agencies and industrialized powers. While Rist (2019) characterizes the Conference’s demands as ambiguous, he notes that members clearly demanded global decolonization. The World Bank interpreted and resolved the Third World items of concern in line with their recent policy redirection. As such, the agency directed the entirety of their aid to developing nations. In managing the terms set by increasingly vocal Third World countries, regional banks also emerged throughout Asia and Africa. In 1960, The UN issued the Declaration on Decolonization. This move appeared as a UN effort to honor Third World demands, but it 59 reflected industrialized powers’ interests in shaping developing countries’ economies through more affordable, direct trade interventions. Therefore, international lending agencies embedded trade liberalization policies in their development prescriptions to postcolonial nations throughout decolonization. Because Third World countries became highly sought-after allies in the Cold War, participating countries such as the US and the USSR often increased their offers of loans and aid to the peripheral countries. The World Bank also established the International Financial Corporation to provide undeveloped countries with better loan rates (Rist 2019). Julius Nyerere took over leadership of the postcolonial nation of Tanganyika against the backdrop of increased aid offers, exploitative lending policies and Third World intellectual exchange. His style of rule would borrow from dependency theory, but Nyerere tailored his country’s modernizing trajectory to contend with two factors: the economic model of export-led growth inherited from colonialism and Tanganyika’s predominantly rural, dispersed populations. Rather than viewing world and national economies according to the core-periphery model preferred by dependency theorists, Nyerere attempted to resituate Tanganyika’s rural populations into multiple self-sufficient cores, village units, without peripheries. Even more, Nyerere actively distanced his socialist approach to government from that of European strains due to their having originated as an extension or symptom of capitalism: The European socialist cannot think of his socialism without its father— capitalism! Brought up in tribal socialism, I must say I find this contradiction quite intolerable. It gives capitalism a philosophical status which capitalism neither claims nor deserves... It (African socialism) did not start from the existence of conflicting 'classes' in society. (1962, in 1967, 1) His philosophical platform for achieving modernization based the pursuit of national and African growth on the principle of self-reliance. The wide scope of Nyerere’s political intentions informed a vision for national development that integrated rural villagers as critical contributors 60 to national and international progress. This perspective would also comprise a key element of the social-development imaginary. Nyerere, Pan-Africanism, and Ujamaa (1950s–1970s) Tracing Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s political trajectory provides necessary context in which to understand his mobilization of rural residents for the projects of pan-Africanism and Tanzanian nation-building. Born in Butiama in northern Tanganyika, Nyerere had prepared for the life of a schoolteacher from a young age. Once he returned from study abroad in Kampala and Edinburgh during university, however, he decided to turn his attention to anti-colonial activism and the cause of Tanganyikan independence. In 1954, Nyerere formed TANU to protest against colonialism and push for independence. As leader of TANU, Nyerere oversaw the publication of a newspaper, “Sauti ya TANU” (Voice of TANU), and travelled throughout the colony, engaging East Africans in critical conversations on the subject of liberation and independence. Importantly, Nyerere saw nationalism as a component of the overarching project of pan- Africanism.3233 He co-founded a conference in 1958 on the Pan-African Movement of East and Central Africa in Mwanza, Tanganyika to harness support for national independence efforts within the regions. During conference proceedings, members concocted the political strategy to boycott South African products in protest of their apartheid system (Bjerk 2011, 221). When British Empire permitted TANU’s political leaders to establish an independent government under their trust in 1961, Nyerere aided Tanganyika through its transition to statehood as Prime 32 In referencing Pan-Africanism, I adopt Shivji’s (2008) concise definition of the term as a political project against imperialism in Africa. 33 As Nyerere said, “African nationalism is meaningless, is anachronistic, and is dangerous, if it is not at the same time Pan-Africanism” (Nyerere 1967, p. 194). 61 Minister. As Prime Minister, Nyerere continued to pursue pan-African objectives by soliciting Mozambican intellectual Eduardo Mondlane’s cooperation in forming the political party, Frente de Liberagao de Mozambique (FRELIMO) to combat Portuguese oppression (Bjerk 2011, 224). After Tanganyika attained status as a republic in 1962, Nyerere oversaw the Organization for African Unity (OAU) in Dar es Salaam in 1963. In 1963, Tanzania became a founding member of the OAU, and Dar es Salaam34 served as host to the headquarters of the African Liberation Committee (ALC). Under the organizational umbrella of the OAU, the ALC focused even more on facilitating liberation movements across the continent. Nyerere, in fact, tied the liberation of all colonized African countries to the welfare of postcolonial Tanzania. As such, his efforts to aid FRELIMO in the War for Mozambican Independence along the country’s southern border furthered tenets of anti-colonialism and African independence upon Nyerere viewed as intimately tied to the project of nationalism. In order to contribute to Pan-Africanist causes and a self-reliant Tanganyika, Nyerere attempted to weaken Tanganyika’s dependence on foreign aid as much as possible. When dealing with IFIs such as the IMF, Nyerere looked for opportunities to practice strategic borrowing by cultivating a wide range of bilateral donor relationships. Leaning on bilateral funding relationships whenever possible allowed him to evade some of the conditionalities typically attached to multilateral aid packages. Overall, Nyerere’s borrowing strategies reflected his unwillingness to act as a “pawn on the imperialist chessboard” (Shivji 2008, 4). As a key member of the Non-Aligned Movement, he particularly refused to allow Cold War rival blocs to manipulate Tanzania in competitive diplomatic and financial lending situations. He 34 Upon a national referendum in 1974, the central government relocated Tanzania’s political capital to Dodoma. This move allowed the government to centralize political authority and capital in the geographic middle of the country. Shifting to Dodoma positioned the seat of government in a more rural environment, thus invoking the county’s political and ideological platform of Ujamaa. 62 conceptualized this stance of non-alignment as “a thorough-going opposition to colonialism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism in all their manifestations” (Nyerere 1983, 1). Under President Nyerere, Tanganyika and Zanzibar joined to form the unified Republic of Tanzania in 1964. After several years of working to secure TANU’s tenuous hold on postcolonial state authority, Nyerere fleshed out his conceptualization of Ujamaa (familyhood) in the 1967 Arusha Declaration. The socialist platform conceived of modernization through rural development and the nationalization of industries. In addition to nationalizing private industries like agriculture and banking, the government created state-owned companies called parastatals such as the Tanzania Electric Supply Company (TANESCO) (Coulson 1982).35 Although intellectual exchanges with global partners had certainly informed Ujamaa, Nyerere consciously crafted a uniquely African way of living that situated authentic rural African traditions (e.g., communitarianism) as key components of modernity (Ivaska 2011; Lal 2012). In order to reorient Tanzanians’ attitudes towards each other in the model of cooperative familyhood, TANU implemented a range of initiatives. Such techniques included encouraging TANU-based familial idioms and appellations in popular discourse and the formal implementation of Ujamaa’s villagization program. The latter program entailed a scheme of village resettlement in which TANU volunteers and party members organized rural residents into commune-like living situations premised on collective labor and food self-sufficiency. These villages served as the lowest representational rung of Tanzanian government and state bureaucracy. Within these communitarian settlements, each house unit often included personal land allotments (oftentimes an acre), but emphasis was placed on communal rather than 35 TANESCO has since become a limited liability company, but the government continues to hold all of its shares. 63 individual farming (Huizer 1971). Several different iterations of villagization strategies existed, however. In the late ’60s, villagization efforts centered on TANU agents’ enlistment of villager participation based on the merits and tenets of Ujamaa. TANU officials thought proselytizing, alone, might encourage farmers to start their own communal settlements (Jennings 2008, 53). When this method of introduction failed to resituate large enough numbers of Tanzanians into Ujamaa villages, party officials incentivized villagization by enhancing health services and increasing general development funding in communal projects. In contrast to the British colonial state planning that resituated villages within closer proximity to market centers and towns, Nyerere intended to reconfigure residents’ social and political relations around the self-sufficient unit of the communitarian village (Green 2014). For instance, government planners encouraged villagers to challenge their attachment to private property by arranging village homesteads around a collectively owned central plot of farmland. Residents would be expected to cultivate this plot in addition to their own individually allotted land. In 1965, TANU politicians such as Nyerere succeeded in pushing for the central government to adopt the single-party system, suggesting the change would re-animate processes of nation-building by refocusing state resources toward the project of nation-building rather than political campaigning. According to advocates, single-party status would free up TANU officers to ramp up their engagement of communities at the local level through such initiatives as village visits. Once adopted, this transition aided in reframing development packages and policy as devoid of political intentions or motivation. Single-party status, meanwhile, precluded opposition parties from questioning the underlying assumptions of policy or putting forward their own. The depoliticization of development, in turn, contributed to the naturalization of the state’s purview 64 over the conceptual and practical field: the government now “administered” rather than “formulated” development” (Eriksen 1997; Green 2014). In 1972, the government of Tanzania’s Government Administration Act extended the scale and scope of development administration through the dissemination of centralized district plans, district-level development agendas created at the upper levels of government and delegated to state representatives posted throughout the country. By casting the village as the basis of district, national, and even international development, Nyerere and colleagues emphasized the significance of community participation and self-reliance in fueling progress (Lal 2012). Within this schema, community members could act as the authors of their own success if they cooperated with one another and put in the effort of hard work (Green 2014, 30).36 Despite a noted decrease in national agricultural productivity and pressure from colleagues to adopt capitalist-friendly policy and western loan packages, Nyerere remained committed to implementing Ujamaa policy in the early ‘70s. He organized a more intensive villagization plan involving the resettlement of Tanzanians into villages centered on communal agricultural practices. This process of villagization steadily accelerated until 1975, at which point the Nyerere administration issued the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act of July 1975. The act prioritized the forced movement of Tanzanians into authorized, registered villages under the purviews of regional and district councils born out of the 1972 Decentralization of Government Act (Verhagen 1980). The streamlining of Ujamaa cooperatives to more closely reflect officially sanctioned villages led to the dissolution of 1300 primary marketing cooperatives and further 36 Self-reliance also served to shift responsibility for services away from the state and into the hands of villagers, themselves. 65 entrenchment of development activity under the auspices of the Tanzanian state (Verhagen 1980, 287). In summation, Nyerere’s introduction of nationalist and Pan-Africanist programs and political campaigns in the mid-twentieth century introduced self-reliance as a bold alternative to international development practice and theory. Through Ujamaa philosophy and projects, Nyerere consciously reorganized government around the social unit of the village. While not always successfully implemented, Ujamaa as a political ideology heightened the intimacy between the Tanzanian state and its citizenry through a series of rhetorical and policy-driven interventions. Most importantly, however, villagization set the stage for rural residents’ moral, ideological, and material engagements with the state and participation in the project of national development. The Social-Development Imaginary (1970s–mid-1980s): Development, Citizenship, and the State Villagization greatly shaped how Mtwara residents understood their roles as citizens in the Tanzanian nation. The intertwined meanings of development and citizenship formed critical context for villagers’ conceptualization of the Tanzanian government as a social-development state. Although village resettlement under Ujamaa has been documented as both disorienting and chaotic (Lal 2012), it was also key to southeasterners’ understandings of national and pan- African development. Popular experiences of villagization suggest that residents often felt that the state did not provide adequate funds and social services, but residents could and did expect the state to provide such services and development funding. Such expectations distinguish the state during villagization from later iterations. I argue that several characteristics of Ujamaa and its practice of villagization contributed to the formation of a social-development imaginary that 66 is still invoked by Mtwara residents in present-day political relations. In particular, I explore how three conditions that informed the project of national development during early independence: Nyerere’s framing of the village as the basic unit of government representation in political hierarchies; the TANU government’s rendering of Mtwara as a stand-in for successful development; and the inclusive morality of Nyerere’s national and pan-African visions for development. Nyerere’s decision to transform rural villages into the basic unit of Ujamaa government provided a conceptual framing of politics in which remote rural communities in the southeast could stand in as autonomous, representational units of the nation. The president’s decision to frame villages as autonomous cells rested on practical as well as philosophical reasoning. In order to successfully harness the agricultural potential of the country’s smallholder farmer majority, Nyerere understood that he would need to empower southern rural residents as cooperative, profitable, self-reliant community units. He could not simply integrate villages and scattered farmsteads into town centers and expect citizens to conform to urban models of industrialization. Instead, the president took the villages of rural southeast Tanzania as exemplary models for the idealized communitarian societies from which he modelled Ujamaa (Lal 2012). Indeed, President Nyerere’s writing and speeches presumed the existence of a self- sufficient ecosystem of community development in which citizens cooperated within villages to extract what they needed from the natural and animal resources around them. Furthermore, by positioning village governments at the base of government hierarchies, Nyerere tied villagers to the project of national development. Villagization efforts reached the Mtwara region of southern Tanzania by the late 1960s, ranging widely from incentivized invitations for people to form collectivized communities to the 67 forceful evacuation of people from their homes, appropriation of their lands, and seizure of their belongings (Lal 2012). Mtwara’s peripheral geographic location and sparsely populated land contributed to the area’s central positioning within a top-down development scheme. Compared to the national average of Ujamaa villages per region, Mtwara and Lindi figures dwarfed those of the rest of Tanzania: By 1969 the Mtwara region alone was responsible for 333 of the 476 (70%) villages throughout the 18 regions of mainland Tanzania; By 1972 the number of villages in Mtwara had reportedly risen to over 1,000 (Schneider 2004, 213). I argue that the southeast’s state of underdevelopment attracted central government attention. As an ideal and focused target of early-independence development interventions, Mtwara would come to serve as a neutral indicator for the success of Ujamaa interventions in state propaganda. When agricultural production, particularly cashew profits, rose alongside the increase of Ujamaa villages, Ujamaa afforded Mtwara region significant recognition. Mtwara featured in a report by The Nationalist in 1968 “as a fast-developing region”: “agricultural production is increasing by leaps and bounds, and (Mtwara’s) contribution to the nation’s economic development is increasing. The region has been opened up and is confident of its future” (Lal 2012). Scholarship demonstrates that wana Mtwara often employed these indicators of economic growth to criticize and request larger measures of government investment and support (Green 2014; Lal 2012; Phillips 2018). The factors given to account for ‘this rapid advance’ were ‘the people’s hard work at production’ and ‘their cooperative spirit’ Throughout the 1960s, cashew production in Mtwara continued to increase steadily every year, and in 1970 the government opened a short-lived cashew plant in the region. The press described this event as a hallmark of self-reliant development, ‘marking a “leap forward” in the peasants’ sustained efforts for better increased production. (228) 68 The increase in cashew nut agricultural output throughout the ’late 60s and into the 70s had succeeded in attracting government funding for a cashew processing plant. Further evidence of state propaganda on Mtwara residents’ agricultural gains during Ujamaa also stands out in the 1982 political pamphlet Siasa ni Kilimo (Politics is Agriculture) by CCM member P.E. Ladda: Citizens of Mtwara region have really put forth an effort. Their efforts to volunteer with their hands and their pockets have made it possible to save 682,235/05 shillings more than in 1966. They were the fourth out of all the Tanzanian regions that saved more money in 1967. In total, all the money that was accumulated in Mtwara in 1967 reaches 1,737,028/70 shillings. In this work they have largely succeeded, although they faced the large problem of water shortage. They dug many wells, but due to the hot sun, many of them dried, especially in the area of Nachingwea. In spite of this, they did not lose hope; instead of continuing to dig wells, they dug swamps. (2) This celebration of Mtwara’s regional contributions positions Mtwara as particularly impressive due to its ability to progress in the face of challenges. They did not rely upon government aid in order to contend with the issue of water shortage. Rather, they “dug swamps instead of wells” (2). Scholars refer to this sense of underdevelopment as a premise and means of contributing to the nation as a citizenship claim: Thus national citizenship appeared to be enacted and claimed precisely through rural communities’ lack of material engagement with, or independence from, the Tanzanian state, rather than comprising a position affording substantive rights to resources from the state. (Lal 2012, 217) As the example of the government-funded processing plants demonstrates, however, recognition for self-reliant behavior could provide government-funded infrastructural and industrial improvements. Mtwara’s particularly low rates of industrialization also qualified the territory as an effective baseline region for development agencies to introduce and refine popular styles of practice such as the participatory method. External governments such as Finland have a long 69 history of collaboration with Mtwara political and planning officers, dating back to 1968 (Lal 2015, 170). In 1974, two Finnish teams aided Mtwara and Lindi regions by creating a Five-Year Development Plan for 1975/1976–1979/1980 as part of the Regional Integrated Development Programs.37 By the mid-eighties, the Finnish had implemented a participatory integrated rural development model in their work with wana Mtwara that valued the local perspective in devising development plans and strategies and encouraged the participation of community members in its execution (Voipio 1998). Focus on confronting development conflicts at the district level highlighted an increasing global fixation on capturing “the local” perspective. This flew in the face of previously top- down, centralized manners of addressing issues throughout the developing world such as poverty and infrastructural underdevelopment. Development discourse at the World Bank in the early ‘80s increasingly conceded that a greater understanding of “the local” perspective should first be gathered by researchers prior to finalizing development plans. Mtwara served as a veritable laboratory for development in which researchers performed and formalized this method (Green 2014; Voipio 1998). Mtwara region had become associated with the participatory method that had been fine-tuned within its borders (Msalya 2015). In this way, development through IFIs and foreign partners perpetuated the positioning of Mtwara community members as virtuous rural residents, tied to “the local”. Development collaboration with outside donors in no way overrode the significance of state-delivered development. Through finetuning and standardizing the participatory method in Mtwara region, foreign development partnerships often produced wana Mtwara as local participants to fit the political construct of the nation-state. 37 RIDEPs were extensions of Tanzania’s Second Five Year Plan and formulated to regionally integrate such economic sectors as agriculture, fisheries, forestry and mining on a regional scale (Lamberg 2020, 15). 70 In addition to their status as underdeveloped and non-industrialized, southeasterners’ location along the country’s southern border positioned them as models of nationalist and Pan- Africanist sacrifice. Early on, development planners had focused villagization efforts on Mtwara in order to establish a strong party presence along the Mozambican border. The boundary provided revolutionary FRELIMO fighters some protection against Portuguese soldiers during the War for Mozambican Liberation (1964-1974) (Thompson 2013). By hosting FRELIMO soldiers, attending to wounded guerilla fighters at Mtwara hospitals such as the Americo Boavida Hospital, and hosting schools for the families of freedom fighters, southeastern residents volunteered their services to the pan-African cause of Mozambican liberation. At other times, civilians sacrificed without having made a concerted effort to support FRELIMO. The border region suffered assaults and injuries due to their proximity to fighting, and the Portuguese made targets of Tanzanian border communities they suspected of having harbored freedom fighters. As Lal (2012) points out, Nyerere used the idealized African village model as the base for an imagined network of national and transnational socialist kinship. This connection allowed rural residents to access lauded kinship networks through their embodiment of Ujamaa morals, such as hard work and sacrifice for the cause of nation-building (214). Chaulia (2003), after all, points out that Pan-Africanist ethos often motivated TANU leadership, but “it must also be noted that Tanzanians at all levels assimilated TANU’s line on liberation movements and spontaneously sheltered guerillas and donated money to promote uhuru” (155). In present-day political claims, Mtwara residents invoke their sacrifices to the cause of Mozambican liberation in order to highlight the injustice of their continuing poor status of infrastructure and funding. This trend suggests that whether or not families and villages specifically participating in aiding 71 FRELIMO, residents understood the Mozambican conflict to have attributed them stakes in the project of national development. The Roles of Government Administrators, NGO Members, and Rural Citizens During Nyerere’s Administration (1964-1985) Scholarship (Green 2014; Lal 2012) suggests that participants in villagization experienced Ujamaa differently depending on the conditions of their participation (e.g., voluntary or unvoluntary) and their level of political activity within TANU. Voluntary participants, for instance, tended to have a more positive or indifferent dispositions to the project. Active TANU members at the time of village resettlement, overall, often viewed the project as an extension of their party membership. Perhaps most importantly, villagization often brought individuals into proximity of critical government-funded health and educational services. Through resettlement opportunities, rural residents could participate in village governments and farmland. Through her oral history work with former participants in villagization in Mtwara, Lal (2012) discovered that several older men and women referred to moving into Ujamaa villages as “moving into nations (mataifa)”, or “beginning to live nationally” (222). In other oral histories, people connected collective work (e.g., digging roads, ditches, and wells) to building the nation. As such, several participants referred to their work as “building the nation” (222). This orientation to the project of development demonstrates that some villagers felt as though they were active contributors to national development. Popular experiences of Ujamaa clearly varied, but residents from the underdeveloped southeast often understood themselves to be vital contributors to the nation-state. 72 Following independence, the ruling TANU party merged local state and local party structures in a way that redefined the content and challenges of government careers. For instance, Eckert (2014) notes that it was necessary for regional commissioners at the time to serve as regional party secretaries in addition to their initial posting. The central government and ruling party TANU expected civil servants and local administrators in the southeast to convey Ujamaa’s political message of self-reliance to their constituents. In 1964, Nyerere decided to offer training and professionalism workshops to civil servants interested in becoming commissioners. In doing so, he hoped to attract educated, responsible candidates by virtue of their credentials rather than their longevity as card-carrying TANU members (Eckert 2014, 210). Lal (2012) provides a proselytizing message from a middle-tier government worker, a regional commissioner out of Mtwara, in relation to the project of Ujamaa: “At the regional level, officials echoed the national position; in Mtwara, the regional commissioner insisted in 1968 that in order to stop exploitation in the region, every adult person should work and live by their own sweat and avoid being like a parasite”(216). Although the population at large looked upon government officials as having benefitted from the transition to independence more than the average citizen, there is evidence to suggest administrators faced key challenges. For instance, government salaries and structures did not encourage the growth of local revenue within villages. As a result of financial deficits, government officials often had to produce their own monetary sources in order to “build the nation.” Many mid-position officers felt pressure to enact and produce development results at the village level such as well or road construction. Economic limitations often meant that these administers had to lean on their rapport and relationships with villagers in order to produce big results on a limited budget. In other situations, administrators used their own funds in order to 73 finalize a project (Green 2014). Overall, however, officials did act as key gatekeepers to development funds for projects such as wells and health clinics. Throughout Tanzania’s socialist period, residents viewed the state—not CSOs—as the primary facilitator of development. Once the country’s government voted to adopt the single- party system in 1965, non-governmental organizations such as “trade unions, cooperatives, women's organization, youth organization and parent's organization” all came under the aegis of Tanzania’s ruling party, TANU (Mercer 1999, 248). At that time, leading ruling-party figures interpreted non-state developmental organizations as threats to the autonomy and unity of the single-party nation. Jennings’ (2008) work on international development NGO interventions during Ujamaa, in fact, suggests that NGOs often implemented and facilitated the work of the state. Throughout this period, the few active CSOs mainly focused on service delivery rather than advocacy work (Mushi 2011). The roles between civil society workers and government employees often blurred, however, as members of both sectors often had to rely upon one another for funding, social connections, and technical expertise (Mercer 1999). Overall, Nyerere introduced an inclusive, village-centered conceptualization of socialist ideals. Rural residents’ participation in this scheme allowed them to serve as nation-builders and contributors to pan-African ideals of anti-colonialism by virtue of their positioning on the border. As workers and villagers, they both defended and built the nation. TANU’s principle of self- reliance rhetorically framed the southeast, in its state of underdevelopment, as a prime site for nation-building. Administrative officials occupied both enviable and frustrating positions within hierarchies of governance. Compared to most citizens, they were offered access to training and professionalism. At the same time, however, their low strategies and resources meant they 74 needed to often work within strict budgetary restraints. In the following sections, we will see how conceptualizations of development and citizenship change over time. Democratization and Decentralization in Post-Socialist Tanzania (1985-2005) Decreased lending offers for Tanzania from the capitalist and communist rival blocs following the end of the Cold War ultimately resulted in the reorganization and repurposing of the central government. Despite the unfavorable lending climate and mounting pressure from colleagues to accept financial reform packages, however, Nyerere avoided multilateral agency aid packages whenever possible throughout the 1970s. For instance, Nyerere refused the IMF’s offer of aid in 1979 due to its conditions of currency devaluation and credit control. Toward the end of his presidency, Nyerere confronted decreased agricultural productivity and war with Uganda while faced with fewer lending options. When Nyerere stepped down from political office in 1985, his colleagues seemed poise to accept capitalist strategies of economic rehabilitation (Biermann and Wagao 1986). Present-day Tanzanians generally concede, however, that Nyerere’s administration proved the high-water mark of political performance in Tanzania (Fouéré 2014; Phillips 2010). By the mid-1980s, Tanzania had fallen into severe debt due to skyrocketing interest rates. Therefore, the central government faced heightened pressure to accept the structural adjustment program (SAPs) proffered by lending agencies. Nyerere’s successor, President Ali Hassan Mwinyi, agreed to an Economic Reform Program backed by the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization in 1986 that entailed liberalizing measures such as the unification of price exchange and the elimination of price control (Nord et al. 2009). These changes in practice and policy prioritized private sphere growth, precipitating what several scholars have recognized as the “rolling back of the state” from responsibilities such as social welfare and infrastructural 75 development (Green 2010). This shift marks the end of Tanzania’s socialist era and the onset of neoliberalism, summarized by Phillips (2018) as “the opening of Tanzania’s economy to international markets, foreign debt, and austerity programs and the privatization of state industries and social services” (13). In 1992, President Ali Hassan Mwinyi (1985-1995) oversaw Tanzania’s adoption of the multi-party system and implemented a series of neoliberal policies geared toward increasing the presence of civil society groups within the country. Following democratization, opposition parties such as ChaDema vied for political office on mainly anti-corruption platforms. Overall, the widening of political competition challenged CCM’s exclusive control over the government’s two branches, the presidency and the National Assembly (Bunge).38 The pluralism of political parties, however, also encouraged the mushrooming of NGOs within the country. Donor- stipulated democratization measures further destabilized CCM authority by removing trade unions and cooperatives from under the exclusive purview of the ruling party. Restrictions on CCM’s purview weakened the ruling party’s monopolization of political influence, but reforms also expanded opportunities for foreign donors (e.g., bilateral and multilateral partners such as the World Bank) to implement their “good governance agenda” around global democratic norms (Mercer and Green 2013).39 Western lending agencies and foreign donors often influenced the focus and structure of newly minted NGOs by directing funding to specific topics and platforms. Along with the privatization of major industries, growth of CSOs, and adoption of multipartyism, Tanzanian democratization entailed the enshrinement of hierarchical political 38 Although Tanzania has existed as a multi-party democratic republic, CCM had occupied the majority of National Assembly seats since its establishment in 1977. 39 Prior to implementation of the multi-party system, ruling party CCM (formerly the Tanzanian African National Union) had so dominated national politics that it proved virtually indistinguishable from the state. 76 relationships through the devolution of government offices in a 1996 Devolution by Decentralization reform (Green 2014). The formerly centralized single-party government transitioned to a more dispersed network of offices in which different levels reported on business to the office above them within an administrative hierarchy. For instance, district officers would handle matters at their level and then communicate their activities to regional superiors. Regional officers, in turn, would then communicate with members of the presidential cabinet. According to the logic of this new structure, responsibilities and benefits would be more evenly distributed among political officers. Furthermore, devolution emphasized the integration and coordination of development projects, meaning that projects and plans at the smallest political unit, the district, would complement and support those further up the procedural ladder. Rather than detracting from state authority, decentralization expanded the scope of bureaucratic practices and procedure. For instance, officers and citizens often viewed the movement of paperwork along hierarchical chains of political command as evidence of coordination and shared objectives across government offices (Green 2014). Within this scheme of bureaucratic administration, government officials could persuasively present development planning as collaborative efforts between higher-ranking officers such as regional commissioners and underlying officers towards a common goal. Once the “local” perspective gained prominence as an object of international development research, lower-ranking officers’ contribution of “grassroots” perspectives to government development projects added to the viability of the plan. Overall, decentralization made government hierarchies key structures in the regulation and representation of unequal power relations between officers (Green 2014). In addition to fostering relationships of dependency and opportunity among officers, these 77 hierarchies strengthened the bureaucratic image of the postcolonial state even as neoliberal reforms restricted the capability of the national government. Throughout the mid- to late-1990s, the Tanzanian government accepted aid packages that continued to create institutional space for NGOs. After the World Bank reported that Tanzania lacked an adequate number of non-governmental democratized organizations (Helleiner 1995), the central government accepted a specialized loan repayment program from the agency to further expand the nation’s civil society sector. Efforts to carve out additional space for Tanzanian NGOs only intensified under the administration of Mwinyi’s successor, President Benjamin Mkapa (1995-2005)40. Mkapa accepted the Comprehensive Development Framework policy model for the mobilization and reconfiguration of development partnerships in 1999 (Green 2014). The framework stipulated that Tanzania must concede greater influence to foreign donor partners in directing, expanding, and funding the country’s non-governmental sector. Democratizing and decentralizing policy reforms throughout the 1980s and 1990s introduced several key dynamics to the practice of development and government in Tanzania. In this period, privatizing reforms prevented the national government from providing social-welfare services as it once had. Under Mwinyi and then Mkapa, the bureaucratic reach of the central government more fully integrated local government offices into political hierarchies of influence. At the same time, international development agencies secured a greater foothold for NGOs within Tanzania’s political system. These shifts set the stage for a reconfiguration in the relationship between development and the state in the following decades. 40 Benjamin Mkapa’s administration reached a high watermark for ruling-party support by the southeastern regions of Lindi and Mtwara as funds and central government interest increasingly redirected to the northern financial and political centers of the country (Killian 2007). Under Masasi District-born Mkapa’s rule, the southern politician pledged to repair roads and construct a bridge over the Rufiji River. Completion of the Benjamin Mkapa Bridge stands as an important monument to the state’s presence and interest in southeastern Tanzania today. 78 The Neoliberal-Extractivist Imaginary (2005-2021): Development, Citizenship, and the State President Jakaya Kikwete (2005-2015) promised to secure national industrialization through the cultivation of natural energy sources during his 2010 campaign.41 Following the TPDC’s42 2010 discovery of offshore deposits in the southeast, the country gained notoriety as a hydrocarbon source. Additionally, the discoveries emboldened government ambitions to attain Middle Income Earning Country status43 by 2025. In light of the seeming potential for extractive industry-based growth, the Kikwete administration introduced several new legal and stylistic changes to Tanzanian political practice: petroleum legislation investing the central government with increased authority over natural resource extraction; decreased investment in social-welfare programming ( e.g. poverty reduction strategies) (Green 2015); and elite state actors’ efforts to convincingly attract foreign business while defending domestic interests. Kikwete’s successor, John Pombe Magufuli (2015-2021), further exaggerated these trends, contributing to the growth of a neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. The rise of this imaginary reflects a shift in theme: from development as a collective effort aimed at economically uplifting the entire population to development as individualistic efforts to attain wealth through self-promotion. Within this shift, the role of the state changes: from facilitator of development through the implementation of collectivized programming and social services to director of an optimal business climate in which citizens may find their own opportunities for development. 41 CUF presidential candidate Dr. Willibrod Slaa had accused Kikwete of having mismanaged negotiations over local content policy in mining contracts (Ng’wanakilala 2010) 42 TPDC is the government-owned parastatal oil company. 43 Middle Income Earning Country status is a World Bank designation based upon gross national income (GNI). This status provides countries with increased access to loan products and financial services. 79 Since 2015, Kikwete has reinforced the private sector’s role as primary generator of national wealth by streamlining public-sector development policy and consolidating knowledge on natural gas policy at the highest levels of government (Green 2015). The prioritization of state and private company partnerships, in particular, is evidenced by government efforts to strip poverty reduction strategies from government policy and legislation (Green 2015).44 In 2015, for instance, state actors consolidated two models of development blueprints—the Five-Year Development Plan (FYDP) policy framework and the National Strategy for Growth and Poverty Reduction (MKUKUTA)—in a merger that stripped MKUKUTA of poverty reduction content. The FYDP II: Encouraging Industrialization (2016/2017-2021) substituted human development initiatives for the former MKUKUTA policy centered on poverty reduction. Such decision- making typifies the recent streamlining of social development-related bodies of governance in the interest of economic growth. MKUKUTA’s incorporation into the FYDP framework also clarified the national vision of extractive sector-powered industrialization: “Investment in harnessing Tanzania’s natural endowment is the driving force for sustainable transformation of our country” (Ministry of Finance and Planning 2016, ii). According to the FYDP II blueprint, economic growth requires that the Tanzanian state foster an investment- and business- friendly atmosphere for potential investors and foreign partnerships. In fact, the economic narrative spelled out in FYPD II claims that past attempts to secure partnerships have been limited by state interventions, national policy that discouraged chain value linkages, poorly managed local politics, and the ineffective 44 Green (2014) identifies this style of governance as “techno-enterprise.” 80 management of natural resources.45 Through this lens, complicated interfaces of government institutions and civil society spaces are also interpreted as impeding the progress of development. During his last months in office, Kikwete backed CCM MPs in their efforts to rush three pieces of extractive sector policy through Parliament. Such efforts suggest that state actors utilize legal institutions and procedure to reinforce government authority over the extractive sectors. MPs introduced The Tanzania Petroleum Act, the Oil and Gas Revenue Management Act, and the Tanzania Extractive Industries (Transparency and Accountability) Act under a controversial certificate of urgency that effectively tabled the bills by precluding discussion of the legislation in Parliament (Lange and Kinyondo 2016). Opposition MPs decried their inability to discuss the Tanzanian Extractive Industries Act, in particular, as it details the government’s oversight and management of natural gas and oil extraction. The Petroleum Act, meanwhile, introduces checks and balances meant to prevent a single branch of government or ministry from holding the majority of operations. For instance, mid and downstream operations fall under the purview of Energy and Water Utilities Regulatory Authority, while PURA is in charge of managing upstream operations. Because the certificate of urgency prevented MPs from thoroughly researching the bills’ content, however, opposition MPs interpreted the rush to legally enshrine ruling party (CCM) monopolization of the extractive industries. 45 Historically, the foreign interests dictated the government’s management of resources. For instance, the parastatal TPDC formalized in 1969 in order to facilitate the government’s partnership with the Italian oil company AGIP. The creation of a production sharing agreement (PSA) affirmed national ownership of natural resources. In the wake of confirmed oil and gas findings along coastal Songo Songo during the seventies, the government passed legislation detailing the terms of partnership between the central government and corporations. The Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act of 1980 which stipulated licensing protocols and stakeholder rights established a system for arbitrating conflict during extractive activities. Nyerere attempted to prevent conflicts of interest in partnerships by limiting the extent to which public sector actors could benefit from the industry (Lyamuya n.d.), but the government introduced more business-friendly terms in the aftermath of neoliberal reforms. The 1980s debt lending crises and Tanzania’s resultant adoption of neoliberal policies, the government amended legislation pertaining to petroleum extraction to engender a more inviting financial environment for interested foreign parties. 81 Kikwete’s successor, President John Pombe Magufuli (2015-2021), extended the legal enshrinement of state authority over the extractive sectors by favoring the Tanzanian government over foreign parties in contract negotiations. Additionally, his administration emphasized the specialized authority of the president. In 2017, three new bills addressed the extraction and governance of natural resources: The Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act 2017; The Natural Wealth and Resources (Permanent Sovereignty) Act 2017; and The Natural Wealth and Resources (Review and Re-Negotiation of Unconscionable Terms) Act 2017 (Poncian 2019; Poncian and Kigodi 2018). Section 5 of the 2017 Sovereignty Act places Tanzanian natural resources in the trust of the president rather than the National Assembly (bunge) (Poncian 2019; Poncian and Kigodi 2018, 3): “The natural wealth and resources shall be held in trust by the President on behalf of the People of the United Republic” (6). In contrast, earlier legislation had stated that wealth and resources were held in trust by the United Republic (Woodroffe et al. 2017,1). Legal analysis of this wording claims that it, signals a more significant role for the president’s office going forward. Where the minister responsible for mining could previously declare any gold or gemstone mining area as a “controlled area”, the president now has this power and it extends to any area where mining operations take place. (Woodroffe et al. 2017, 1) A further distinction is made between the president and the government in the act’s preamble: “by virtue of Article 27 of the Constitution the protection of natural wealth and resources in the United Republic is charged on the People and the Government and the control of which is entrusted to the President” (4). Thus, the Sovereignty Act recognizes the president rather than the United Republic of Tanzania as the authority over the nation’s natural resources and extraction (Woodroffe et al. 2017; Jacob and Pedersen 2018). 82 In his management and handling of mining contracts and foreign business dealings, Magufuli exercised an intense level of secrecy. Secrecy and acts of knowledge restriction allow state actors to project the government as capable of attracting foreign investments and securing/defending domestic interests. In the midst of his transition to power, Magufuli appeared as a man with integrity who was capable of defending the nation. Early on into his administration, the general populace appreciated his confident tone and managerial style. During fieldwork in 2015, I noted that many urban southeasterners in Mtwara Town held Magufuli in high esteem for his pragmatic and decisive character. However, as the —rather than a —top authority within Tanzania’s legal and political regimes, Magufuli enacted a slew of suppressive legislation including a ban on opposition party rallies until the 2020 Presidential Election. The crucial premise that only Magufuli could have prevented western imperial interests from ravaging Tanzania’s national mineral wealth has authorized his performance as Tanzania’s “economic messiah.” Claims of the president such as, “I am the president, I know all the secrets of this country. I would not say all this if I were not sure of what I am talking,” reflect his past attempts to position himself as the lone defender of national interests (Poncian 2019). While past presidents such as Kikwete had also positioned themselves as bulwarks against the influence of western neoliberalism and imperialism, Magufuli’s performance of this role rested on his personal leadership abilities and his invitation of moral comparisons with Nyerere. Recent scholarship tracks Magufuli’s integration of Ujamaa ideology into public addresses and his past propensity for having drawn, “on the popular appeal of the long- abandoned Arusha Declaration to secure public support to his ‘economic war’ by publicly dubbing Acacia Mining and other foreign investors as robbers and exploiters of Tanzania's 83 extractive resources” (Poncian 2019). Such displays of anti-imperialist sentiment alongside an increasingly personalistic style of doing business had increasingly positioned Magufuli as a state actor capable of bending international business interests to his whims. Kikwete’s promotion of the central government as a key arbitrator in extractive sector negotiations influenced a realignment of the definition of national development: individual Tanzanians are increasingly expected to take advantage of the business and social opportunities created by an authoritative state. Within this development, however, state actors such as Kikwete and Magufuli make efforts to balance their stances between two seemingly conflicting orientations: On one hand, both Kikwete and Magufuli attempt to showcase their business expertise in driving and attracting foreign business such as international oil companies. On the other hand, both presidents adopt language and imagery to underscore their dedication to serving the interests of Tanzania and Tanzanians. During his administration, Kikwete made efforts to foster and celebrate business relations with African entrepreneurs such as Aliko Dangote. In so doing, the president attempted to emphasize Tanzania’s involvement in an African business empire and an iteration of pan-Africanism inspired by neoliberal measures of privatization. The neoliberal pan-Africanism, however, embraces strengthening African cooperation through the forging of capitalist relations and private sector-based dealings with a range of bilateral and multilateral partners. As such, this version contrasts with the vision initially championed by Nyerere that saw western donors and agencies of capitalist expansion as contemptible tools of oppression.46 Overall, state elite have contributed to the prominence of the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary within Tanzania by: 1) perpetuating an interpretation of development as premised 46 Nyerere viewed many western multilateral lending agencies such as the IMF and World Bank as contemptible but also found it near impossible to govern the country without their involvement. 84 upon the individual choices of entrepreneurial citizens and 2) affirming the state as uniquely invested with the entrepreneurial expertise to balance attracting foreign investments while growing the national economy. The Roles of Government Administrators, NGO Members, and Rural Citizens During the Magufuli Administration (2015-2021) In the transition to Magufuli’s presidency, Mtwara residents generally regarded the candidate with hopeful optimism. His reputation for pragmatism and decisive action complemented the image of an authoritative state that Kikwete had invoked in rushing gas policy through Parliament. Like Kikwete, Magufuli’s style of rule also promoted aggressive individualistic economic growth as the model for development in Tanzania. According to Green (2014), citizenship in Tanzania can still be understood through residents’ relationships to development. The definition of development in post-socialist Tanzania has changed, however, and the onus to attain development through business ventures and social networking increasingly rests upon the shoulders of citizens. Tensions arising from this reconfiguration of development, however, inform the roles played by government workers, CSO members, and rural residents in contemporary Tanzania. In contrast to the era of Ujamaa, government officials no longer act as key mediators to development resources such as infrastructure investments. They, themselves, can no longer access such resources in the wake of neoliberal reforms. Instead, administrators exercise control over intangible mechanisms for development which Green (2014) describes as “practices, performances, words, and paper” (116). This distinction suggests that citizens no longer view administrators as capable of securing funds for projects such as well construction. Administrators, on the other hand, are capable of offering bureaucratic representations of 85 recognition such as drafted introductions and invitations to privileged government and social networks. Key bureaucratic forms such as planning have transformed into critical evidence of social prestige and opportunity. Additionally, these forms underscore officers’ ties to the central government and conceal uncertainties in natural gas policy knowledge. During my fieldwork, I found government officials employed bureaucratic obstacles and explicit practices of knowledge restriction to gloss over insecurities and ambiguities within the natural gas sector. Since the proliferation of NGOs on the Tanzanian social and political scene, scholarship has largely highlighted ways in which Tanzania’s ambiguous civil society sector legislative scaffolding blurs the boundaries between state and civil society sectors (Mercer 1999, Green 2014). Although MPs crafted the 2001 NGO Policy and the NGO Act of 2002 to lend structure, purpose, and protections to non-governmental organizations during the transition to multi- partyism, scholars have characterized the legislation as murky and contradictory, at best (Mushi 2011, Jennings 2008). Mercer’s (1999) overview of the state-civil society relations, however, lends a critical point of contrast for analysis into NGO work under Kikwete’s administration. In an interview with a district planning officer, Mercer (1999) asked the administrator to describe the role of district council. The interviewed characterized the roles of NGO actors and the district counselors as interchangeable: The district council acts like an NGO because there is a special budget for every ward, which the wards have control over spending, thus carrying out sustainable development in an empowering way. So, a certain portion of the development levy goes straight to the ward, a much more participatory and bottom-up approach to development (254). This interchangeability differs from how residents distinguished the roles of government and NGO and CSO officers in 2015 Mtwara. The delineation of responsibilities is more pronounced within the context of Tanzania’s nascent gas sector; government discourse suggests that the state 86 should receive as little interference as possible from CSO and NGO actors. In recent literature on Tanzania’s natural gas sector, scholars reflect upon the low visibility and productivity of natural gas–focused CSOs: Petroleum investments differ from other extractive sectors and therefore call for other civil society strategies. Another reason could be the self-asserting negotiating position of the state; obviously, state representatives find it hard to accept too much meddling in contract negotiation processes of this importance. (Pederson and Bofin 2015, 25) As outlined in the blog post “The Irrelevance of NGOs in Tanzania” by Tanzanian report Khalifa Said on Africa is a Country, the perceived ineptitude of NGOs to intervene and direct change in the face of blatant corruption presents great controversy. In assessing the culpability and potential for NGOs to make incursions into politics as champions or advocates of charged topics such as extractive industry governance or the handling of COVID-19, it is crucial to keep in mind the sector’s historically informed constraints, and the Magufuli administration, has severely intensified censorship and surveillance of civil society programming (Paget 2017; Said 2020; Sørreime and Tronvoll 2020). With the passing of the Non-Governmental Organizations Act (Amendments) Regulations, 2018 and the Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) No. 3 Bill of 2019, the national government has made the innerworkings of NGOs and CSOs, alike, increasingly transparent and vulnerable to government oversight (Kelly 2019, 11). Rural residents have been sidelined in government conceptualizations of development since the onset of neoliberalism in 1986. Instead of the rhetorical backbone of the nation, rural residents increasingly receive the message that they need to find opportunities for growth and entrepreneurship. CSOs attempt to integrate villagers and women as indicated key household contributors but their inclusion in development is not guaranteed. Rather, it is based upon adapting them to the roles of valued economic actors able to participate in the modern economy 87 as individual entrepreneurs. The conceptual condition of their involvement in development varies greatly from that of Ujamaa. Under Ujamaa, rural residents and villagers could actively take part in nation-building through their sacrifice of hard work and moral disposition. In the contemporary southeast, Mtwara residents’ peripheral positioning and underdeveloped status posed a problem rather than a virtue in the aftermath of natural gas finds.47 Conclusion This section has demonstrated critical configurations of development, citizenship, and the state that informed residents’ formulation of two different development imaginaries. Ujamaa-era development programs circulated specific concepts of morality and national belonging. With the introduction of Ujamaa villages throughout the geographically isolated stretch of the country’s southeastern territory, Mtwara felt the direct, targeted intervention of state-engineered development. While many criticized and compelled the government to perform larger measures of investment and support to voluntary (and involuntary) villagization, literature attests to the fondness many southerners still hold for the administration of President Nyerere (Green 2014; Lal 2012; Phillips 2018). Under Nyerere, villagers experienced an inclusive vision of development that entailed the collective upliftment of rural Tanzanians’ and their participation in extended socialist kinship networks. Out of this development paradigm formed the social- development imaginary in which the central government presented a collective version of development that necessitated state involvement. Citizens experienced the influence of the 47 On March 17, 2021, President Magufuli passed away. It is too early to assess the economic policy of his successor, Samia Hasan 88 central government through rural development projects and social services. Furthermore, residents at the border understood themselves to be key contributors to pan-Africanism through their participation in the War of Mozambican Liberation at the border. Their collective participation in and sacrifice for the nation led many Mtwara residents to view the state as obligated to repay the southeast through some form of recognition. Under Presidents Kikwete and Magufuli, the government introduced development as an individualistic endeavor in which the state intervenes to cultivate an optimal business environment. Within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary, citizens can only benefit if they make well-informed economic decisions based upon the conditions and opportunities set by the state through its extractive dealings. Although state actors and discourse absolve the government of ensuring citizens receive particular development benefits, representatives still project a state capable of driving the nation and of even furthering the cause of a neoliberal pan-Africanism. Throughout the remainder of the dissertation, I address how members of the general public, CSO officers, and government officials draw on components of the social-development imaginary and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary to propose, contest, and affirm different visions for national development in Tanzania. 89 CHAPTER 3: PLANNING, PERFORMANCE, AND KNOWLEDGE RESTRICTION WITHIN THE NATURAL GAS SECTOR In the wake of the 2010 gas discoveries along the southeastern Tanzanian coast, Mtwara’s bureaucratic orientation to the central government shifted. This regional repositioning is reflected in ALAT’s (the Association of Local Authorities of Tanzania) decision to host Maadhimisho ya Serikali za Mitaa (The Local Government Celebration) in Mtwara urban for the first time on July 1, 2015. The week-long celebration invited local governments to represent their respective regions at a one-day event held in Uwanja wa Mashujaa, a field and recreation venue in the heart of Mtwara Town. Participating representatives set up tables with sections for purchasing crafts and produce reflective of their regions’ agricultural and cultural environments. Several hosts had printed out informational graphics and charts reflective of their regions’ industrial and agricultural activities. Throughout the day, cashew vendors from Mtwara wound their ways through the crowd, hawking the region’s most prominent cash crop to attendees. Amid regional displays, Tanzania’s parastatal oil company the TPDC sat beneath a narrow tent in the center of proceedings. Their table displayed informational posters regarding the benefits petroleum extraction would produce for regional residents: decreased reliance on foreign money, growth of factories and employment, savings on electricity, and environmental conservation from the reduced use of charcoal. TPDC had printed maps of the Mtwara–Dar es Salaam Pipeline Project and encouraged passers-by to pick up pamphlets on the parastatal’s history and plans for upstream and downstream petroleum production. Although the impressive posters and displays faced the general public, the exhibit mainly attracted a small number of older men whose bearings, professional suits, and ID tags suggested that they belonged to the same professional circles as the TPDC representatives. TPDC representatives formally welcomed several guests with long handshakes for conversations in a cordoned-off section of 90 TPDC’s small tent concealed by a dark blue curtain. The scene contrasted sharply with the Tandahimba Newala Cooperative Union’s bustling table, where the group’s representatives connected with most men and women passing by (Fieldnote, July 1, 2015, Mtwara Town). More importantly, however, the heightened displays of knowledge restriction and policing at the TPDC table echoed the significance of secrecy with which government officers propped up the Tanzanian gas sector and the neoliberal-extractivist state. In conversations following the event, wana Mtwara took ALAT’s decision to celebrate in Mtwara as a sign of the region’s enhanced reputation and significance within Tanzanian politics. At the recently erected Tiffany Diamond Hotel across from Uwanja wa Mashujaa, young male entertainers from Dar who had been hired to perform for the week of ALAT activities remarked on Mtwara’s growing number of hotels and commercial prospects.48 Until recently, community members suggested, Mtwara Town did not have the necessary amenities or housing options to offer visiting officials. A Human Resources manager in his early forties from Dar es Salaam pointed out: in terms of guest houses where you are staying—there used to be 60 but now there are over 100… for the first time this year, the big conference is called ALAT association local gov authorities in TZ [(Tanzania)]. There are now like 168 local gov authorities in TZ. For the first time the annual meeting is taking place in Mtwara. Close to the end of June to the first week of July, for the regional directors and the chairpersons and the mayors. They are coming because they are sure they will get a place to sleep and get something to eat. (Phoye 2015) Bureaucratic practice and relationships had resituated Mtwara as a critical site in the state’s bureaucratic apparatus. According to a young male municipal officer recently arrived in Mtwara urban from Dar, political climbers used to view appointments to the southeast, 48 Large hotels had previously only existed within the boundaries of Mtwara Urban’s enclave of more affluent urban residents, Shangani Peninsula. In 2015, Tiffany Diamond’s height and aesthetic likened it to the immense Naf Beach Hotel. 91 particularly Mtwara region, as death sentences for their careers. Even high-ranking positions such as regional commissioner marked a professional dead-end during the era of pre-petroleum- Mtwara. This attitude has somewhat altered since 2010’s natural gas discoveries, “the gas city” now attracting political employees from metropolitan centers such as Dar es Salaam (“The Mtwara Rockefellers” 2013). That same municipal officer suggested that in 2015, an appointment to Mtwara signified the potential for greater opportunities down the line. His own excitement to serve in Mtwara after having worked in Dar demonstrates that change in attitude. In the eyes of rural Mtwara residents, government representative derive benefits from their perceived proximity to influential networks of political influence and increased access to resources. The increased opportunities associated with working in Mtwara local government within the context of Tanzania’s burgeoning natural gas sector, however, also involved certain challenges and dynamics that have yet to be analyzed. As reflected in the remarks of a young woman from a focus group in the rural Mtwara village of Nanguruwe, “Watafaidika kuliko sisi” (They will benefit more than we will), there is a sense that local government officeholders benefit disproportionately from heightened economic activity and profit derived from gas extraction. Scholarship demonstrates that throughout the socialist era, residents tended to view local government officials as advantaged citizens and valuable gatekeepers of resources and social networks. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, government and party officials were still able to exercise political influence and authority through their ability to guard access to key resources such as state funding and agricultural or construction equipment (Lal 2012; Green 2014). Throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, however, reforms and aid conditionalities led to the increased decentralization of the central government and the privatization of government 92 services (such as healthcare) and industries (such as agriculture). These trends introduced two key changes to the organization and function of government: 1) The bureaucratic expansion of ministries and local offices under the purview of the state lent increased importance to the role of bureaucratic planning in development work. and 2) the kinds of resources to which government officers had access changed (Green 2014). Following the implementation of privatizing aid stipulations in the 80s and 90s, members of the weakened central government and its underlying local representatives could no longer provide citizens with direct funding and development resources. Instead, they could offer donor investments and introductions to privileged networks of donors and benefactors (Green 2014). Little is known, however, as to how these shifts have played out for local government officers in the context of Tanzania’s developing natural gas sector (Becker 2019; Phillips 2018). In order to assess how officials interpret and promote development in the wake of natural gas extraction, I ask: 1) What images of the state do different government officials make through discussion of the content and purpose of natural gas development in Mtwara? 2)How do government actors define development and the state in exchanges with different members of society? In the following sections, I assess state actors’ projections of development and their roles within it according to the two imaginaries outlined in Chapter 2—the social-development imaginary and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. After 2010’s petroleum discoveries, the central government has encouraged natural gas policy and financial dealings that situate the state as uniquely qualified to oversee the gas industry. I outline key characteristics of natural gas performance and planning that underwrite the practices of knowledge restriction employed by government officers within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. I identify a kind of entrepreneurial-based development that Kikwete embraced in his performance of a neoliberal, 93 trickle-down brand of pan-Africanism. The former president celebrated his connection to the African business mogul Dangote before an audience of rural villagers. In interviews with ward-, municipal-, and district-level officials, I analyze participants efforts in fostering a particular kind of neoliberal-extractivist state through acts of knowledge restriction. Finally, during situated exchanges on natural gas development during focus groups facilitated by ward officers, I reveal contestations between the social-development and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginaries. Most Rural residents and one lower-level ward officer from Masasi and Mtwara districts critiqued the neoliberal-extractivist imagining of the state that most government actors encouraged. By placing the responsibility of attaining development on citizens rather than the state, promoting a pan-African approach to business relations, and relying on exaggerated acts of knowledge restriction, local government officers often supported the neoliberal-extractivist image of the state. In disagreements between rural residents and ward officers during focus groups, Tanzanians invoked the social-development imaginary in asking for the state to provide a more collective, enduring form of development. For the most part, however, Mtwara government officers mainly adopted knowledge restriction as a strategy for concealing the state’s insecure handle on natural gas policy and their own inability to access privileged fields of expert knowledge. Run-Ins with the Tanzanian State: Mtwara’s Bureaucratic Layout While in Mtwara region, I made the site of 2013’s protests, Mtwara urban, my base of operations.49 As Figure 2 shows, Mtwara region is divided into five rural districts (Mtwara, Masasi, Tandahimba, Newala, and Nanyumbu), a municipality (Mtwara-Mikindani 49 Mtwara-Mikindani Municipality is commonly referred to as Mtwara Urban by local authorities. 94 Municipality) that is often referred to as Mtwara urban, and three town councils (TCs) (Newala TC, Masasi TC, and Nanyamba TC).50 Masasi district proves the most populous district with 247,993 inhabitants.51 My interest in conducting interviews and focus groups with residents of the inland municipality of Masasi Urban and Masasi rural District, however, necessitated that I make myself a known entity within Tanzanian government bureaucracy. Figure 2: Map of Administrative Units in Mtwara Region During fieldwork, I confronted numerous obstacles in accessing information on gas policy and plans for Mtwara. For the most part, high-ranking government representatives at the district level52 discouraged questions and rebuffed my initial attempts at introductions. I first attempted to schedule meetings with municipal officers from Mtwara urban. When my efforts to 50 In 2015, the central government of Tanzania oversaw 25 regions, 40 urban councils and 132 rural district councils (CLGF). 51 The 2012 Census only recorded Mtwara District (Mtwara Rural) at 228,003 and Mtwara-Mikindani Municipality (Mtwara Urban), 108,299. 52 Figure 2 displays local government hierarchy at the regional and district levels. 95 arrange meetings over email did not progress, I showed up in person. For the most part, my experience of the state in Mtwara mirrored iterations of bureaucratic ritual and practice detailed in popular and ethnographic renderings of government office visits in Tanzania: I passed a gatekeeper at the administrative building’s entrance; checked into a central room partitioned off from visitors by either glass or wood paneling; signed my name, nationality, and purpose of visit in a guestbook shown to me by a secretary; and then followed a clerk to the office of the person I had scheduled to meet. In my navigation of post-conflict Mtwara in 2015, however, anxiety over reprisals of violence between government and community relations in the lead-up to the 2015 Presidential Election made government officers harder to reach for visits and consultations. After having learned of my research subject, however, town and district authorities failed to show for scheduled meetings or refused to meet without having first received permission from their own senior officers on several occasions. After several failed attempts at scheduling meetings with government officers, I began to perceive the Tanzanian state as a steep hierarchy at which each level guarded increasingly confidential and valuable knowledge. As a young female, western researcher interested in conducting interviews in the politically charged lead-up to the 2015 Presidential Election, I could only gain footing when accompanied by particular individuals. Fortunately, during an early session of participant observation at ADEA’s museum, Chilumba had introduced me to Dennis, a pastor, local historian, cultural attaché, and former employee of Mtwara District. In previous years, ADEA had called upon Dennis’s social networks, ties to the Makua and Makonde ethnic groups, and extensive geographical knowledge of rural districts such as Masasi and Newala to aid in the organization of the MaKuYa Festival. He was familiar with surrounding rural 96 landscapes and landmarks throughout Mtwara region, as he used to serve the district government as a plumbing technician. Although technically unaffiliated with ADEA at the time of our meeting, Dennis had situated himself in the museum portion of the cultural center to write. After several meetings and discussions of Mtwara history, Dennis agreed to serve as my research participant. According to him, my first order of business was to frame a letter of introduction to influential offices within local government (e.g., Mtwara’s Regional Administrative Secretary, District Commissioners, and Ward Executive Officers). I sent him several drafts of introductory letters before he accepted a version that offered a timeline of research and the official title of my dissertation. After I printed out my letter of research intention to the district commissioner (DC), Dennis slipped the document into an official-looking brown envelope and organized the hand-off on his own. It was my responsibility to laminate and then carry return letters of authorization from high-ranking officers with me on all our travels. Prior to receiving a letter from the Mtwara Regional Administrative Secretary (RAS), Dennis and I were called to meet him in person. After having unsuccessfully attempted to schedule interviews with lower offices of government authority earlier on, I was surprised to learn that Dennis had secured a meeting with a regional officer in such short time. During the actual exchange with the RAS, I would only speak once to briefly lay out my research objectives and rely heavily on Dennis’s pleasantries. The officer’s silence organized conversation, indicating when Dennis should volunteer information regarding my status as a student or confirm that we would only work through channels of local government on trips to Masasi and Newala. Although I could not tell by the end of our meeting if we had received permission to conduct research in the inland districts, confirmation arrived in the form of a letter the following day. 97 I welcomed the material evidence of district-level government approval offered me on our travels to rural Masasi, Newala, and Mtwara, as I wanted to avoid scenes similar to the one that had developed soon after my arrival in Mtwara. I had paid a large rental car to drive me to the nearest industrial project within the extractive development scheme, a gas refinery plant in nearby Madimba Village that processed natural gas from Msimbati Village. As soon as we pulled up to the rear of the plant, armed security guards had rushed over to ascertain our intentions. My presence had been especially noticeable due to my form of travel. Rather than the more customary dala dala (small passenger buses), boda boda (motorbikes), or even tuk tuks (three-wheeled small vehicles), I had commissioned an ominous black sedan to transport me along the dusty, rutted roads of Mtwara-Mbamba Bay Road. After having confirmed that we had not taken pictures of the refinery, the guards suggested we leave. This incident impressed upon me the need for greater planning and caution when scheduling future trips. More importantly, the intense invited me to view natural gas activity as highly significant and sensitive. Overall, Dennis’s participation as research assistant transformed my experience of navigating bureaucratic practice and procedure in urban Mtwara. His familiarity with local government officers enabled travel throughout Mtwara region’s rural inland districts (Newala, Tandahimba, Masasi, and Nanyumbu). During interview exchanges, Dennis often interjected to remark upon potential opportunities for investment in Masasi cultural events. Most officials warmly welcomed these references, highlighting the extent to which residents enjoyed the MaKuYa Festivals of years past. Locally recognized as a cultural attaché for the Masasi-based Makua ethnic group (Mtwara’s second most populous ethnicity after Makonde), Dennis’s association with cultural-themed NGOs such as ADEA allowed me to navigate exaggerated 98 bureaucratic protocol and what I would later come to recognize as acts of knowledge restriction on the part of government officers. An Overview of Bureaucratic Planning In Chapters 1 and 2, I demonstrated that government officials and civilians rely on specific bureaucratic forms (i.e., funding letter, development plans) to represent, build, and maintain social networks and to organize access to resources. Development planning, in particular, emerged as vital process of role recognition within the Tanzanian government. In development-focused planning, mentioning specific offices and titles lent plans legitimacy and credibility (Green 2009): Reference to and recognition of government offices in development plans often produced co-constituting effects in which titles reinforce the credibility of development work. In turn, officers relied upon the abstract language of development planning to establish the efficiency and longevity of government positions. In this section, I introduce bureaucratic planning as it relates to the work of knowledge restriction performed by local government workers to uphold the state as realized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Prior to the implementation of decentralization measures in the early 1970s, the central Tanzanian government had orchestrated the majority of service provision and mainly tailored their efforts to meet the needs of urban areas and larger projects. In an effort to refine the coordination of service provision for rural development needs, the government introduced legislation geared toward the devolution and decentralization of centralized authority to local branches of government (e.g. regional, district, municipal, town, village) throughout the early ’70s. Additionally, decentralization aided in integrating and coordinating two concomitant structures of political hierarchy that existed in the 1960s: the British colonial state’s former 99 organization of local representatives under the Native Authorities Ordinances53 and the independent government’s system of locally elected government officials. In the wake of reform measures such as the 1972 Decentralization Policy, however, central government interests largely continued to dictate development and political priorities at the local level (Green 2014). In 1982, two pieces of critical legislation—the Local Government (District Authorities) Act and the Local Government (Urban Authorities) Act—officially laid out a tiered system of local government councils and offices in rural (district councils, township authorities, ward development committees, village councils and hamlets) and urban (city, municipal and town councils) areas (Figure 1). Once again, the central government introduced this comprehensive plan to redirect and refocus responsibility for service delivery (such as healthcare) to government offices closer to the village level. This set-up assumed that offices more firmly ensconced within the communities they oversaw would develop more detailed view of “the local.” According to this logic, more localized perspectives would then develop a more authentic understanding of communities’ needs. Development administration amid the decentralization measures of the 1980s relied heavily on the production of the “local perspective” by district and town officers. The global template of development policy at this time assumed that specialized knowledge held by individuals at the grassroots level needed to first be “captured” so that planners could plug it into development formulae. This view conceded that a top-down model of development informed only by society’s decision- and policy-makers could not conceive of an efficient plan to benefit community members. Instead, the value attributed to “the local” or “grassroots” in development 53 Under British colonial rule, the governor had introduced two ordinances geared toward constructing and managing a form of local government among African populations. This legislation often invested authority in presumed leaders or “principal headmen” who would act as the top tier of native authority within a given region. These policies reinforced lines of legal and political distinction between Africans and Europeans. 100 work on poverty alleviation invited central government and ruling-party officials to increasingly include local viewpoints in effective development planning at the national level. Oftentimes higher-ranking government actors called upon lower-lying officers such as district and town officers to contribute the local perspective on government plans. Due to its popularity within international development discourse, the local perspective’s inclusion in development planning lent validity and viability to government policy and plans. Figure 3:The organizational structure of the regional- and district-level tiers of local government in Mtwara, Tanzania An emphasis on the participatory approach to development throughout the 1990s invited villagers, as targeted objects of development, to involve themselves in development planning and implementation. While this model of development work has been portrayed as problematic for 101 several reasons,54 it did introduce and necessitate dialogue between community members and local government officers in development projects (Green 2009, 2014). Within these discursive spaces, some community members found opportunity to express disinterest or cynicism in the logics and premises of specific development models. In 1998, the central government published a policy paper introducing the concept of Devolution by Decentralization (D by D) which would be translated into two consecutive reform programs (LGRPs) from 2000-2008 and then 2009- 2014. These phases expanded administrative staff and made their positions based upon local council elections rather than central government appointments. The central government intended to provide local offices with increased autonomy to enact change without relying upon the will and consent of central government superiors. District and township authorities have committees to collaborate with councils on policy and planning.55 District councils often oversee and coordinate the financial and development activities of municipal and town councils. Committees are elected to develop policy, set budgets and oversee the work of specific departments. Each district council tends to include officers tasked to represent various facets of district management such as Planning and Budgeting, Social Welfare, Agriculture, Environment, and Women’s Interests (Akina Mama). The logic of planning reinforces a clear hierarchy that suggests elite government actors must be allowed to act in the best interest of the country. The assumption that top members of government contain key information guiding the direction of Tanzania’s extractive industries, however, can present challenging conditions for local government. Oftentimes residents and observers expect local officials to speak and act on their presumed proximity to said knowledge. 54 Implementers of “bottom-up” development planning often based models of development on their own assumptions regarding rural residents’ lifestyles and values. 55 See Figure 3. 102 During fieldwork, an officer’s positioning within government hierarchy seemed to inform their responses to specific questions on gas policy. The District Administrative Secretary (DAS), for instance, navigated gas questions by adopting abstract language to reference ideals of state efficiency. In response to my question regarding whether or not Masasi residents had questions for government officers concerning gas, the DAS admitted that several had voiced their interest in learning more: “They’re there, they’re there—they come to ask what benefits are coming from this. We do seminars or workshops... to explain about the gas... and explain its distribution and the like” (November 2015). Although I arrived in Mtwara after the pipeline’s construction and during its eventual connection through to Dar es Salaam, wana Mtwara could not find clear answers as to what percentage of profits, if any, they would receive from the national government. Local government officers did not have or did not volunteer answers to these inquiries. In interviews, government officers communicated the existence of guarded knowledge through exaggerated acts of knowledge restriction and their reliance on the language of bureaucratic planning. When it comes to local government officials, bureaucracy, itself, functioned as a self-referential, technical solution to sensitive questions pertaining to the details of the natural gas sector. In response to inquiries on extractive industry timelines, officials, instead, provided abstract, circuitous answers to residents, answering, “what bureaucratic channel will deal with this aspect of the natural gas sector?” with, “There will be an office to deal with that. They will deal with it.” State representatives relied upon strictures of bureaucratic procedure in order to further their positions within the state in the face of ambiguity stemming from the murkiness of natural gas legal policy. In several ways, the ambiguity and insecurity underwriting natural gas planning 103 contributed to the image of a highly capable state as realized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. For instance, government actors emphasized the inevitability of an overarching development plan organized by high members of government office to fend off residents’ frustration over the ambiguities and murkiness of legal policy. Seeing as controversy over new gas policy in 2015 had temporarily tabled bills in Parliament, CSO and state actors mainly spoke of the efficacy of accountability measures and revenue policies in the future tense: “There will be an office for that” or “we are waiting to hear about that.” The ambiguity tied to such future tense pronouncements created the effect of making policy points unknowable and inevitable. The 2015 Bills Debate In this section, I introduce the 2015 Bills Debate as the result of state actors’ efforts to present the neoliberal-extractivist state as a uniquely qualified arbitrator of extractive industries dealings. Key legal amendments pertaining to the extractive industries reflect the necessary role of business broker and domestic defender that the central government is called upon to play. The presumption that the state, alone, holds the expertise to future natural gas production and national development in Tanzania is central to the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Although Tanzania only recently gained notoriety as a hydrocarbon source within the last decade, companies have conducted oil and gas explorations in Tanzania since the 1950s. In 1969, the state oil company TPDC, a parastatal company owned by the government, formed in a bid to encourage domestic petroleum production and industry and to ensure “direct state ownership of shares of operations” (Bofin and Pedersen 2017, 6). Under Nyerere’s leadership, TPDC introduced a PSA template for its partnership with AGIP, an Italian oil company, that affirmed national ownership of natural resources. This distinction designated subsoil minerals as state property prior to their extraction and featured as a critical precedent in authorizing the 104 Tanzanian state to dictate the terms of petroleum extraction with foreign parties (Bofin and Pedersen 2017, 6). In the wake of confirmed oil and gas findings near Songo Songo Island56 during the seventies, the government passed legislation detailing the terms of partnership between the central government and corporations. The Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act of 1980 which stipulated licensing protocol and rights as well as set up a system to handle disputes arising from conflict sustained by extractive activities. This legislation prevented conflicts of interest in partnerships by limiting the extent to which public-sector actors could benefit from the industry (Lyamuya n.d.). In the aftermath of the 1980s debt crises and Tanzania’s resultant adoption of privatizing aid conditionalities, the government amended extractive industry legislation to engender a more inviting financial environment for foreign oil companies. For instance, the Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act of 1980 still outlined state ownership of oil but stipulated that the minister of Energy and Minerals could form agreements with oil companies apart from TPDC (Bofin and Pedersen 2017, 6). Throughout the 2000s, Tanzania embarked on a trend of toughening contract terms for international oil companies (IOCs), culminating in the introduction of a new Model PSA (MPSA) template in 2008. The new MPSA entailed increased state ownership of operations granted to TPDC in every dealing (Bofin and Pedersen 2017, 4). The Power Sharing Agreement appointed TPDC as the trustee of resources and mandated that PSA contractors enter into the agreement with TPDC in all manners of business including the granting of licenses and even more minor matters. When BG (which has since been acquired by Royal Dutch Shell) discovered 56 Songo Songo Island is north of Mtwara and south of Mafia Island along Tanzania’s coast. 105 sizable enough reserves to justify construction of a liquified natural gas (LNG) refinery57 in 2010, IOCs’ interest in Tanzania intensified. In a bid to authorize the government to produce and profit off the country’s national resources in the lead-up to the presidential election, CCM MPs introduced three bills to Parliament under a controversial certificate of urgency: The Tanzania Petroleum Act; the Oil and Gas Revenue Management Act; and the Tanzania Extractive Industries (Transparency and Accountability) Act. The first Act stipulates that the government is charged with oversight and management of natural gas and oil extraction. In addition, the Petroleum Act distributes authority and oversight of the sector so that multiple branches of the government or the Ministry of Energy and Minerals hold authority over the majority of operations. For instance, mid and downstream operations fall under the purview of Energy and Water Utilities Regulatory Authority, while PURA is in charge of managing upstream operations. In an effort to gain international distinction for harmonization with EITI’s transparency standards and receive access to direct aid from EITI-Supporting Countries, the Tanzanian government had already signed onto the international Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).58 As stipulated by EITI, Tanzania needed to first establish a correlating body of oversight—the Tanzania Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (TEITI)—prior to completing the process of harmonization. The TEITI body currently exists underneath the governing umbrella of the Ministry of Minerals and Energy, the location of Tanzania’s own oil parastatal company, TPDC. In the lead-up to the passing of the three 2015 Acts, state-owned and 57 The refinery would have been necessary for the condensing and then liquification of gas prior to its transportation via pipeline. 58 EITI is an international standard for open and accountable governance of extractive industries set by a global organization of multinational stakeholders with 55 current signatory countries, 106 independent news media had anticipated TEITI’s effects on refining transparency measures in Tanzania (Poncian and Kigodi 2018). Such discussion alongside the rush of bills through Parliament contributed to a contradictory picture of Tanzanian political practice. Since the potential profitability of the natural gas reserves were first assessed, politicians and government representatives had little opportunity to debate local content policy, contract transparency, and revenue management. The introduction of a certificate of urgency59 by CCM MPs effectively tabled the bills, precluding discussion of the legislation in Parliament (Lange and Kinyondo 2016). Opposition party Parliament members interpreted the move as a means to legally enshrine CCM’s monopolization of control over the extractive industries. They suspected the bill’s authors of attempting to circumvent discussion of the controversial topics in the extractive sector legislation. Several Opposition leaders took umbrage with the underlying ambiguity of the bills. The general lack of detail threatened to derail opposition party efforts to make Production Sharing Agreements transparent and accessible to the general public. Additionally, the bills failed to provide specifics on how revenue from the natural gas would be returned to the Tanzanian citizenry, let alone Mtwara residents (Pedersen and Bofin 2015). Opposition party representatives, for the most part, campaigned for residents' rights to know the percentage of profits they would see prior to the bills’ passing. The Energy and Minerals Minister at the time, George Simbachawene, framed the financial stakes of the bills as too high to even make a matter of politics: “There are politicians who are criticizing these bills in order to achieve their political agenda,” he said, “and if we don’t enact this law, we are likely to lose our investors” (Mbashiru 2015). 59 A certificate of urgency is a legislative intervention aimed at foregoing necessary parliamentary procedure in light of pressing conditions. 107 Frustrations over the opacity of legal processes directing the country’s burgeoning natural gas legal infrastructure came to a head, however, when CCM speaker of the house, Anna Makinda, ordered forty-something members of the opposition party members out of assembly. The headlines from national newspapers at the time have captured the controversy associated with the proceedings, e.g., “Bill Passed with only Two Opposition MPs in House” (Mbashiru 2015). With fewer opposition representatives present to challenge the bills, the three Acts passed in a relative rush. On August 4, President Kikwete signed the bills into law. This drama, having played out in the run-up to the national election, lent weight to fears of ruling-party corruption in Mtwara. My own friends at Bambo Guest House sat for long stretches in front of the TV broadcasts of Parliament on the TBC. Grace, a young woman originally from Dar who quietly identified as a CCM supporter in conversations, shook her head in astonishment and occasionally “tsked” in the direction of reporters. Her younger brother, an active CUF member, refused to watch with us, only shaking his head angrily as he frequently passed by. While I did not have the opportunity to speak with government officials about the debate, I was able to interview Mtwara-based human relations (HR) director Nestor Phoye on the subject of the debate. Having often served as an intermediary between oil companies, government, and Mtwara communities, Phoye offered unique insight into the concerns and priorities of state actors. In particular, he had managed natural gas drilling and extraction teams with Wentworth Group (formerly Artumas) in 2006 and an HR consulting business in Mtwara’s most upscale, outer-reaching stretch of coastline. Prior to having worked in HR, Phoye had graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in anthropology and subsequently worked with a number of NGOs in the financial capital before learning of potential job opportunities within the extractive industries. His own interpretation of the legal drama reflected that of the Minister of 108 Energy and Minerals—act now to keep our investors and secure out profits. While considering his own excitement at the progression of Tanzania’s natural gas production, he recalled a lack of institutional knowledge that he had encountered in 2006 and now wanted to avoid: “there was no procedure as how to go about mandating land for use by gas companies, which individuals to approach regarding which questions” (Phoye 2015). This logic, in turn, mirrors the language of bureaucratic planning popularly on display within Tanzanian bureaucratic practice. Given Phoye’s familiarity with the sector and activities as the lone human resources agency in Mtwara specifically pertaining to the extractive industries, he had been approached by CSO and government representatives to participate in a review of the bills. In our interview, Phoye’s own framing of the 2015 bills debate controversy prioritized the unimpeded growth of the natural gas sector through legislation over the establishment of effective accountability and transparency protocols. Phoye’s logics mirrored the ruling party’s overarching argument: we cannot experience growth until we can begin extraction, and we cannot extract until the laws legitimizing extraction are in place. Therefore, policy must first be implemented: Well, it’s controversial because of the media but to me that law was supposed to be in place three years ago. But unfortunately, because of the delays and the bureaucracy, and the opposition, I’m sure there has been a lot of confrontation. I was invited to one of the meetings, to do some kind of opinion. I was invited in Dar es Salaam, and I have read that law from the first page to the end of the page. I find nothing wrong, honestly. The country has to start somewhere, and you have to start somewhere, you can't start if you don’t start. If you don’t decide to start, but at least there is (information) about local content now, there is (information) about [corporate social responsibility (CSR)], there is (information) about using local services for the industries, there is (information) about management of funds, and if the government will get money out of the oil and gas industries how’s it going to be administered? Those mechanisms are going to be put in that bill. It would be very difficult, even tomorrow, if we were producing a lot of money out of it (gas)—not knowing where it went. But at least now we have a law. We have a book(policy) that (says) if you do this, this is the consequence. So yes, I would say it’s controversial, cause it’s election time, and everyone’s looking for another opportunity to screw one another and demolish the other one’s reputation. You know politics? I’m not a politician. I don’t approve of politics. A 109 lot of things I don’t approve of, but they happen anyway. It (the bills) has (have) not started operation yet, cause the president has not signed it yet, but when it is in operation, there is at least a guideline that companies will sit down with a local government to decide the appropriate project that needs funding. (Phoye 2015) At the national level, the bill debacle had developed into a rallying cry against CCM corruption for opposition party supporters. I could only locate CSOs based out of Dar es Salaam such as the Oil, Natural Gas, and Environmental Association (ONGEA) who launched a public petition against the rushed legislation. In an interview, an officer of ONGEA castigated CCM MPs for attempting to push through legislation without first allowing stakeholder and civil society consultation. In an official document, the officer’s organization signed onto a Civil Society Coalition’s statement against the passing of the bills (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre 2015). Despite an increasingly visible backlash from opposition party, members over the manner in which the bills were passed, Parliament ultimately took no action to prevent their application. In the 1980s and 1990s, the national government introduced policy implementing advantageous investment and share-holding terms for foreign business actors in Tanzania’s extractive industries. Within the business-friendly legal framework of the ’80s and ’90s, IOCs benefitted more from oil production agreements than the national government. Since the 2000s, however, the government has made increasing efforts to balance investing the state with increasing amounts of authority and ownership in the extractive industries with continuing to encourage foreign investment. The 2015 extractive industry legal drama reflects tensions inherent in central state actors’ efforts to cultivate a legal framework and investment environment: The central government has attempted to make foreign investment in the natural gas sector easy and lucrative for external actors. At the same time, central government actors 110 have ensured the Tanzanian populace that citizens will profit from the opportunities and advantages created by their governance of the gas sector. The flawed assumption that the government can act in the best interest of the Tanzanian public and foreign investors in the extractive sectors is a key contradictory premise of the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. In the following scenes from fieldwork, lower- and higher-positioned government officers respond to rural audiences and my own questions on the burgeoning gas sector by mainly invoking the neoliberal-extractivist state as a driver of business and development. Scenes of the Neoliberal-Extractivist Imaginary Scene 1: The Dangote Cement Factory Inauguration In addition to the legal enshrinement of state authority, business ventures such as the Dangote Cement Factory also attributed state offices the authority to induce a lucrative investment environment. The capacity to foster Tanzanian and African entrepreneurialism is a key characteristic of the state within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Throughout the past decade, African institutions, leaders, and supporting global allies have focused on centralizing the role of the private sector in aiding Africa’s economic and political rehabilitation through forging multilateral cooperative relationships.60 In his entrepreneurial relationships, President Kikwete emphasized the African identity of industrial investors in domestic markets features. Kikwete’s success in attracting Dangote demonstrated the successful mobilization of African investments across countries to expand the economies of African countries beyond the home 60 In 2011, President Kikwete endorsed a new economic paradigm built on Pan-Africanist ideals, the African Consensus. 60 The forum’s members, including Nigeria and Ethiopia, intended for new kinds of multilateral partnerships across the continent to tackle increasingly pertinent themes for Africa (i.e., peace and security; development; cooperation; and institution- and capacity-building). “Local financing for sustainable and socially responsible businesses through community empowerment” stands out as one of three core principles (African Consensus Youth Forum 2015, 26). It is not clear if Kikwete and fellow member countries of the African Consensus (Nigeria and Ethiopia) are currently committed to building the African Consensus. 111 countries of the investors. This style of business represents a trickle-down approach to pan- Africanism that further distinguishes the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary approach to fostering development from that of the social-development imaginary. In 2015, President Jakaya Kikwete positioned himself as a shrewd arbitrator of development projects through his collaborations and business dealings with Nigerian entrepreneur Aliko Dangote. Born in 1957, Nigerian entrepreneur Aliko Dangote formed the Dangote Group in 1977 as a trading company. He later transformed Dangote Group into a manufacturing conglomerate. Dangote’s approach to business emphasizes localizing production of imported commodities, and his establishment of factories across Zambia, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, and Mozambique has earned him a reputation as a pan-African industrialist (Akinyoade and Uche 2018, 846; Cassell 2021). He is currently thought to be worth $11.8 billion (Cassell 2021). At the inauguration of Dangote’s cement factory near Msijute Village in Mtwara Rural District, Kikwete stressed the entrepreneur’s vision of building a pan- African financial empire. For his part, Kikwete aided in incorporating Tanzania into Dangote’s expansive business by supposedly offering the magnate reduced costs and even a private gas pipeline to fuel the new cement factory. Such a configuration would release the company from dependency on imported petroleum. When I had first arrived in Mtwara in February 2015, Dangote Cement Factory featured as critical evidence of Kikwete’s ability to lead the country. Upon arrival, I had stayed in the Chikongola Neighborhood of Mtwara Municipal District, an economic and social hub in close proximity to the central open-air markets and bus station. This area, in particular, had been extended grandiose promises regarding infrastructure development, business investments, and employment opportunities. Rather than an accelerated rate of development, Chikongola residents 112 faced pressure from price inflation following the late-2012 drop in the cost of oil on the global market. Additionally, numerous foreign business offices and investors had fled the district in the wake of May 2013’s violent protests, leading to general disapproval of the quality and rate of economic transformation in Mtwara, however, they still expressed trust that gas-driven development would transform the region. Of the residents with whom I had spoken during research, only a couple had seen the evidence of gas development in the form of pipeline construction. Many participants pointed out that they did not know how natural gas smelled, tasted, or appeared. More than anything else, renewed foreign corporate interest and investment and the increased cost of land stood out as evidence for development investment in the aftermath of the gas finds. May 2013’s violent protests and 2014’s fall in the global price of oil, however, eventually culminated in a waning of foreign interest and investment in the region. At that time, residents noted the closure of local business branches and a dip in the rate of land purchases. Amidst these negative indicators, Dangote stood out as a beacon of hope for investment in the region’s financial future. News coverage of the plant emphasized President Kikwete’s assurance that the cement plant would stimulate the local as well as national economy (McDubus 2015). Interviews with government officers such as Masasi’s District Assistant Secretary affirmed Dangote as an indicator that the future will likely bring development to the area: “You must wait for the future to see the benefits...perhaps Dangote’s factory will bring more changes and more cement. We also think that the economy will be very high. I think that every day people will benefit from the opportunities that are there.” (Masasi DAS 2015). Grace, a woman in her early twenties who had arrived in Chikongola neighborhood from Dar to work in her uncle’s guesthouse and raise her young daughter, informed me many times 113 that she did not know about the progress of natural gas development or want to discuss politics. Dangote’s decision to invest in Mtwara District, however, had caught her attention: “Kwa sasa hivi sijaona maendeleo labda makumpuni—muda wa kwanza—hususan Dangote, lakini makampuni wanasubiri kuanza rasmi” (For now I haven’t seen development—maybe companies (came) at first in particular Dangote, but companies are waiting to officially open) (Grace 2015). Grace’s focus on Dangote in light of her reluctance to speak on the subject of political or economic investments in Mtwara since the advent of natural gas extraction offers some insight to the influence he held within Mtwara Town communities. Chilumba, a cultural officer in urban Mtwara Town employed at the NGO ADEA held Dangote’s extensive private investment as responsible for the manifestation of development: “Yes, Dangote, he came last year, for opening the area for building the port, Dangote port, so the community over there they benefitted because they sold their land to Dangote, so people are happy in Mtwara...through natural gases. Yes” (Chilumba 2015).” Even though Chilumba supported the opposition party ChaDema, he still celebrated the arrival of business facilitated by CCM President Kikwete. For many residents, Dangote’s arrival served as evidence of Kikwete’s capacity to serve as the strong state leader conceived of within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Despite many residents’ distrust of CCM, they generally welcomed the economic opportunities Kikwete had cultivated in rural Mtwara. Outside of the guest house I had made my base of operations throughout 2015, I spoke with several young men in their early twenties regarding their economic prospects within the area. Although these wana Mtwara, most of whom worked as piki-piki (small motorbike) drivers, agreed that they had felt isolated from avenues of employment that might place them in the extractive industries, a couple agreed that Dangote’s plans to construct a cement factory offered hope into the region’s employment figures. One man 114 added that Dangote seemed a promising investor because he followed up on the promises that he offered. According to the young man, Dangote had refused to move his factory to the northern historical port city of Bagamoyo after having been begged to do so by then President Kikwete (Felix 2015). Rumors of Kikwete’s plans to invest in his northern birthplace weighed on the minds of many wana Mtwara, as they had interpreted any interest in the northern city as the continuation of the northern agenda against the southeast (“Scores Protest over Gas Benefits” 2012). For many young men lacking a source of secure employment, Dangote’s decision to invest in Mtwara spoke to the wealth and promise of their region. President Kikwete’s ability to secure Dangote’s through his style of business-friendly diplomacy, as celebrated in articles in neighborhood conversation and in the government-owned and independent newspapers (McDubus 2015; “Kikwete kuandika Historia Mtwara” 2015), had contributed to residents’ fairly positive development outlooks even after Mtwara had failed to transform into Dubai. To many rural and urban residents, Dangote’s decision to establish a cement factory in Mtwara served as indisputable evidence that the region was worth investment. In each of three focus groups of young men that I conducted throughout Mtwara rural and Masasi rural, at least one person would list Dangote as a positive change attributed to natural gas development and evidence of the state’s creation of an inviting climate for investment. Through my association with Chilumba at ADEA, I found the opportunity to attend the inauguration of Dangote Cement on October 10, 2015. Chilumba had been approached by the local government to arrange a performance and display of the local ethnic groups. At least two hundred community members from Mgao and other nearby villages had arrived to spectate the four-hour event. Their presence and participation in the ceremony would seemingly lend 115 authenticity to Dangote’s dedication to CSR compliance. Although the specifics of CSR standards (policy stipulating how corporations should invest in the communities that host their business) remained unclear in Tanzania at this time, Dangote had previously publicized that he would donate 1 million dollars toward the establishment of new schools and a hospital in the area. The division of space and seating positioned distinguished invitees from the elevated financial or political circles of Dangote’s economic empire inside a giant white tent. Meanwhile, construction workers and village members arranged themselves onto the ground. Elders and distinguished village officials occupied comfortable seating closest to the tents and were first to receive promotional gear and gifts such as t-shirts. Chilumba had been contracted to hire a local Makonde ngoma ensemble to entertain the Mtwara regional commissioner Halima Dendego, President Jakaya Kikwete, Aliko Dangote, and the Nigerian entourage with an exhibition of local cultural entertainment upon arrival. The ngoma dancers would have to wait long stretches of time in between guests’ arrivals to perform as various dignitaries from Nigeria and Chad arrived by helicopter. In a special address to villagers prior to the more formal speeches, Kikwete attempted to lay the important groundwork of establishing his ties and credentials in the southeastern region. His performance indicated insider knowledge of popular regional themes of such as territorial underdevelopment and foreign excess through anecdotes on the poor state of dirt roads and the foolhardy attempt by a South African man to raise lions in Mtwara’s rural district. Perhaps most importantly, Kikwete cemented the region’s ties to central state governance and hierarchies of patrimonial politics by referencing the good works of his predecessor, former President Benjamin Mkapa (1995-2005), who was born in southeastern Masasi district. Toward the 116 conclusion of his address, Kikwete mentioned that Tanzania’s partnership with Dangote has contributed to the expansion of the national as well as African economy. In addition to Kikwete and Dangote, esteemed dignitaries from Nigeria attended the inauguration. Organizers consciously entwined Dangote’s wealth with nationalistic narratives and regionally specific stories which lent a degree of insider status to the northern-born president. The appearance of the Prime Minister of Chad along with ministers from Malawi and Mozambique lent cohesion to the celebration’s pan-African framing, reinforcing scales of belonging among Dangote (the African continent), the Tanzanian nation, Mtwara region, and the surrounding villages throughout the ceremony. Poles displaying the flags of Nigeria, Dangote Ltd., Tanzania, Chad, Mozambique, and Malawi lined the red runway guiding esteemed political and financial figures from their parking lots to the VIP tent. Fostering African financial partnerships in the name of pan-Africanism lent authority to the overall development scheme. From my seating location outside the primary tent, I could only make out the speeches delivered by President Kikwete and Aliko Dangote. Dangote, who spoke before the Tanzanian president, praised Tanzania and Kikwete for fostering an investment-friendly atmosphere for economic opportunities such as the Dangote Cement Factory. He insisted that Dangote would generate a “multiplier effect” and enhance other parts of the Tanzanian economy. This reference garnered grand applause from wana Mtwara situated around me outside the main tent that overtook any of the applause Kikwete had formerly received. He mentioned Tanzania’s reputation as the fastest growing nation in East Africa, due, in large part, to foreign direct investment. Dangote’s claim that 7000 individuals, in particular youth and small business owners, would receive employment in the area received an even more enthusiastic response. 117 Villagers who had been perched on a steep brick impediment behind the outside seating section rose to clap and cheer following this section. Later on in the day, an ADEA office member spoke on Dangote’s credibility and integrity during a debriefing following the close of the inauguration ceremony. Ramadhani claimed the central government had wanted to lure Dangote to invest in the rejuvenation of Bagamoyo, but Dangote denied him, insisting that he wanted to stay in Mtwara” (Ramadhani, 2015). Whether or not Dangote had refused to move his operations from Mtwara, Ramadhani’s focus on the entrepreneur’s selection of Mtwara highlights the significance attached to including Mtwara as the base in a vertically configured order of financial and political dealings. In the inauguration’s aftermath, Chikongola neighbors celebrated Dangote’s ties to then- ruling party CCM presidential candidate John Magufuli. As members of Magufuli’s party, CCM, they claimed that the entrepreneur’s association with Magufuli served as evidence of the economic partnership’s trustworthiness (Field Note, October 24, 2015, Mtwara Rural District). In this particular framing, Magufuli’s reputation for honesty and perseverance in the run-up to the 2015 Presidential Election lent clout to the Nigerian entrepreneur. At this point in the race, Magufuli’s no-nonsense, pragmatic reputation had positioned him quite favorably among other prominent ruling-party political players whose profiles had been tarnished by highly visible corruption scandals. The opposition candidate running against Magufuli, Edward Lowassa, had been ousted from President Jakaya Kikwete’s presidential cabinet following the administration’s involvement in unlawful subcontracting in the Richmond energy scandal (Gray 2015; Phillips 2010; Roder 2019). In turn, neighbors also used Dangote’s reputation as evidence for Magufuli’s presidential merits: “That is how we know he is a good politician, because Dangote, powerful businessman 118 and richest man in Africa, has walked with him” (Field Note, October 24, 2015, Mtwara Rural District). My neighbor’s confirmation of Magufuli’s positive character rested on his having “walked” alongside the entrepreneur. Walking has often presented in depictions of Nyerere as evidence of his humble origins and dedication to the moral ethos of his socialist platform. In renderings of his character, supporters had often stressed his tendency to forego the trappings of material wealth. Nyerere’s had, in particular, expressed distaste for his fellow party members’ visible consumption of Ford cars during the start of economic liberalization. Tanzanians often portrayed Nyerere as having walked with the common man (Bjerk 2017). In this neoliberal turn, Dangote, a billionaire and model of capitalist success, can be interpreted as an embodiment of pan-Africanism in the neoliberal-extractivist sense. Kikwete and local government officials’ involvement in the Dangote Inauguration conveyed a pan-Africanism centered on the trickling down of African capitalist investment in African nations. Within this pan-African paradigm, however, African citizens are expected to improve themselves by taking advantage of the economic opportunities afforded by African investment. Through development performances, state actors attempt to establish a commonality of purpose (development) with their audiences. In framing development as performance, Becker (2014) suggests that the performative embellishments of developmental measures (such as government officials’ reframing development objectives to appeal to rural audience’s priorities) often overshadow and supplant the specific content being conveyed. Government officials’ efforts to appeal to rural audiences in development performances can create the effects of shared objectives between the state elite and citizens (Becker 2014, 2019). For instance, an administrator may curry favor with rural constituents by emphasizing how a particular plan or politician will benefit villagers’ local environments. A crowd of villagers could voice their 119 disagreement with a development platform if they feel their own interests have not been recognized. On the other hand, a convincing performance by government actors may encourage rural residents to uphold the image of an expert state. Within the Dangote Inauguration performance of public-private partnership, elite state actors cast the state in the key role of facilitating business interests and attracting of foreign investors. In the Dangote Cement Factory inauguration, Kikwete and Dangote situated the factory as evidence of future economic opportunities and a moral Tanzanian state through its dedication to an African entrepreneurial empire. Their presentation of corporate-state partnership suggests that elite government actors are attempting to build commonality with the southeast by contributing to moral conversations on pan-Africanism. Kikwete and Dangote’s efforts to perform pan-Africanism highlight national development as a project premised on the maintenance of reciprocal relations between government and citizens. Following the event, residents who had attended and members of the general public celebrated the Kikwete-Dangote African partnership. In the wake of neoliberal reforms, national governments across Africa lost the capacity to fund social-welfare programs. The dissolution of such services, in turn, eliminated many of the outlets through which citizens had formerly experienced and understood their national governments (Ferguson 2006). This shift has fostered political disillusionment among African citizenries who, in turn, view present-day leaders and political institutions as incapable of embodying national ethos and morals (Fouéré 2014).61 This sense of “demoralization” in politics is said to be particularly prevalent in the context of extractive industry projects, where state 61 This phenomenon is reflected in the wave of nostalgia for Nyerere and his adherence to and embodiment of Ujamaa’s moral precepts. 120 actors are thought to especially prioritize capital accumulation and investment of capital over the competing interests of subnational communities (Ferguson 2006; Watts 2004). In fact, literature suggests that extractive enclaves function as definitive sites of demoralization, where residents no longer expect political leaders and actions to adhere to moral tenets of national belonging (Ferguson 2005, 2006). Political actors and community members’ efforts to pursue and contest development within the extractive sector, however, challenges this picture. The Dangote Cement Factory inauguration, for instance, offers an example in which elite state actors such as the president adopt regionally specific styles, stories, and values in acting as pan-African business broker within the burgeoning extractive sector. Rural villagers’ mainly positive reception of the pan- African performance featured as a key component in Kikwete’s and Dangote’s projection of cooperation and promises for increased employment opportunities and overall heightened economic activity in the region. Their presentation accomplished more than Becker (2019) covers in her ethnography of smaller development exchanges between local government officers and local audiences. In the lead-up to the 2015 Presidential Election, Kikwete was certainly attempting to curry favor in a region historically suspicious of CCM. However, the president’s efforts to court Dangote also represented a bold new characterization of African business partnerships that simultaneously seated Kikwete as a strong driver of development based on entrepreneurship. Within the scene of the factory’s grand opening, rural audiences cheered wildly upon hearing of the 7000 or 9000 job opportunities the company would soon offer. Their enthusiasm for employment opportunities but also the specific kind of African entrepreneur Dangote represented served to endorse a model of trickle-down pan-Africanism. 121 I view the inauguration as a performance of neoliberal pan-Africanism. Elite state actors and industrialists made efforts to highlight forms of African entrepreneurialism for the rural audiences in attendance. Such displays of state-fostered entrepreneurial development distinguish a shift in the roles of central government officers. Popular iterations of neoliberalism entail the withdrawal of the state from the market, but the state within the Tanzanian neoliberal-extractivist imaginary is viewed as vital for its expertise in establishing an optimal business environment in which to grow the natural gas sector. Scene 2: Knowledge Restriction and the Neoliberal-Extractivist Imaginary The burnt-out shells of ambulances blended so seamlessly into the town council building’s front walls that I had initially overlooked them on my way to meet Masasi Town’s Mtendaji Mkuu’s (chief executive officer) in November of 2015. The rusted metal attested to the anger of past demonstrations that had organized in Masasi’s urban center to oppose the government-directed Mtwara–Dar es Salaam Pipeline Project in January of 2012.62 Masasi Town Council’s executive officer gestured to the abandoned vehicles outside his office in response to my question, “How had natural gas extraction affected Masasi?” He mentioned that the town had lost its ability to transport residents to nearby hospitals because protesters had lit the two Isuzu cars on fire: “we were negatively affected” (tumeathiriwa wa negative) (November 25, 2015). With the evidence of 2012’s violence not ten feet from us, the Mtendaji Mkuu turned to discussion of more positive effects, stressing the significance of economic gain at the national, regional, and, in particular, district level for Masasi: “It (the gas) will bring about a big revolution. Masasi is central on the route to Songea. Paved roads will be finished. Also, (the 62 These protests entailed charges of arson, vandalism, and assault but received less coverage in media than May 2013’s violent confrontations with the national guard. 122 road) from Nachingwea to Tandahimba (will be paved). There will be a big “multiplier effect”” (May 25, Masasi Town). Although Mtwara Rural District was the district of gas discovery, Mkuu predicted that natural gas development would soon transform Masasi district into a region (“Masasi itakuwa mkoa”). Mkuu’s grand development expectations for the growth of Masasi’s administrative capacity and identity as a natural consequence of petroleum-based national-level economic growth would echo in the predictions of other Masasi Town Council officers. Superior in rank to the Mtendaji Mkuu in Tanzania's hierarchy of government offices, Masasi’s DAS adopted a more prescriptive approach to the discussion of gas effects in our interview. The DAS, who directly supports the activities of the president-appointed DC, is popularly viewed as serving the interests of the central government at the local level. On the whole, district-level appointees are often viewed as critical nodes in the transfer of funding and knowledge between central and local government offices. While they are legally invested with the ability to pass by-laws, the central government could ultimately override district-level legislative decisions (Lange 2008). When I entered the office of the DAS with Dennis, the Mtwara-based local historian and cultural ambassador who had accompanied me to Masasi in the capacity of research assistant, I was surprised to find the DAS joined by three other members of his district council at a large desk. The appearance of bureaucratic efficiency set the tone in the crowded room; council members had dressed in business suits, and each officer had placed a notebook and pen before him on the desk. Once I had signed my name to the visitor’s book, registering my presence in Masasi’s bureaucratic landscape, I situated myself next to Dennis at the other side of the narrow, long table. An atlas of local maps sat on the table between us. 123 After quick introductions by each officer and Dennis’s more familiar exchanges based on his past collaborations on the MaKuYa cultural festival (mentioned in Chapter 2), I posed my question on the “effects” of natural gas extraction to the council members. As the DAS laid out his reasoning, council members nodded their consent: Hawana “effects”. “Athari” (ni) jambo mbaya (There are no ‘effects.’ An effect is something bad.) but you can say: what are the benefits? ‘Faida gani?’ (what are the benefits?) The discovery of gas is something that could push forward the maendeleo (development) of the mkoa (region) and nchi (country) (2015) The DAS’s policing of language effectively ruled out follow-up questions regarding violence and community conflict. In suggesting that I substitute “athari” with “faida,” the DAS implored me to abandon terminology (“athari”) that presumed causation. We could not discuss the ill effects of central government-driven natural gas extraction if officers had only witnessed benefits. Adopting “faida,” meanwhile, placed focus on the planned benefits of gas extraction. The verb form of “faida”, “kufadhili” (to sponsor), connotes a donor-recipient relationship and is often used in the context of development and local government work (e.g., “Tunashukuru shirika la Oxfam kwa kufadhili mradi huu” (We thank the Oxfam organization for sponsoring this project.)). As an outsider whose exploration of the extractive industries had to be carefully monitored, I found myself in a unique position from which to observe the policies and procedures that pushed and reinforced the logics of state-directed, private sector-based petroleum development. At first glance, the Mkuu Mtendaji’s focus on the natural gas industry’s growth prospects for district offices might appear to align with Ferguson’s (1994) view of development as an apparatus that organizes social life in accordance with the legitimating techniques of development. As such, complex issues such as social inequality are transformed into development problems that can only be solved by development solutions. In my conversation 124 with the DAS, his almost immediate substitution of “issues” for “benefits” precluded consideration of social conflict surrounding the natural gas project. This exchange demonstrates the application of proactive development planning. Given the high surveillance under which the government had placed me, Dennis and I understood the importance of adhering to the limited number of days in Masasi Town that the regional government-approved travel itinerary had allotted us. With only a few days in which to conduct interviews, district and municipal council members graciously arranged to sit down with us in rapid-fire succession of meetings. This configuration only added to the explicitly curated production of bureaucratic efficiency. From my perspective as a visiting western researcher, the professional stances and attire of the district councilmen during the scheduled interview with the DAS resembled the general styles of government offices on Mtwara Town’s coast. The seeming similarities produced the effect on an organized bureaucratic body. When I sat down with the council of men after having expected a personal interview, I soon realized I was in a debriefing. While I had intended to ask the DAS questions pertaining to specific back-and-forths he had with residents regarding the natural gas industry’s impact on Masasi, the objective of the councilmen’s performance proved more in line with producing or suggesting abstract policy for my observation. HR manager Bwana (Bw.) Phoye’s experience playing the role of intermediary between Mtwara communities and foreign oil companies since 2006 offers additional insight into the pressures facing government officials to act as informed implementers of policy. At the same time, they often lack access to valuable knowledge pertaining to activities within their own region. Phoye shared with me the extent to which local government officials’ knowledge regarding the development of natural gas projects and policy had been limited back in 2006: 125 It seems that all these policies are formulated in headquarters, in Dar es Salaam, and immediately people were coming here for projects, equipment. There was movement, and the local authorities were very, very worried for it—especially the government people. And it was like, “what are you guys doing? What’s this, what’s this?” (Phoye 2015) In 2015, recently elected President Magufuli occupied a key role in the exercise of knowledge restriction by district officers. They mainly suggested that Magufuli, as head of the Tanzanian state, could wisely navigate political obstacles due to his unique ability to conjure strong business relations while maintaining a nationalistic trajectory. Masasi’s DAS predicted Magufuli would set a good example as president: “MAGAFULI! Hizi fursa (these are opportunities). The way that opportunities start, they must come from a good environment” (2015). Officers suggested or directly stated that he had access to secret knowledge concerning gas contracts that would help to foster a lucrative development environment. Apart from government officials, young male and female rural villagers suggested that a capable business broker as president is necessary for the effective running of the state. A young man in Madimba voiced his support for the then newly elected president in response to my question regarding how young people might prepare for the gas economy. He trusted that Magufuli would bring about a good economy in which he would be able to seek employment. In response to my question asking what roles and offices are charged with handling natural gas concerns at the local level, the DAS responded by outlining that the Tanzania Electric Supply Company63 (TANCESO), not the local government, per se, is entrusted with making sure villagers see the benefits of natural gas: “there are other bodies that have to implement the policies and rules that Wizara ya Nashati na Madini (the Ministry of Energy and Minerals) 63 TANESCO is the parastatal electricity company in which the government has the majority shares. 126 makes—and that is TANESCO. TANESCO has to make sure that the gas which is coming from Mnazi Bay has to reach every citizen and help each one.” The DAS meant that TANESCO, in partnership with the American power company Symbion, was in the first stage of construction on a 400-megawatt (MW) power plant. In 2015, TANESCO was still in the process of connecting villages in Mtwara and its neighboring region of Lindi to a power grid fueled by natural gas (“TANESCO and Symbion” 2013).64 By bringing up TANCESO and pointing to the benefits of electricity through natural gas, the DAS precluded addressing the responsibilities of government to ensuring benefits for villagers and showcased a supposedly efficient system in which residents had already received tangible benefits (connection to the electricity grid) as a result of investment in the natural gas sector. Contradictions of this efficiency emerged throughout the course of focus groups in rural Mtwara and Masasi. Residents faulted TANESCO for setting electrification standards in housing materials and occupancy that excluded villagers who had grass-thatched roofs and travelled annually to Mozambique. While Masasi’s municipal planning officers, two men and one woman in their early- to mid-thirties, recognized the challenges that faced many rural residents, they assured me that they could not rectify the situation at the district or municipal level. Issues with TANESCO had to be taken up at the regional offices in Mtwara urban. While these municipal officers acknowledged the particular obstacles facing rural villagers, they referenced protocol as determined by government hierarchy to absolve themselves of any responsibility in the matter. Multiple municipal-level officers recognized community members’ frustrations but leaned on technicalities of protocol to profess their inability to effect change during fieldwork. 64 This grid had been intended, in part, to appease Mtwara residents in the wake of the pipeline’s announcement but also to prepare for the energy requirements of factories such as Dangote. 127 When I attempted to raise the questions of villagers’ grasp of gas policy content before the DAS and councilmen, the officer seated to the DAS’s interjected to foreground the significance of role recognition in determining authority and maintaining order: R: Do many citizens have questions for you about gas? DAS: They’re there, they’re there. They come to ask what benefits are coming from this. Councilman: Gas is a mineral. And it is needed to have explanation of what that means, coming from the right authority, so that people will believe the info and will trust the authority. DAS: We do seminars or workshops to explain about the gas. And explain its distribution, etc. (2015) The councilman interrupted the DAS’s acknowledgement of residents’ contested benefits by rerouting focus to a recitation of the expected systematic production and movement of knowledge by virtue of its relevant scientific content. The officer’s reference to gas, as a mineral, necessitating heightened procedural protocol relates to the specifically scientific content of the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. It is widely assumed that the president, his ministers, and expert producers of scientific knowledge have the widest access to the highly sought-after information regarding the natural gas sector. Masasi’s DAS conceived of his position as below the central government. He imagined gas profits trickling down from the state’s expert handling of international and national business deals: It could influence, in regard to infrastructure, roads, the health sector, sector of water, there are many things that fall under infrastructure—it is necessary that there will be changes. The changes that come from gas will be taken from a national fund—but if we get a lot from the national fund, there will be changes for us down here—the economy will be good, the govt will benefit, it will create a good budget—and if the budget is good, then the infrastructure will be good, the water sector will be good. The infrastructure also relates to the agriculture and 128 then that will be good. Therefore, if things get a push, there will be changes. (2015) Masasi Town’s Municipal Council Officer of Welfare (Ofisa Ustawi) highlighted the significance of receiving information from the right authorities in a later interview: “Tatizo haina. Upate ushauri kutoka kwa wataalum. DC for wilaya or by RC” (“There’s no problem. You will get advice from the experts—either from the DC for district-level matters or the RC). When I returned to the topic of relationships between citizens, the government, and the gas companies at the table of district councilors, the DAS situated knowledge restriction as an essential characteristic of bureaucratic planning. According to the representatives, regional officers are privy to necessary, sensitive knowledge. Regional administrators, therefore, are qualified to manage and address larger issues at hand based upon their access to expert knowledge: We are at the district level, not the regional level. Sometimes bad things will happen with people in another district. And then automatically we will get the information. We will be called to a meeting—and we will be told about how things are being run. But Mtwara is peaceful, I am telling you it’s peaceful. (2015) After a period of prolonged silence during which Dennis hinted with a glance that we should drop the subject of government and citizens relationships, I moved on to a preferred question among government officials. Although I did not secure many interviews in Mtwara Town with district-level officers, I did speak with several in confidence on the subject of citizens’ expectations of natural gas. In these discussions, officers tended to enthusiastically take up the subject of preparation. The topic of citizen responsibility, reflected in the question of “how can citizens prepare for the natural gas economy,” comprises a critical theme of the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. In political claims and documents (such as workshop materials), government representatives direct focus to how 129 citizens may prepare rather than what they may expect from natural gas extraction. This emphasis on self-preparation complements familiar discourse of Tanzanian government such as self-reliance in suggesting that it is the responsibility of residents—not the state—to cultivate opportunities for their own economic self-improvement. In the context of preparation, officials often told constituents to “fuga kuku” (raise chickens) so that they might sell eggs to the higher- skilled factory employees temporarily situated near their villages: “Get exact information. You can’t prepare yourself without information. But if you know, you can prepare economically, politically. They can take the opportunities that come from gas. They can look to the market and think about buying chickens. You have to buy it for very expensive—so you should say look, there’s an opportunity…. You can make a profit.” (DAS 2015) District, municipal, and lower-lying ward officers frequently suggested “raise chickens” in rural Mtwara region, where chickens seemed optimal animals for a business venture.65 As previously established, the conceptualization of citizenship underpinning Tanzania’s Vision 2025 centers on the individualistic pursuit of economic opportunity. International and national policy-makers craft policy that assumes social actors as economic actors that, through rational choice, can prosper through their integration into the economic systems set by government. In Tanzania, male youth66 pose a particularly vocal, visible challenge to prescriptions of the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. In Mtwara urban, young men are employed in a variety of service jobs such as piki-piki and tuk tuk drivers. In 2016, Tanzania had a population of 55 million people, of whom 28 million were under 25 (“Tanzania’s Next 65 Chickens, in particular, featured as a popular recommendation, as raising larger animals required greater starting capital. Mtwara’s climate and low-nutrient soil also made herding large animals a capital-intensive, risk-prone investment. 66 The World Bank 2010/11 National Panel Survey, Demographic and Health Surveys identify youths as people within the age range of 15-24. Local village representatives’ selection of young men reflects this range. 130 Generation” 2016). Scholars have covered the shared experience of challenges facing Tanzanian youth. The conditions informing the outlook of maisha magumu (life is hard) include the attraction of migration to urban destinations such as Dar. Once in Dar, is it is difficult to maintain consistent employment in sector recognized as formal by the government. Youth in southeastern Tanzania particularly rely upon agricultural work but often do not own land, themselves. Many who migrate from rural areas within Mtwara region to Mtwara Town perform casual labor or take part in services and petty trade that would be looked upon as part of the informal sector. These circumstances suggest why government actors’ predictions of economic growth and employment opportunities had raised expectations prior to the confirmation of the Mtwara–Dar es Salaam Pipeline Project. A male environmental officer in his thirties responded to my question on preparing for the gas economy by stating that “the youth should get education about everything. It is very important. They can, but they refuse.” (Nov 24 2015). This statement further supports the neoliberal-extractivist version of development in suggesting that youth who fail to find opportunities in the system are not fulfilling their duties as citizens. A younger male member of the DAS council did mention the difficulties youth without secondary school training faced when trying to find job positions in Mtwara: “I would like to add three things: there’s the economy, politics, and education. You need to know science in order to work in some of these companies, so people need to be given the skills to get jobs in some of these places (DAS)”. In suggesting that the youth of Mtwara urban and rural districts need to be “given the skills” to benefit from the natural gas sector, however, the councilman does not imply that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure such opportunities. 131 This section has explored the roles that members of the Masasi district- and municipal- level governments officers expect citizens and themselves to play within the neoliberal- extractivist model of development. State actors conveyed, produced, and restricted knowledge in ways that evoked a seemingly inscrutable state. The president is viewed as the top administrator of natural gas projects, and, therefore, qualified to access and exercise expertise on natural gas policy. In line with neoliberal-extractivist logic, it is understood that information and opportunities will flow down to underlying administrative units and citizens who have prepared for them. Such assumptions are key to fostering the neoliberal-extractivist development imaginary. Scene 3: Development Imaginaries in Contestation Dennis and his contacts in the Masasi and Mtwara District councils largely organized the focus groups I conducted within the villages of Lengo, Nanguruwe, and Madimba. The conditions and circumstances in which these activities took place allowed for my observance of contestations over development imaginaries between rural residents and elected ward officers. Soon after arriving in the location of my first focus group, Lengo, I learned that a village officer would be present at each session as a research condition. Locally elected officers would also prove responsible for generating the requested number of participants for each of the three groups questioned within a given village: vijana (young men), wanawake (women), and wazee (Elder men). Across nine focus groups, with six participants per group, I posed questions to 54 people concerning experiences of the natural gas industry from the perspective of rural Mtwara residents On the whole, many uncomfortable confrontations over political accountability between group participants and facilitators reflect rural Tanzanians’ demands for direct state involvement 132 in ensuring widespread, enduring development. In several exchanges, government facilitators supported the model of development upheld by the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. In contrast to the attitude of district- and municipal-level government officers, however, one village officer allowed and even encouraged rural residents’ expectations of more direct forms of state intervention in natural gas development. In contrasting my conversations with district- and municipal actors with focus group work facilitated by ward-level officers, I found that workers who had received their positions through appointment (district and municipal officers) more often supported the expertise of a neoliberal-extractivist state and placed responsibility for development on individual citizens. Meanwhile, some village-level officers accepted or even affirmed development as conceived of within the social-development imaginary. Unlike the DAS or DC, village council members are elected by their peers. During focus groups, I observed village officers as dynamic intermediaries and translators of policy. While I unfortunately did not have the opportunity to interview ward officers, I gleaned much from their varied interactions with focus group members. The village officer from Nanguruwe, the second village visited after Lengo in Masasi district, stayed clear of the forum. In Madimba, the village situated near a small gas refinery, the village officer sat in on exchanges and intervened several times to challenge the logic of young men group members, in particular. Across focus groups and interviews, community members reported that the promises and expectations of benefits derived from natural gas met numerous obstacles and restrictions in application. Promises of employment proffered by TPDC and other oil and gas companies only extended so far within the socioeconomic economic contexts of Mtwara urban and rural districts. The youth, men, and women of rural Mtwara region, for the most part, lacked the technical or professional education to practice within the new refineries that facilitated gas extraction and 133 distribution. Women, in particular, mentioned feeling edged out of employment opportunities tied to the extractive industries. Even those who had gained the requisite training felt intimidated by the prospects of working in predominantly male spheres of business. During town-based fieldwork, I had noticed particular businesses such as Ophir Oil attempt to promote the visibility of women working in the natural energy sector. These companies displayed them on the cover of their magazines and advertised special scholarships exclusively extended to women. While in Tanzania, however, I only encountered one woman who worked with the natural gas and oil companies at TPDC in Dar es Salaam. During the young men’s focus group in Nanguruwe, rural Mtwara, a participant laid out the having received the necessary education for work within difficulties he experienced in making money and accessing employment opportunity without the natural gas industry. In response to my question asking how people might prepare for the gas market, the same young man took issue with my placement of responsibility on the part of villagers. In his opinion, villagers and the youth, in particular, had already started their work of preparation: “They have already started. They have already started raising chickens and forming cooperatives. But these (kinds of) development are weak.” Weak development (maendeleo hafifu), according to this young man’s narrative, referenced particularly weak and unreliable forms of development upon which he could not rely. This characterization draws a strong critique of the development afforded citizens within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Following this, the ward secretary assigned to me on that particular day replied with the response: If you get a customer, then you will get the market. “fuga kuku” (raise chicken). When the young man attempted to address the improbability of such a scheme for his specific circumstances (the difficulty he faced in acquiring land rights for such a venture), the district 134 officer, again, cut him off in English: “It’s a trickle-down effect. Prepare” (Lengo, November 2015). In cases where government offices had to respond to development expectations of residents, the “trickle-down” effect appeared to relieve government agents and officers of responsibility in fostering a widespread form of development. In particular, reference to the “trickle-down” economy reinforced that responsibility for attaining development rested with individual citizens within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. The ward officer challenged the young man’s efforts to blame the state for ambiguities in land policy Participants in each session emphasized the need for the government (in particular, Magufuli) to ensure accountability and transparency in natural gas oversight. Conversations tended to falter, however, once group participants expressed their frustrations with the structural challenges facing village members in Mtwara’s natural gas-based economy. A young male in Lengo, the furthest inland village, complained that there was no transparency (hakuna uwazi) in response to a question on government involvement in the natural gas sector. In Lengo, the relationship between county executive officer and young men seemed much more familiar and friendly than in the other villages. The youth implored the government facilitator to speak with the government on their behalf. Mtendaji Kata nodded his head in return and looked to his phone seated in his lap. That this exchange did not meet with opposition from the seated official suggests the worker’s muted support for greater direct involvement. Furthermore, the logic that the youth employed evoked the social-development image of the state’s role in ensuring development. In all nine focus groups sections, I asked residents to comment on changes they had witnessed since the onset of natural gas extraction. Although most participants claimed to have seen little or no changes in the wake of gas extraction, many did mention that additional gas 135 availability had caused TANESCO to enhance the district’s electrical network connectivity. As a result of the increased number of energy hook-ups, several women in Madimba stated that the increased connectivity to electricity had saved them time and resources by making them less dependent on charcoal for fuel. For instance, a woman in her forties from the Lengo focus group anticipated increasing connectivity to the electricity grid will reduce the work women have to do (“umeme utapunguziwa kazi kwa mama”) such as cutting down trees to burn for fuel. For even more women, however, the subject of TANESCO raised frustrations with government inaction. Masasi district's Akina Mama representative claimed that while some women did benefit from the extension of natural gas lines to a greater number of houses around Madimba’s natural gas refinery, TANESCO’s strict building restrictions had prevented many residents from enjoying the benefits of the energy source. For instance, the para-statal company had set an ordinance that grass-thatched houses could not qualify for natural gas hook-ups. This policy excluded many houses in the Mtwara and Masasi urban districts from benefitting from the gas-fueled energy source.67 One young man in Madimba further explained in English, “TANESCO only hooks electricity up to houses with tin roofs. Or, if you go to Mozambique and return part of the year, then you will not qualify for TANESCO.” When young women and men addressed these issues, the ward facilitators either did not respond or nodded in agreement. In agonizing over the unfair policies of TANESCO, residents portrayed a state that did not care or was incapable of intervening. Accounts of TANESCO generally critiqued the version of the expert state that most officers projected, as it seemed that rural residents required a greater level 67 Rural Electrification Agency (REA) and TANESCO said that grass-thatched houses could be connected to the electricity grid in 2019. 136 of intervention from the government in order to more fully experience the benefits of the gas industry. In two instances, participants critiqued the neoliberal-extractivist model of development according to the criteria of the social-development imaginary. In the first exchange that played out within the village of Nanguruwe, a young woman artfully addressed the uneven development born from the extractive sector: “Mkuu is exploring everything. Manufaiko? Watamfaidika kuliko sisi; hali ngumu...(lakini) viongozi watafagiafagia”68 (The chief government officers (probably in reference to DC or RC) is exploring everything. Benefits? They (the rich or the well- positioned) will benefit more than we will; it’s a hard situation (or position to be in). Leaders will clean up things.) (Focus Group 2015). As the younger woman spoke in the meeting room provided for us, her eyes frequently returned to the elected ward secretary who had accompanied us. Although the female participant did not directly challenge the secretary by suggesting that government officers receive disproportionately high profits from natural gas extraction, she had effectively acknowledged the unequal opportunities afforded both of them. After meeting the secretary’s eye, she smoothed over tensions by suggesting that government leaders are invested with the expertise and knowledge to address these challenges. While the woman had initially disparaged the neoliberal-extractivist model of development, she chose to ease tensions during the exchange by upholding the image of the expert state as conceived within the neoliberal- extractivist imaginary While in Lengo, members from the wazee group reported that resident and government sit like a family (“tunakaa kama familia”), the Madimba group expressed a more divided view of 68 “Kufagiafagia” references, in particular, the description attributed to then presidential candidate John Magufuli to describe his focus on practicality and anti-corruption platform. 137 the categories of actors. One older man complained of the secretive political atmosphere, contrasting natural gas-era political relations with the older regimes of authority such as that of Julius Nyerere. He suggested that government leaders these days do not share information with villagers. “Siku hizi hajashirikii… he (the local government representative) has not shared. People from the company came but hawajatoa taarifa (they have not given information), not local government. Sisi waTanzania, haki, bado (We Tanzanians do not have rights yet.” In this example, the older man clearly critiqued communication and the distribution of information in present-day Mtwara with his idea of how relations between government and citizens worked in the past. He condemns state actors’ efforts to restrict knowledge, a key strategy of the neoliberal- extractivist imaginary, and contrasts this occurrence with the more widespread distribution of information and resources indicative of the social-development imaginary. Overall, residents contested the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary during focus group changes by suggesting that the government needed to intervene to a greater extent in order to effect actual structural change. Furthermore, discussions on employment brought to light residents’ dissatisfaction with the inaccessible, unrealistic forms of development that the government expected citizens to attain for themselves. Such disagreements brought to light rural residents’ desire for the role of central government as conceived within the social-development imaginary. While some ward officers allowed residents to critique the current model of development and the state upheld by many state actors, most reinforced the neoliberal- extractivist model of development in reminding citizens that development is their responsibility. resources. 138 Conclusion Historically, local government officers in rural Tanzania employed development planning to project and organize resources and relationships within their social and political networks. In the aftermath of gas discoveries, however, natural gas policy and business expertise have transformed into key elements of political authority. State actors in local and central government rely upon their proximity and assumed ability to access information on natural gas policy in order to make their roles as officers relevant. Since 2010, government representatives have increasingly relied upon the acts of knowledge restriction such as cancelling meetings and referencing bureaucratic protocol in order to manage access to information on gas policy and to conceal insecurities in the government’s own handling of gas issues. In a demonstrating neoliberal pan-African partnership, Kikwete projected a state capable of delivering development through the forging of lucrative business relationships with African entrepreneurs such as Dangote. Meanwhile, in interviews with government representatives and exchanges with ward officers, government workers emphasized that individual citizens were responsible for attaining development by seeking opportunities in entrepreneurial ventures (i.e., raising chickens). Overall, in these scenes of post-conflict government work and activity, officers upheld the state as uniquely qualified to attract foreign investment and guard domestic interests. In line with the neoliberal-extractivist-imaginary, they absolved the government of direct responsibility in fostering widespread development. 139 CHAPTER 4: FOSTERING THE NEOLIBERAL-EXTRACTIVIST STATE IMAGINARY IN MTWARA’S POST-CONFLICT CSOS Waiting After several email back-and-forths with the secretary of MRENGO, I arrived at the network’s headquarters along the periphery of Nangwanda Stadium in Mtwara Municipal District. The unoccupied dukas (little shops) surrounding MRENGO’s home offices in Nangwanda betrayed the economic stagnation of the past several years. In the investment-rich atmosphere of peak oil speculation in Mtwara (2010-2013), the stadium had hosted grand cultural celebrations such as the regional MaKuYa Festival honoring the area’s largest ethnic populations: Makonde, Yao, and Makua. Financial insecurity sparked by May 2013’s violence had threatened numerous business ventures in the area, however, discouraging foreign embassies’ and IOCs’ investments in projects such as restaurants, supply stores, and cultural events. The rising price of crude oil on the global market had also contributed to increases in the price of goods, taxes, and the cost of land in Mtwara (Chilumba 2015; Phillippo 2015). Many residents—particularly those involved in civil society work—bemoaned the challenge of meeting higher costs of living with seemingly fewer options for economic advancement in light of shrinking opportunities for formal employment and funding by foreign donors (Chilumba 2015; Grace 2015). Inside MRENGO’s office, I received notice that my contact, Mr. Mkopoka, was still en route from across town, where his work in insurance had delayed him. Upon his arrival by boda boda (motorcycle), I launched into a carefully scripted introduction of my research on community and government relations within the context of natural-gas-based development. I had prepared for a potentially tense or evasive discussion of 2013’s state violence, but Mkopoka directly broached the topic in an overview of the WWF-funded survey work of Mtwara region 140 community perspectives on gas extraction that MRENGO had carried out in summer 2014. Emboldened by Mr. Mkopoka’s confident sketching of the WWF-funded project and seemingly forthright tone in regard to local government relations, I excitedly inquired as to the coalition’s current activities. He chuckled and responded, “Now, we’re waiting.” To Mkopoka, well-versed in the culture of CSOs, my expectation of the organization’s packed schedule may have come across as naive. In Mtwara, CSOs are often distinguished from NGOs by government and civil society actors on the basis of their assumed proximity to and ability to stand in for the “grassroots” level and, more often than not, rely upon short-term contracts and narrow donor pools (Mercer and Green 2013). Given these conditions, waiting can be viewed as built into the structure and tempo of CSO life. Furthermore, Mkopoka, like many CSO officers, maintains at least one additional business, as he is unable to rely upon steady CSO funding for his salary. In addition, Mtwara’s CSO culture is structured by the infamously treacherous road networks that crisscross rural Mtwara region, often drawing out visits between regional network members from days to weeks. Mr. Mkopoka and I often relied upon email for communication whenever his trips to maintain CSO connections with regional and private partners kept him from Mtwara Municipal’s headquarters. MRENGO’s waiting periods did not imply phases of passive inactivity, however. Waiting entailed researching and applying for funding opportunities and intensive social networking. Indeed, CSO workers actively sought opportunities for investment and plotted political networks on the brink of reconfiguration due to election uncertainty. Scholars have identified waiting as a formative, unifying experience for African citizens who seem to perpetually wait on the positive changes and expanded opportunities initially promised by neoliberal champions and propaganda of the ’80s and ’90s. Normative neoliberal 141 discourse promised that individuals, as rational, economic actors, would be able to find employment and economic betterment if they made the right economic choices within the private sector. In the aftermath of structural adjustment programs, however, many citizens across the African continent failed to see their expectations met (Ferguson 2005; Fouéré 2013). Although the unifying experiences of waiting and stagnation derive from widespread economic and social conditions, anthropological discussion of waiting or anticipating often centers on the experiences of young people. 69 Furthermore, analyses tend to emphasize the creative and productive dimensions of these acts of waiting. I highlight social actors’ resourcefulness and creativity by focusing on acts of waiting and other forms of development practice that advocacy-related CSOs have had to cultivate in order to function in post-conflict Mtwara. However, I also demonstrate ways in which government and CSO actors create new limitations on the work of two advocacy- related CSOs through exchanges within the natural gas knowledge economy. This line of inquiry acknowledges that boundaries between NGOs and the state have proven historically murky but suggests that the central government’s aggressive push for extractive sector-based growth encourages its representatives to adopt restrictive knowledge practices and planning styles. The combination of these effects contributes to the projection of a state with entrepreneurial expertise and the unique capability to profitably govern the natural gas sector. district- and national-level government procedure has relied upon the pace of natural gas industry proceedings and is informed by the fear of reigniting further conflict over natural gas extraction in Mtwara region that might prove disruptive to the pace of economic growth in Tanzania. In the aftermath of natural gas extraction and the reinvigoration of nationalistic 69 Given the harsh conditions of reality and the severely limited reach of public services in the wake of 80s and 90s reforms, many young citizens found themselves alienated from the economic, social, and political pathways to successful education and career paths. As African youth wait on unmet expectations, they also anticipate entry into the biological and cultural maturity and the responsibilities that accompany this transition (Statsik, et. al. 2020, 2). 142 narratives, I ask: How do different CSOs frame the relationship between development and the state in post-conflict Mtwara? How do advocacy organizations and cultural organizations differently function in the post-conflict climate? In order to answer these questions, I trace how the government’s management of natural gas policy and business relations influenced the work of two kinds of CSOs, a cultural CSO—ADEA—and two advocacy CSOs—the FOCONA and Mtwara region NGOs Network (MRENGO), in post-conflict Mtwara. Advocacy and cultural CSO activities often supported the image of the state as realized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary, but MRENGO members, in particular, faced particular challenges within the extractive sector context. For instance, local government actors attempted to conceal insecurity regarding natural gas policy knowledge by placing restrictions on the speech and mobility of MRENGO officers. By restricting access to information and places, state actors could guard the image of the state as uniquely invested with knowledge on gas policy and the foreign investment interests. ADEA, on the other, found favor with the local government through their entrepreneurial approach to marketing and celebrating local culture. Because of their entrepreneurial framing of cultural and embrace of the government’s vision for future business opportunities, ADEA received increased opportunities to work in Mtwara’s tense post- conflict climate. Government officers authorized and encouraged their reinforcement of the neoliberal-extractivist state. FOCONA, meanwhile, remained mainly dormant throughout the duration of my fieldwork, but I draw on the life history of the group’s well-established leader to illustrate my portrayal of NGO and CSO history in Tanzania. The representative cultural CSO I use in my analysis, ADEA, has provided support to Mtwara-based artisans in their production of artwork uniquely associated with Mtwara’s majority ethnic group, Makonde, since 2003. ADEA’s founder, Douglas McFalls, left his design 143 practice in Boston to visit old friends in Mtwara in 1999. According to the director, his friends had put him in touch with Akina Mama (women’s group) so that he might supervise their artisanal production of cloth items. The group had been interested in creating custom Makonde designs to reflect the traditional arts of Mtwara’s largest ethnic group. McFalls’ interest in aiding local artisans in their creation and marketing of unique, locally-informed products eventually evolved into his establishment of ADEA with Philipo Lulale, an Mtwara-based businessman and journalist, in 2003. In the early 2000s, the cloth production group grew into a center that provided local artisans with business education, training, and design assistance. After several years, ADEA’s activities expanded to include the Performing Arts Initiative MaKuYa that takes its name from the three major ethnicities represented in Mtwara region—Makua, Yao, and Makonde. I include ADEA in an analysis of Mtwara’s post-conflict CSOs70 due to their perceived distance, rather than proximity, to natural gas-related activities. In order to present the image of an uncontested state in the lead-up to the 2015 Presidential Election, local government actors allowed members of the organization certain liberties and access. The local government’s relationship with ADEA organizers provided the basis for an illustrative comparison of the CSO with MRENGO’s experience with censorship and surveillance as an advocacy organization. 70 In this analysis, I only refer to ADEA as an NGO. ADEA’s members and literature positioned the group as an NGO. The group’s registration as a government-recognized NGO in 2003 has formed a critical focal point in documentation such as newsletters, blog posts, and ADEA’s organizational history. Formal recognition as an NGO has been a stipulation of their capacity to organize activities across regional, national, and international borders. 144 MRENGO71 is an umbrella organization comprising ten self-help and social-welfare CSOs such as Mtwara Action for Self-Help Activities (MASHA).72 The ten CSOs are unified through their focus on environmental sustainability and/or agricultural livelihoods and are directed by Mr. Allan Mkopoka. Oxfam, through their own interaction with the coalition, suggest that the scale of MRENGO’s work and their low media visibility position the group as a service- delivery NGO rather than an advocacy-oriented organization (Denny 2015, 26). I, however, recognize MRENGO as an advocacy group due to their professed mission. In a report on the inception of their coalition, Mr. Mkopoka highlights the primacy of advocacy work and even lobbying to the group’s overarching mission of advancing community members’ “petroleum and natural gas literacy” (2). MRENGO’s emergence corresponded with an increasing preference for the umbrella organizational model among external donors such as the Department for International Development (DFID).73 From February-August 2014, they worked under the aegis of the WWF to facilitate six projects of the overarching mission of “Strengthening Civil Society to Work on Oil and Gas Issues.” The project entailed the conducting of baseline surveys of Mtwara region residents’ experiences of gas and oil development and facilitating capacity-building workshops for coalition steering committees and government officials on the extractive industry’s influence 71 Although a MRENGO report on the WWF study once specifies that the CSO coalition is referred to as the Mtwara Environmental Conservation Network locally, Mtwara community members and Mr. Mkopoka had exclusively referred to the coalition by the name of its supervisory body, MRENGO during fieldwork. 72 In a January 2015 Oxfam report entitled, “Accountability through Active Citizenship,” the survey claims MRENGO comprises 56 members. But while MRENGO may have had a large base of participants, I observed only small numbers of in-office active officers from my earliest visits in March 2015. The close censorship of media under local and central government regarding the topic of natural gas and the increasing restrictions placed on the civil society sector by the Magufuli administration, however, suggests MRENGO’s low media visibility may not accurately reflect their organizational intentions. 73 External donors viewed umbrella CSO networks as critical links between “donors, local government authorities and local CSOs, and a stage on which civil society engagement in the development process is enacted and made visible” (Mercer and Green 2013, 109). 145 on Mtwara’s environment. In the wake of the 2013 Protest, MRENGO was the only CSO to confront the issue of natural gas extraction and its potential benefits for Mtwara region residents in state-sanctioned seminars and workshops. Since the third CSO’s74 establishment in 1993, FOCONA has functioned as a local intermediary in a number of government-global NGO partnerships projects such as the environmental assessment for the Mnazi Bay Ruvuma Estuary Marine Park. FOCONA’s director, Mr. Msalya, functioned as the main visible, active member of this group in 2015, preparing to enter into contract with the WWF on his implementation of their module—The Citizens’ tool for Monitoring Environmental Performance of Oil & Gas— for engaging local community stakeholders in discussions on Tanzania’s nascent gas sector. Mr. Msalya’s insight from having actively participated in the civil society sector in various iterations since the 1990s lends key insight into the functions and challenges facing rural CSOs whose work addresses social justice issues. At the time of my fieldwork, FOCONA’s founding director, Msalya, acted as the embodiment of FOCONA. In our conversations, Msalya had claimed that FOCONA activities had stalled, and that he was looking to future funding opportunities. Through imposing restrictions on mobility and language, local government in Mtwara attempted to obscure a general lack of knowledge centered on natural gas governance. In concealing the government’s insecure grasp of gas sector knowledge, state representatives managed to uphold the image of the state as uniquely qualified and advantageously positioned to 74 Out of the three groups researched during fieldwork, FOCONA’s director, alone, established that he preferred that his group be addressed as a CSO. According to the founder, the designation further distanced the group from the negative reputation of NGOs: “Being a development organization, these days we prefer to be called CSOs because they say NGOs is more negative—CSOs is more positive” (Msalya 2015). The founder’s strict adoption of the CSO term played off of popular understandings of NGOs as elite institutions that the government had historically organized to guard state interests. CSOs’ more “positive” reputation, in part, has stemmed from its reputation for addressing grassroots issues at the local level. 146 attract foreign business and foster domestic growth in Tanzania. Moreover, even as government workers attempted to distance the advocacy group from critical arteries of knowledge in order to protect the reputation of the state, state actors relied upon advocacy actors to lend added credibility to the state through their capacity as accountability-holders of the state. In many cases, efforts to support the state as conceived within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary contributed to challenging work conditions for advocacy CSOs. Overall, CSO members who conducted advocacy faced few options but to support the illusion that privileged knowledge is invested in the government. Recent contributions to the anthropology of development emphasize how social actors creatively occupy development networks in order to pursue their own interests—rather than strictly adhere or conform to government prescriptions (Becker 2018; Green 2012, 2014; Philips 2019). Green (2012, 2014), in particular, views contemporary Tanzanian development as ideologically and practically distanced from the Ujamaa-era development discourse. Through its central role in historical practices of social organization and discourse, development has evolved into a cultural style and organizational form. While formal development policy and procedure are often at least partially implemented by government institutions, non-state actors and organizations are also often involved in facilitating development. As Green (2014) even suggests, Tanzanians have come to build their senses of selves and social relationships around such historically informed forms of development as community organization. In other words, it is largely accepted that the central government does not hold a monopoly over the exercise or administration of development. According to the framing of development, Tanzanians may bypass otherwise impenetrable networks that guard state resources by accessing alternative donor networks based 147 in international or regional civil society groups. For example, environmental CSOs gained access to funding from the global NGO WWF by first working alongside the national-level NGO the Tanzania Natural Resource Forum in 2013. Since May 2013, however, government narratives and procedure have increasingly shaped professional development practice by dictating budgetary timelines, issuing strict censorship practices, and restricting access to knowledge on gas policy. Funding opportunities for advocacy CSOs wishing to connect with international NGOs such as the WWF were increasingly based upon the assumption that local civil society officers can access information on gas policy. International NGOs view such knowledge as critical data with which to measure the performance of developing nations against global standards of governance. Additionally, larger NGOs and lending institutions view access to knowledge on transparency policy and extractive sector governance as critical to protecting the needs and interests of local communities affected by resource extraction. The guarding and forestalling of natural gas knowledge by local government representatives, as such, can interfere with local CSO efforts to secure contracts with global NGOs. The government knowledge economy has shaped Mtwara’s post-conflict civil society in ways that challenge the work of advocacy CSOs, in particular. The trend in scholarship to unseat the state as primary purveyor of development has overlooked how shifting configurations of state authority influence the activities and prospects of specific kinds of development actors. This case study suggests that portraits of development opportunities should be tempered with some of the obstacles facing CSO members who work in contexts of state insecurity. CSO organizations like MRENGO often rely on validation afforded through the recognition of state authority and its specialized knowledge. Through the course of their work, CSO officers in the advocacy group worked within a challenging bind: they often translated and perpetuated the state as conceived 148 within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary, as an efficient driver of private sector-based development. This work, ultimately, reinforced the knowledge economy that inspired the increasing obstacles placed before them. Mtwara’s Civil Society Landscape In this section, I introduce key trends in the practice of civil society throughout Tanzanian history and, in particular, the career of FOCONA’s director, Mr. M. Bright Msalya. The experiences of the northern-born, educated NGO leader exemplifies those of other civil society directors. CSO members and officers have often adapted their organization’s form and focus to resemble the preferred development forms prescribed by western donors. They continue to do so within Mtwara’s post-gas and post-conflict environment. As established in Chapter 2, the conceptual and practical field of development has historically played a formative role in distinguishing the Tanzanian state from its underlying citizenry (Becker 2019; Green 2014; Lal 2012; Monson 2009; Phillips 2018). In the era of early independence, political discourse and practice positioned development primarily under the purview of the state and ruling party TANU. Tanzanians constituted their relationship to the state through their experience of development and its prescriptive moral culture. Since the late twentieth century, however, NGOs, grassroots CSOs, and IFIs (International Financial Institutes) emerged as provisioners of development alongside or in competition with the state. This shift entailed the privatization of development work, as donors and their policy frameworks increasingly dictated the creation, direction, and content of non-governmental organization work. Reconfigurations in funding and resource allocation challenged the historically informed, co- constituting relationship between development and the state but in no way ushered in the complete “withdrawal of the state” (Kamat 2004). In fact, CSOs adopted practices of 149 bureaucratic planning from Tanzania’s central and local governments in order to better access resources within established political and social networks. In the mid-1990s, the World Bank and the IMF designated Tanzania as a Heavily Indebted Poor Country. Membership in this category identified Tanzania as a nation with high rates of poverty, qualifying the country for access to specialized debt repayment programs that entailed prescriptive policy stipulations. Poverty reduction-oriented deals mainly required the central government to carve out space for CSOs as representatives of the poor and a check on the exercise of state power. The term “NGO” often stands for a larger-scale national- or international-organizations with government-oversight and -registration stipulations. Identification as an NGO, on the whole, tends to connote a more intimate degree of government oversight and management.75 The network NGO structure (e.g., the regional NGO umbrella and NGO coalition) grew in popularity throughout the 1990s as a means of accessing resources and coordinating agendas in the face of decreased central government support. Tanzanians had established the first NGO umbrella organization, the Tanzania Association of NGOs (TANGO), in 1988 (Mushi 2011, 145). This form has since met several obstacles in accessing international donor networks, as applications for funding too often pit umbrella organizations against their member coalitions. Due to this competition, the United Nations Development Program had refused to allot funds for civic and voter education to two umbrella networks in 2005 (Mushi 2011, 147). During the 1990s, western lending agencies cast African states, weakened in the aftermath of SAPs, as the political forces responsible for creating conditions of impoverishment 75 During (the time of your??) fieldwork, legislation stipulated that groups could register as NGOs under Business Registration and Licensing Agency or the Registrar of NGOs (Harrison, 2018, p. 11). 150 due to their undemocratic practice of governance. Rather than distance themselves as distant accountability-holders of government, however, CSOs have historically adopted bureaucratic styles of representation and accounting long embraced by the central and local governments (Green 2014). As ethnographies on CSO work in rural Tanzania demonstrate (Green 2014), officers often adopted bureaucratic techniques associated with the practice of government such as planning to survive in the wake of post-structural adjustment. By translating development projects and relationships into the abstract language of planning, government and CSO workers lent credibility and permanency to work performed in ambiguous and challenging contexts. Moreover, planning across sectors encouraged CSOs and government offices to increasingly rely upon each other for financial, technical, and professional support. From the 1990s into the 2000s, distinctions between the functions of state officers and CSO members grew increasingly ambiguous and blurred (Green et al. 2010; Mercer 1999). In the ’90s and early 2000s, NGO affiliation connoted privileged access to Tanzanian government funding. International development spending targeted NGOs for donations in funding streams oftentimes mediated by national government actors. This model of funding is exemplified by the centralized Tanzania Commission for AIDS distributing donations from Danish and Swiss International Development Agencies to NGOs working on HIV health care delivery (Harrison 2018, 22). The central government introduced more expansive NGO policy in 2002, further promoting and formalizing the roles of NGOs as mediators between the levels of international donors, state actors, and an underlying citizenry. As the NGO form gained prominence, however, more progressive circles within Tanzania’s civil society sector scrutinized the NGO structural body’s capacity to effect change (Shivji 2007). The earliest iterations of 151 Tanzanian NGOs had been directed by elite individuals in urban metropolitan centers and rarely prioritized service provision for the nation’s poor (Mercer 1999). Having arrived in Mtwara from Iringa in 1983, Mr. Msalya’s access to education and ability to study internationally allowed him to engage globally circulating development discourses on sustainability and conservation. This exposure eventually inspired his creation of a conservation-themed CSO in 1993. In retrospect, FOCONA’s intellectual and structural origins stemmed from its founder’s opportunities for international travel: it’s a long story...in 1990 I was in the UK studying development and the environment. You’ve read about this meeting [the UN Conference on Environment and Development] in Rio De Janeiro in 1992. I told you I was studying environment in university—the environment was a big thing—in the course of studying, we visited a town called Milton Keynes. And then this person had lots of materials being shipped to Tanzania, and I asked where in Tanzania exactly, and then they said they are going to an environmental NGO called Tanzania Green Society. I was ashamed because I am studying government and the environment in the UK but didn’t know. So I said when I go back, I will contact these guys and we will form a branch in TZ, so when I came back, I got their address and said: what about having a branch in Mtwara? But there was no reply. So I said ok, I've studied government and the environment, so I should organize people to establish a similar organization. I wrote up this organization 1993—that’s the history behind the organization. This organization has been here many years now. This is 2015, so we’re talking about 22 years. It’s not new—it’s one of the oldest NGOs in Mtwara! (2015) Msalya frames his organization’s conception as the implementation of global-level conservation and development trends at the national level. As an NGO worker and government employee throughout the 1970s, Msalya framed the lines between his roles and responsibilities as civil society actor and government worker as murky. In the early 1980s, Msalya had served on the town council of Mikindani, an historical coastal town, and took up supplementary work as a paralegal in Mtwara Municipal District. By this time, he had also moved on to contract-based central government employment. For each 152 project he had undertaken for the central government, Msalya had had to apply for and receive written permission. Although he recollected the rigidity of state-authorized contract work, Msalya’s engagement with various rural development NGOs, including the regionally famous Finnish-funded program, again, reflected a degree of perceived flexibility and even fluidity between state and non-state organizations: I was an employee of the government—but then there is also an arrangement where a local government (employee) can work for a government program—you apply, you get permission, and then you get, like, you’ve shown me a letter. Of bodies working in the government, I’ve worked in rural development programs for some years. With three different organizations in (the) gas regions of Mtwara and Lindi. Beginning in the mid-1970s, there have been cooperation between Tanzania and Finland. All these years, there have been programs for rural development. So I worked in the Finnish-funded program. But also the ILO (International Labour Organization). They were all concerned with rural development programs. (2015) Msalya associates the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as a period in which professional development work had offered an entree into professional networks at the national and global scale: I spent much time in the villages, or all the time, we are travelling. I’ve been everywhere. Mtwara and Lindi. That is what we call the proper south in this country. Although if I can add something there—my engagement in those problems made me go to other regions to do similar things. It was the end of the 1990s, (and) the Finnish-funded program was supporting the participatory approaches in development. They were very famous. They were the first in the country to try to do that. Because of that, being one of the pioneers, and taken as an expert, I went to work in other regions. I went to Mbeya, Kagera, Kilimanjaro, near the Kenyan border. We were seen in those days (emphasis of author) as experts. And (one) of the experts we worked with is Dr. Robert Chambers from University of Sussex, England. He was coming at times to work with us. He was already very old (in) those days! (Msalya shows me a book by Robert Chambers in his personal library) This one is a global figure. We brought these big guys from Dar to train them here! We were becoming very powerful back then and we had the resources to do that. (2015) This overview of past work experiences illustrates the international and national recognition that Msalya achieved through the connections and prestige associated with 153 participatory research in the late 1990s. Mtwara’s capacity to serve as a laboratory for testing participatory methods lent it regional, national, and international acclaim. More than that, it transformed into a site of veridiction regarding the participatory paradigm of research. This evidenced by Msalya’s remark that even experts from Dar came to the southeast in order to train. In 2003, the central government heralded the rise in popularity of the CSO through introducing the Foundation for Civil Society (FCS). The FCS managed the dispersion of external donor funds to smaller organizations (CSOs) from lending agencies such as the World Bank. The blossoming of CSOs, in turn, marked a general shift away from privileging the “top-down” model of development planning formerly embraced by western development institutions. Top- down designates a form of development planning in which authorities at the top tiers of funding and governing hierarchies model policy based off their own assumptions regarding local community lifestyles (Green 2014; Mercer and Green 2013). Meanwhile, CSOs adopted a “bottom-up” approach to development premised on the logic that an understanding of the “local” perspective must guide development work. As such, the World Bank and IMF often imagined CSOs as better positioned to connect with and capture community perspectives at the grassroots level (Mercer and Green 2013, 108). Apart from being associated with a grassroots perspective and scale, CSOs were also “small and personalized, revolving around a founding person or group of people” (Green and Mercer 2013). In contrast to NGOs, CSOs are just as often based in rural as well as urban settings. Furthermore, they tend to include a broader base of non-government associations than those explicitly tied to development services: Tanzania’s murky regulatory framework for CSOs has allowed groups to register locally and under different guises: as a Trust under the 154 Registration, Insolvency and Trusteeship Agency; a Society under the Societies Ordinance, a Company Limited by Guarantee; and even a company (Harrison 2018). Finally, CSOs are easier to register than NGOs because they only need to register at the local level. Since the early 2000s, occupying the interstices between the conceptual fields of state and citizens has transformed CSOs into key translators of Tanzanian state authority (Green 2014). Meanwhile, government funding of NGOs has severely lessened throughout the past decade, however. While registration as a governmental form has amounted to fewer and fewer state funding opportunities, registered NGOs have been increasingly expected to comply to organizational standards in the NGO Act under the threat of suspension (Harrison 2018; Kelly 2019). In light of these factors, most small organizations that can afford to operate in rural Tanzania often assume the identity of CSO. Overall, CSOs have transformed into one of the targeted forms of external development funding in present-day Tanzania. In the wake of gas extraction, however, local government censorship and surveillance have complicated CSO partnerships with external partners such as international NGOs. Advocacy CSOs and the Neoliberal-Extractivist State In this section, I argue that evidence of CSO surveillance by the local government following the 2013 Protest reflected state actors’ insecure grasp of natural gas knowledge. This insecurity, in turn, served as the basis for a knowledge economy in which state actors restricted MRENGO’s mobility and access to government information to present an omniscient and effective state. The increased restrictions mounted against the advocacy CSO MRENGO following the 2013 protest highlights difficulties that advocacy workers faced. Although both advocacy and cultural CSOs faced restrictive conditions (e.g., censorship, lack of funding) in the aftermath of state violence, the former received fewer opportunities to work with local 155 government. When MRENGO did receive funding opportunities from western donors such as the WWF, they were then reliant on ambiguous legal dealings and the authorization of state actors. Government restrictions on mobility first followed protests on May 23, 2013, when the regional government issued an 18-month-long State of Emergency.76 The State of Emergency received scant attention in scholarship or national and international media houses but held far- reaching consequences for Mtwara residents. In general, government bans curtailed development work by prohibiting organizations from facilitating workshops and seminars. Through connections I had made with volunteers from the NGO the Korean International Cooperation Agency77 at the MRENGO office, I discovered that many CSO visits to inland rural Mtwara had been suspended in early fall 2015. Forms of community engagement and outreach formed valuable evidence of work and provided privileged grassroots data on local perspectives that Mtwara-based CSOs relied upon to build legitimacy and opportunities for funding among donor networks within national and international contexts. Restrictions on Mtwara region’s rather small CSO scene such as the prohibition of travel between districts within Mtwara frustrated the work of service-centered as well as advocacy organizations. On two separate occasions during research in 2015, CSO officers had informed me that the local government cautioned them against conducting activities based in the rural inland districts. During the 18 months of the State of Emergency, wana Mtwara could not publicly organize in large groups or travel back and forth to sites central to the natural gas controversy such as Msimbati Village in Mtwara rural district. In a post-protest monitoring report in 76 The protests are covered in greater detail in Chapter 1. 77 KOICA volunteers had been participating in the Eye Health System Strengthening Program in Mtwara rural. The program is funded by a public-private partnership between the Government of Tanzania and the Korean charity NGO the Heart-to-Heart Foundation. The program is set on enhancing the delivery of eyecare services to rural regions through capacity-building programs and the contribution of eye clinics and advanced medical equipment. 156 partnership with the WWF, Mkopoka of MRENGO attests that, “There had been an official state of emergency in the region ever since the protest broke down. There have been no Public gathering/meetings,” (“Monitoring Report” 2014, 7). It was not until October 2014 that the central government repealed the ban on public meetings (Denny 2015, 11). As many components of MRENGO’s project with WWF entailed administering surveys to community members in specific rural districts and villages, local governments often exercised their discretion in cancelling outings deemed likely to stoke or spark unrest. In 2014, MRENGO’s steering committee had entered into contract with the World Wildlife Fund to carry out “WWF’s Project on Strengthening Civil Society to Work on Oil and Gas Issues,” here on out referred to as “The Project for Oil for Development.” (“MRENGO” 2014, 2). “The Project for Oil for Development” entailed three activities. For the first project, the baseline survey, coalition members had questioned community members across five districts in Mtwara region on their understanding of extractive industry projects. MRENGO then arranged capacity-building workshops (the second activity) for the MRENGO Coalition Steering Committee, government officials, religious leaders, and media on environmental aspects related to oil and natural gas. In one of their reports for WWF, MRENGO explains that governmental dislike of the project at the regional level prevented them from meeting the first research quarter’s survey baseline objective of 500 participants. The regional commissioner is not directly blamed for halting MRENGO’s research, but the report’s authors recognize regional authorities as “being against” the project: Therefore by the time we were informed that the regional authorities were against the project three districts of Masasi, Newala and Tandahimba were fully covered while Mtwara District was half covered. The only district which was not touched was Nanyumbu. All in all a total of 361 respondents were contacted.(“MRENGO Technical Progressive Report” 2014, 3) 157 Due to regional government intervention, MRENGO officers had been prevented from conducting the entire scope of their proposed program. MRENGO had also actively anticipated the resolution of conflict regarding the Transparency in Extractive Sectors Bill’s tabling in Parliament. CSOs awaited the passage of the transparency-centered bill, the EITI. Civil society actors relied upon transparency procedures within the petroleum industry to frame letters of introduction, address funding requests, and enforce accountability measures for government oversight. Even though many CSO officers doubted the likelihood of government ministries adhering to transparency principles, MRENGO acknowledged that their organization’s effectiveness rested upon familiarity with petroleum sector legislation. Indeed, the role of the central government in setting, controlling, and stalling legislative progress in relation to the passage of extractive industry policy carried serious consequences for members of CSOs in Mtwara. In many cases, officers took up waiting, heeding and abiding by the latest in legal proceedings so to better fulfill the role of policy translator popularly prescribed them by lending agencies and national bodies of government since the 1990s. This role proved quite challenging, as ruling-party candidate Dr. John Pombe Magufuli and opposition candidate (and former ruling-party member) Edward Lowassa busied themselves with consolidating client networks in the lead-up to the 2015 Presidential Election. CSOs busied themselves with the processes and practices of waiting (i.e., securing researching funding, seeking government authorization, and strategizing political ties in light of anticipated electoral outcomes). Talk in CSO offices often touched upon whether the ruling CCM party’s government appointees would remain in place or if the opposition parties, who held their strongest followings along the coastal 158 South and the Zanzibar archipelago, might wrest political positions away from currently seated officials. At his MRENGO-MASHA offices off Nangwanda Stadium, Mr. Mkopoka assured me that most activities in the Mtwara office had halted, as activity hinged upon the passage of laws overseeing downstream and upstream operations of the petroleum industry. Because legislative deliberation over passing the 2015 petroleum bills into legislation had stalled progress on natural gas policy, MRENGO’s preparation of baseline surveys and negotiations with global NGOs had come to a stand-still. Although global MRENGO had premised its mission on enhancing community members’ legal knowledge on the extractive sector, the government refused to broad progress on the proposed bills. At that time, government obfuscation of extractive industry legal policy processes had complicated MRENGO’s positioning as an advocacy CSO, lending credence to reports of harsh government pressure on civil society actors attempting advocacy work related to the natural gas sector (Bofin and Pedersen 2015). After having enquiring after their most recent work, Mkopoka informed me that MRENGO officers were mainly focused on preparing reports from the past summer. Activity pertaining to fostering community education and dialogue on the matter of natural gas had halted. According to the files in question, MRENGO had already faced problems with receiving funds due to delays on WWF’s part. From my first visit to MRENGO in 2015 through the conclusion of my research, the offices faced state- and WWF-instated delays, and the members could not be certain of their future timelines. My scheduling of visits to Mkopoka’s office consequently involved a generous offer on their part to allow access to records, make myself at home in their office, and attempt to nail down a time at which the coalition would be more active. This sitting and waiting around allowed me to witness how officers and volunteers made 159 use of their time and office space while waiting to hear back on local business, central government budgeting information, and legislative progress to further their personal business interests and studies. For members depending on injections of international funding or national- level permission to proceed with research, however, this stagnation caused concern. In a personal email exchange, a member summarized the situation: “currently we do not have much to do, so I would be happy if something could be done to save the situation” (Personal email exchange between X and author, June 2, 2015). Apart from time constraints, limitations on the accessibility of networks at the national and international scale shaped participants’ experiences. Despite his depth of experience within the civil society sector, Mr. Msalya felt less certain about the possibilities in navigating and accessing donor networks regarding the topic of natural gas. His entry into regional NGO networks seemed reliant upon national identity and state authorization. In 2014, Mr. Msalya represented FOCONA in a workshop on transparency in oil companies based in Kampala, Uganda: M: Gas is the current thing, and so we are interested to know—going to show me something again—(At this point, Msalya rose to show me a picture from his participation in an East African workshop on transparency in oil companies from 2014 in Kampala)—We are involved; we want people to know for their own development. R: Will you attend another workshop? M: I don’t know—we were just invitees. Now there is COFEA in East Africa, but in Tanzania there is also an organization called ONGEA [Oil, Natural Gases & Environmental Alliance], and they’re based out of Dar. (2015) As “invitees,” Msalya suggests CSOs’ access to global events and conferences is not easy to secure. In mentioning his familiarity with ONGEA in Dar and, in particular, a founding member 160 (later in conversation), he positioned himself, as an adept navigator within development networks, and FOCONA in conversation with NGOs at the national level. When I last visited Msalya in 2015, he was waiting to work with WWF on the distribution of a “Citizen’s Tool” (guidelines for monitoring environmental performance of oil and gas companies developed by WWF and civil societies in East Africa) to Mtwara residents. Like MRENGO, FOCONA met with accessibility issues when attempting to schedule trips to rural districts. These constraints contrasted with his experience of collaboration and the flexibility Msalya experienced in working under state and non-state purviews throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. Despite the degree to whether requirements for state authorization may impede CSO workers’ such as Msalya’s navigation of CSO networks, his interpretation of the role of the state assumes and translates its omniscient authority. As Msalya had earlier advised in regard to the pace of gas-based development, “Even with discoveries, it doesn’t happen with the blink of an eye. They have been insisting on patience” (Msalya 2015). When NGO actors such as Msalya attest to such logic in order to further national as well as personal interests, they contribute to the production of a state with omniscient reach. In turn, CSO officers’ recognition of the state’s seeming omniscience narrows opportunities for those organizations to work without the explicit sanction and legal authorization of the state. Within the nascent gas industry’s obscured legal content and its murky implementation, state actors strictly guard both knowledge and the absence of knowledge. CSOs workers with established global and national networks such as Msalya even face great obstacles in accessing information and funding opportunities connected to the natural gas sector. Even as state actors attempted to conceal insecurities of the neoliberal-extractivist, they relied upon the group’s role as an accountability-holder of the state to project a convincing image 161 of government expertise and capability. Government representatives and advocacy CSO workers rely upon each other in order to successfully fulfill their respective roles. For instance, CSO workers require state authorization and access to policy information in order to receive recognition for doing appropriate work and access future funding opportunities. Meanwhile, the construction of the neoliberal-extractivist state relied on gains veracity from CSOs like MRENGO who can attest to its adoption of particular governance practices throughout different communities. Additionally, MRENGO can convincingly present a successful, expert image of the Tanzanian through its activities among communities far from the seats of government. It is interesting to note that local government officers participated in MRENGO’s capacity-building workshops but later restricted the collection of Mtwara residents’ opinions on gas extraction. Coalition members had intended for their workshops to enhance participants’ familiarity with National Natural Gas Policy, institutional arrangements and legal frameworks. Additionally, they had structured the workshops to provide a better understanding of the role of the extractive industries within the Tanzanian economy. MRENGO organizers had prepared the third activity as an awareness creation workshop, for CSOs, councilors, agricultural cooperative society leaders, and village chairpersons from the four wards of Madimba, Ziwani, Nanguruwe, and Msangamkuu. According to the narrative report of the project, capacity-building workshops and awareness creation workshops covered identical material but involved different kinds of participants. The awareness events had been centered on inviting participation from news media and CSO actors. I draw on evidence from these three associated reports and their activities to establish an MRENGO narrative of post-conflict civil society and an omniscient Tanzanian state capable of sustainably driving the economy. 162 In MRENGO’s research reports, generously shared with me by Mr. Mkopoka, the CSO identifies a resolution for the environmental devastation and social unrest that emerged in the wake of pipeline construction. Rather than describing May 2013’s confrontations between wana Mtwara and the national guard as “violence” or “conflict,” however, the document refers to “the Natural Gas Fracas” (“Coalition Inception Report” 2014, 3). The group’s report on its inception as an NGO network frames one of its intentions as bringing “Peace and Tranquility especially after what had happened during the Gas fracas in our region, this can be done in collaborations with other peace-loving stakeholders” (“Coalition Inception Report”, 2014 1). In their “Monitoring Report,” which stands apart from their work with WWF, MRENGO makes sense of the local government’s actions in the lead-up to 2013’s conflict, framed the causal links between state actors’ and community members’ understanding of natural gas activities as murky: Capacities of local government and government to address the challenges in regions were very limited because communities were not involved from time of massive discoveries of gas and even before the protest occurred. Major problem was the delay of civic education to the community, they did not understand what was going to happen but later on the government formulated plans that will overcome challenges. (6) This framing of relations between citizens and a state body assumes conflict ensued due to an obstruction in the flow of knowledge between community members and the local government. As logic follows, reinstating clear communication would be the only way to reverse damage. In addition to prescribing the top-down diffusion of extractive industries-related knowledge, the report states that, “knowledge should be spread from the bottom, from the grass roots level, to the top. This means from community (the bottom) to the Government Authorities both in Local Government and Central Government” (“Narrative Report on Oil for Development” 2014, 4). 163 Overall, MRENGO’s dealings with the local government in post-conflict Mtwara contributed to the perpetuation of the neoliberal-extractivist that managed to function, in part, due to pronounced acts of concealment and knowledge restriction on the part of local government. In order to sustain their own relevancy within this climate of heightened knowledge manipulation and concealment, advocacy CSOs often faced few alternatives but to concede to the rulings and interests of state actors in upholding the state as conceived of within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Workers in advocacy CSOs, however, faced increased challenges and limitations on their work, as opportunities to connect with non-state sources of funding relied upon the assumed state expertise and knowledge guarded by government workers. ADEA and the Neoliberal-Extractivist State In contrast to MRENGO’s experience of heavy surveillance, the cultural NGO ADEA received opportunities to work with local government and move throughout otherwise prohibited landscapes. By virtue of their connections to networks of ethnicity-based networks and embrace of the entrepreneurial interpretation of development fostered within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary, ADEA received several opportunities to support and facilitate government functions. The CSO’s earliest iteration reflected an artists’ cooperative that included ten artists. The group’s initial activities included two-hour bi-weekly meetings that developed over time into Skills Training Workshops and various other programs that introduced cost-effective methods of crafting and production. McFalls and Lulale displayed crafts and artwork produced by the cooperative in a gift shop for purchase. Its workshops, museum, and gift shop have been included in official government-led tours of the region. In 2006, ADEA even represented Mtwara (and the specific artisanal stylings of its three bantu ethnic groups: Makonde, Yao, and Makua) in the MAKUTANO trades market in Dar es Salaam. 164 Since its establishment, ADEA has evolved to take on issues of cultural preservation and education. In 2008, the organization launched its most regionally celebrated program, the MaKuYa Traditional and Performing Arts Festival. ADEA’s founders in partnership with Makonde elders from their artisan networks spearheaded the annual organization of the MaKuYa celebration, a presentation of traditional dances and cultural artifacts from the Makonde, Makua, and Yao ethnic groups, from 2008-2011. The Swiss, Finnish, and German Embassies along with the Artumas Oil Group (currently Wentworth Resources) all contributed funding for the event. While Mtwara Town had hosted the festival from 2008-2010, the District of Masasi had hosted the popular cultural celebration in 2011. At the time of fieldwork, ADEA had operated as a cooperative, gift shop, and museum of cultural artifacts. ADEA membership entailed involvement with the museum; work leading art and craft workshops; and selling crafts to interested financiers in the group’s gift shop. When I had first visited the multi-faceted CSO in March 2015, employees on the museum side of operations and artists, alike, described the financial pressure that had come to face cultural and advocacy CSOs. Once investors had fled the region in fear of violence after the 2013 protests, several reliable sources of funding had disappeared. Chilumba, curator of ADEA’s museum and former cultural anthropology student, unfavorably compared museum sales in the early 2010s with those in the wake of the 2013’s violence. Visitor numbers had dwindled to the extent that the museum could no longer afford rent in their building within Chikongola neighborhood (Chilumba 2015). ADEA had been anticipating the move to another building in March 2015, looking for loans from foreign agencies to extend the length of their stay. But because of the tense atmosphere in the wake of the protests and the drop in global oil prices beginning in 2012, ADEA’s leaders had found it increasingly difficult to secure loans from long- 165 standing funding agencies such as the Norwegian Embassy. Consequently, the NGO had to forego holding the regional cultural celebration MaKuYa, for which the group had gained national and even global renown. As the 2015 presidential election neared, however, ADEA had been approached by local government officers to facilitate a concert for peace and unity. This opportunity, apart from providing ADEA with an outlet for expression and networking, positioned presenters in a supposedly non-political performance to reflect the political authority of the state. While I could not secure interviews with the organizers of this municipal concert, I was able to attend the concert and observe the presentation’s main theme: peace and unity in times of political strife. To kick off the event, municipal officers had invited Christian and Muslim religious leaders, alike, to speak on the centrality of peace to the observance and practice of their religions. Several choir ensembles performed hymns, contributing to the decidedly religious tone of the festival. In consideration of the alleged role religious figures had played in contributing to the incitement of opposition to the state pipeline,78 the local government’s choice to have them headline the peace festival appeared as a strategic move aimed at quelling resentment amongst the faithful. Suspicions tied to religious figures, particularly those within the region’s Islamic community, have stemmed from structural disadvantages that Muslims have confronted in institutional settings of power throughout Tanzanian history. According to Dilger (2020), the central government’s efforts to strike a balance between facilitating “religious diversity, on the one hand, and the maintenance and restoration of this multiplicity’s internal equilibrium for the sake of ‘national cohesion’ (Ng’atigwa 2013), on the other.” In their efforts to adopt a neutral 78 Christian and Muslim leaders had approached central government members in early 2013 to request that the government more effectively consult with Mtwara residents on the future of natural gas extraction. 166 approach to the governing of religious populations, however, the central government has often neglected structural and institutional advantages afforded to Christians. For instance, the postcolonial government adapted their public schooling educational system from the model presented by Christian missionary educational practices and institutions. At independence, the state transformed standing missionary schools and centers into secular schools of the new nation.79 This trend had consequences for the coastal southeast, where Islamic influences had molded educational practice more than colonial-era German or British missionary activity (Becker 2019). A smaller missionary presence throughout the southeastern territory led to the overall establishment of fewer schools in the wake of decolonization. In light of these educational obstacles facing Muslim students, Muslim political figures have criticized the Tanzanian government system for disadvantaging and financially disempowering Muslims by obstructing their access to privileged institutions of education. Within recent years, the central government has increasingly associated Tanzania’s Islamic southern coast, in particular Mtwara, as a stronghold for opposition parties such as CUF who taken up the issue institutional bias against Muslims in Tanzania. Following in the wake of 2012’s and 2013’s protests, the national and local governments had challenged the validity of protesters’ opposition to the pipeline by framing the conflicts as having been stoked by CUF instigators intent on creating political chaos. Given the reputation of religious leaders among southeastern government officers, the decision to integrate them into the “Peace and Unity” performance ostensibly demonstrates that Christian and Muslim representatives are in accordance with the objectives and vision of local government. None of the imams or priests I 79 The relationship between Christian and secular school has caused many Tanzanian Muslims to refuse to send their children to public school out of fear that they might absorb Christian values (Stambach 2004). 167 listened to spoke on the actual topic of gas. Most sermons highlighted the religious value of peace. Apart from religious figures, several groups performed popular Makonde ngoma.80 Non- advocacy organizations such as health service CSOs presented morality tales on the virtues of safe social conduct, ranging in message from providing care for individuals with HIV to aiding the elderly. The HIV awareness presentation entailed a short foreword by a member of the health CSO that was soon after eclipsed by the performance of a girls’ dance troupe. In the lead-up to the election, the opportunity to socialize and celebrate publicly and boisterously presented a rare opportunity in the run-up to the 2015 Election. The local government had not ordered a ban on public gatherings, but residents understood that local government officers would surveil any public exchanges The concert’s overarching message of peace and avoidance of conflict afforded opportunities for cultural CSOs to perform and gain visibility in the aftermath of 2013’s violent confrontations. While no visible arguments or direct references to state violence (beyond castigations of violent inciters) emerged, most festivity and excitement centered on the public presentations of dancing and choir music. Although healthcare service CSOs had been invited to participate in the event and even perform publicly, the focus of the event had been structured around the messaging of figures from Mtwara’s local religious communities. Most importantly, however, this function allowed ADEA to support the presentation of the state as a benevolent figure, unbeholden to residents’ demands for collective development or equal treatment. Outside of cultural events, government workers invited ADEA members to take advantage of the projected entrepreneurial opportunities fostered by the state. Shortly after the 80 A style of performance developed by Bantu groups that incorporates music, dancing, drama, and even healing. 168 election, the RC had given me permission to travel to Mtwara’s inland rural districts in the company of ADEA employee Dennis. His involvement with the cultural festival MaKuYa provided a comfortable topic to break tension or redirect conversations on natural gas extraction. While interviewing the DAS in Masasi, I had repeated the question of how residents might benefit from the growth of the natural gas sector. In response, the officer addressed Dennis and stated, “They need to look at the chances that are there in the market in Mtwara. They need to look to the factories that are being built there. Those are who work there are going to need to eat and sleep. They will need entertainment. Even MaKuYa will be able to get a market there” (November 25 2015). In response, Dennis had nodded, briefly mentioning some of the challenges ADEA had faced in securing funding for the festival over the past several years. In refocusing the conversation away from the topic of state responsibility to that of foreign investment, the DAS had invited Dennis to affirm the state as realized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. According to the officer, the focus of government should be placed upon attracting foreign investors to the region. The government representative expected Dennis to recognize the value of natural gas profits in attracting potential donors to Mtwara upon whom CSOs like ADEA heavily rely. Although the cultural CSO employees often upheld the entrepreneurial state by participating in business and networking events that this configuration encouraged and looking for additional ways in which they might benefit from economic opportunities fostered by government activity, individual members did find fault with the emphasis on knowledge restriction underwriting the neoliberal-extractivist version of development. Having received numerous requests for information on extraction/production timelines and policy content during focus groups sessions in rural, inland Mtwara region, I had asked Chilumba if he knew of any 169 CSOs or groups that offered such services. In response to my question, Chilumba had clarified that he, as an NGO member, could not distribute information without the clear-cut authorization of a district-level government contract: NGOs are not doing more in the community because we are not in the real situation (we’re not in the position to...). For us, NGOs, to give education to the community, there should have to be a contract between the government and the NGO. YOU have government to give info to the community, for example, ‘take this, you can benefit this way or that way...’. We as an NGO, we cannot move from ADEA to giving education on the street to people. Because there is a fine. YES. They could ask you, ‘Who are you?’” (Chilumba 2015) Chilumba emphasized the significance of the contract-based model of NGO-government relations within Mtwara, excluding himself as a potential candidate for “giving education on the street to people” because he lacked state authorization. Phillippo—ADEA co-founder, local journalist, businessman, and long-time Mtwara resident in his forties—remarked upon the noted lack of resource sharing between government and civil society actors: “Even cooperation with the government is not very easy because the NGO has goals and the government has goals. I don’t see very many people cooperating” (May 20, 2015). Additionally, Mr. Msalya reinforced the contractual authority of the state, reminding me that NGOs can only offer workshops and seminars through the authority of the government. The truth of Msalya’s remark reflected in several CSO and NGO members’ concerns that local government might penalize and halt their civil society sector operations. These anecdotes demonstrate that CSO members in cultural organizations also experienced government restrictions of knowledge on extractive industry policies. Interestingly, Chilumba’s discussion of state contractual authority transformed into an indictment of the neoliberal-extractivist role of the state in facilitating development, altogether. He followed up his discussion comparing the roles of government and CSOs in accessing and 170 distributing information by suggesting that the state deliver information and actively protest the best interests of communities under its purview: And government...it should be the government to work with those communities— give the right information to communities: “this gas is your property, is your share, it should benefit with your industry...” So that the industry will employ the local community and the local community will sell their products, like foods, this kind of information they could give communities. It will be peaceful. And if it’s peaceful, NGO(s) can work with communities. It will be able to give more information to more communities, but the situation that has happened nowadays—the NGOs— cannot work, cannot give education to the local community. His further explanation that the government “should work with communities” evoked the state as conceived within the social-development imaginary. It is not surprising that Chilumba, as a member of the opposition party ChaDema, found fault with the current CCM regime. On the contrary, calling on Independence-era ideals to reprimand present-day politicians and conditions serves as common practice within post-SAP Tanzania is (Becker 2019). Chilumba’s criticism of government roles and responsibilities amounts to more than an abstract moral criticism, however. Chilumba’s critique suggests a configuration of government made accountable to serving communities by distributing information and managing natural gas expectations. As a cultural organization, ADEA naturalized and normalized local government authority in celebrating safety over gas or election contestations. As cultural officers, assumedly unaffiliated with the political state, group members drew distinct boundaries between their responsibilities in terms of community education engagement and that of the government. Local government officers made sure to surveil MRENGO members in their involvement in the natural gas sector. Although opinions sometimes differed as to how the state should intervene to ensure development within the extractive sector, CSO officers in both cultural and advocacy groups contributed to the projection of the state as capable of setting a mutually beneficial investment 171 climate for foreign and domestic actors based on exclusive access to natural gas policy. This perspective aligns with the state as characterized in the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Conclusion: Waiting on the State Anticipating changes to Mtwara’s CSO landscape, MRENGO’s officers creatively sought alternative routes of national and international financing and opportunities to participate in extractive-sector-focused conferences. Officers such as Msalya frequently reached out and maintained ties to NGO actors in national and international forums to seek out opportunities for participation and inclusion. Despite the resourcefulness of Mtwara CSO actors, however, these practices of waiting could not be easily construed as optimistic or hopeful. Waiting relies upon authorization from the national government in the guise of written guidelines, policy, and the validation of CSO networks. As FOCONA’s director pointed out: One of the things they are saying is that with development from gas discoveries, it takes time, so you must allow some time to take place. They (government) mention places like Norway. Even with discoveries, it doesn’t happen with the blink of an eye. They have been insisting on patience. (Msalya 2015) Examples of reliance on state authorization have demonstrated that advocacy CSOs face heightened restrictions and expectations due to their roles as translators and accountability- holders of the state. Within the insecure governing environment of Tanzania’s nascent petroleum sector, CSO workers in Mtwara confronted new challenges and expectations. The contrasts in treatment of advocacy and cultural CSOs by local government offices highlights certain shifts in the role of civil society workers in the aftermath of gas extraction. For instance, advocacy CSOs face increased scrutiny and heightened restrictions on the content and scope of their activities. This is evidenced by the organization’s decision to prematurely end their distribution of surveys on the last leg of their project with WWF after having received word that the regional 172 government did not approve of their project. MRENGO’s restrictions contrast with the opportunities afforded ADEA to project the state through performances and relationships framed as cultural.81 In 2015, CSO members framed NGO and government responsibilities as distinct. In the case of several participants, their work distinguished the state as an authoritative, overarching presence. Even as development workers adapt to altered political terrains with creativity, many also contend with new constraining conditions that require evaluation. In the aftermath of gas extraction, state actors have contended with their own insecure grasp on policy and extractive sector timelines by restricting CSO workers’ mobility and access to key knowledge. Such efforts carry dire consequences for participants in CSO advocacy work in post-conflict Mtwara. Although the local government does not hold a monopoly on development, development and government actors face heightened pressure to project the state as an adept entrepreneurial actor, unbeholden to the economic demands of citizens. Restrictions on advocacy CSOs continue to shed light onto the presence and prevalence of the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary in post- conflict Mtwara. 81 Government and cultural officers had advertised the Peace and Unity Festival as cultural rather than political. 173 CHAPTER 5: FROM SACRIFICING TO SACRIFICIAL: MOURNING DEVELOPMENT IN MTWARA, TANZANIA Development in the Aftermath of Violence On May 23, 2013, the central government deployed the PDF—the Tanzanian national guard— to quell protests that had been organized by wana Mtwara (Mtwara residents) to oppose construction of the Mtwara–Dar es Salaam Natural Gas Pipeline. The central government of Tanzania intended for the pipeline to transport recently discovered petroleum from its origins in the southeastern region of Mtwara to the northern metropolis of Dar es Salaam in order to fuel power stations. The PDF’s arrival upon the scene escalated into violent confrontations between wana Mtwara and police and military forces, culminating in the loss of eight civilian lives, assault, arson, and wide-scale vandalism. Many urban residents highlighted disorientation in their attempts to resume social routines amidst landscapes ravaged by 2013’s state violence. Two years following the clashes, residents still marked the conflict’s anniversary with concerted acts of withdrawal from daily economic and social exchange at the site of conflict. In the lead-up to 2013’s violence, President Jakaya Kikwete’s administration had introduced policy shifts reframing Mtwara region’s positioning within Tanzania’s political landscape from underdeveloped periphery to a site of regional revitalization. After IOCs made a string of gas discoveries along southern Tanzania’s Ruvuma River Basin in 2010, the central government had launched a campaign of national revitalization centered on the promise of gas- driven national development. As a source of sizable petroleum discoveries, Mtwara would help realize national growth objectives laid in the country’s FYDP II (2016-2021) such as qualifying for Semi-Industrialized Nation status (reliance upon both agricultural and industrial modes of production sets the World Bank standard for semi-industrialized.) (“Growth and Equity in Semi- Industrialized Nations,” 1979). Political figures such as President Jakaya Kikwete cast petroleum 174 as the catalyst to launch Tanzania into Middle Income Earning Country status by 2025 (Gray 2015). The central government re-envisioned rural Mtwara, the southeastern regional source of natural gas, as a new nationalistic and bureaucratic reference point along Tanzania’s political topography. In 2010, President Kikwete had announced that “Mtwara will be the new Dubai” (Kikwete 2010), ensuring wana Mtwara that 83% of gas profits would remain within the Mtwara region (Kamat 2017; Ndimbwa 2014). This pronouncement suggested that Mtwara, like Dubai, might rise from its origins as a small port to become one of the fastest growing cities in the world (Bajaj 2015).82 Amidst rumors of a state-funded pipeline project intended to transport gas to Dar, however, Mtwara residents called for greater inclusion in development deliberations and state plans. In response, state actors from the ruling CCM party reframed the region as greedy and undeserving. Appealing to free market logic, they encouraged Wana Mtwara to forge their own financial inroads into the nascent gas market as self-reliant stakeholders (Simbakalia 2013). The central government’s failure to communicate or deliver specific natural gas benefits for the region amidst pipeline plan rumors, however, contributed to Mtwara community members’ organization of protests throughout 2012 and 2013. May 22-23’s protests resulted in extreme levels of violence once the central government deployed the PDF in response to regional commissioner Gen. Joseph Simbakalia’s request for aid. In 2015, wana Mtwara still marked the anniversary of the conflict (May 22) by challenging (and mourning) a particular conceptualization of development and the state. The shared conceptual space in which wana Mtwara have historically performed and reflected upon their ties to the nation—Mtwara’s development imaginary—serves as the critical setting that 82 In 2018, the United Arab Emirates was among the top five import partners of Tanzania (Mansour 2018). 175 lends the anniversary meaning. This chapter poses the overarching question: (1) How do Mtwara Town residents make sense of natural gas development in light of the 2013 protest violence? In order to address this question, I base my analysis on Mtwara Town residents’ opinions on the post-conflict relationship between development, citizenship, and the state. As observation of the protest’s anniversary is one clear manner by which residents confront the 2013 conflict, I further ask: (1) What is being mourned by Mtwara residents’ observation of May 2013’s violence? In order to respond to these inquiries, I assess resident views within the context of the development imaginaries previously established—the social-development imaginary and the neoliberal- extractivist imaginary. Petroleum-fueled development promises and the increased presence of bureaucratic state authority following gas discoveries in Mtwara evoked a deep history of regional envelopment by large-scale development projects such as Ujamaa that intimately tied the premise of wana Mtwara sense of national belonging to the fortification of the state (Green 2012, 2014). Mtwara residents’ involvement in Ujamaa and successive models of devolved development planning played a critical role in bolstering nationalistic ethos and legitimizing the political trajectory of the postcolonial state. Through their contributions to projects of nationalism such as the Mozambican War of Independence (Chapter 2), wana Mtwara view themselves as having played vital roles in realizing Nyerere’s vision of African liberation. As the southernmost presence of the single-party state throughout the 1970s, wana Mtwara Ujamaa villages had fortified the reach of Tanzania’s single-party rule in the region against competing, grassroots models of cooperative communities such as the Ruvuma Development Association. The central government’s handling of the pipeline project refused to incorporate any recognition of the 176 sacrifices made by wana Mtwara through their involvement in national development schemes, thereby challenging key premises of regional belonging for Mtwara residents. In the aftermath of violence in Mtwara, different strands of social science literature have attempted to account for the exercise of state violence on generally peaceful mainland Tanzania. International Relations scholarship (Must and Rustad 2018) on the protest compares determinants of economic status (e.g., the percentage of households with electricity access) to confirm that “objective regional inequalities have remained relatively constant” in Mtwara (1). This consistency, in conjunction with Must and Rustad’s (2018) survey and interview data from Mtwara and Lindi regions, suggest that group grievances and perceptions mainly precipitated 2013’s violence. International Development scholars Ahearne and Child (2019) and anthropologist Kamat (2019) build upon Must and Rustad’s (2018) focus on group grievances yet conceptualize themes of betrayal as expressions of differentiated or “fragmented” citizenship. According to this line of literature, natural gas development had exposed that Tanzanians experience citizenship along deep fault lines of regional and socioeconomic status. In interpreting 2013’s conflict as citizenship negotiations, the articles argue that southeastern residents have not received the same recognition and services from the central government as other Tanzanians (such as residents of the comparatively-wealthy, agriculturally-productive north) (Ahearne and Child 2019; Kamat 2017). Ahearne and Child (2019)’s article stands apart in its identification of two distinct premises of “fragmented” citizenship underlying protest violence—one appealing to a sense of national belonging that prioritizes the courting of foreign investments, the other stemming from Mtwara residents’ regionally based expectations of a social development state (Ahearne and Childs 2019, 5). According to this rendering, wana Mtwara had based their campaigns for 177 inclusion in natural gas development on regional rather than national frames of belonging. My analysis of post-conflict Mtwara, however, highlights the relevance of national development imaginaries to contestations of development and the state by urban residents. Throughout Tanzanian history, development paradigms and ethnic, racial, religious factors have informed the treatment of subnational populations. During Ujamaa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the southeast’s designation as an undeveloped and sparsely populated territory qualified it as an ideal setting for rural development programming. Participation in villagization programs allowed for interactions with social-welfare services and decentralized political offices that fostered an awareness of the Tanzanian state among rural residents. Additionally, the Pan- Africanist vision attributed to early-independence rural development projects by TANU leaders encouraged rural residents into extended networks of anti-imperialist activists across Africa. To frame conflict over natural gas extraction as the result of the “fragmented” nature of citizenship (Ahearne and Child 2019) in Tanzania, however, obscures the active demands and vested interests of many residents in restoring a particular kind of national development project. Many rural residents continue to base national claims upon a dialectic of underdevelopment as laid out in Chapter 2. In engaging this dialectic through demands and assertions of national sacrifice, rural Tanzanians evoke the social-development imaginary. In post-conflict interviews urban Mtwara residents underscore the extent of their national sacrifices for the sake of Tanzanian nation-building. In their interpretations of past confrontations, wana Mtwara balance the injustices done onto them against the incredible effort they have and continue to contribute to key projects of nation-building such as Ujamaa and the Mozambican War of Independence. In the aftermath of state violence, urban residents expressed a wide range of views on maintaining development expectations and relationships in the aftermath of state violence. The 178 sentiments of local radio DJ Abdul exemplify the relationship between development and the state as upheld within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary often invoked by central government actors: “If you lose someone important in your life, would you lose the will to live? If the chances for development are there, you must take them.” (Abdul 2015) Following from a conversation on the brutality of state violence, Abdul asserted that seeking opportunities for business and networking was a necessary condition for living. Having been raised in northern Mara Region, Abdul arrived in Mtwara several years prior to our meeting. As a radio host in his early thirties who enjoyed learning different perspectives and immersing himself in different lifestyles, Abdul saw himself as a mwana Mtwara (a resident of Mtwara) and, therefore, qualified to speak on community members’ general outlook: “I speak with wana Mtwara because I, myself, am mwana Mtwara. I live in Mtwara. Do you eat ming’oko?83 I eat ming’oko. I am a community member.” His opinion suggests that although people have been injured, even killed, Mtwara residents will seek the opportunities that have come their way. This assertion upholds development as choice-based and related to individuals’ pursuits of economic opportunities within their environments. Within this conceptualization of events, the government is not held accountable to the violence of 2013. As many residents emphasize past regional sacrifices and suffering in their assessments of current development conditions, Abdul’s emphasis on opportunity over violence may relate to his fairly limited time in Mtwara. Many urban residents, in particular older men, carefully couched their interpretations of violence in expressions of uncertainty and disbelief. Amari, a local journalist in his forties who 83 Ming’oko are edible roots indigenous to Mtwara and Lindi regions. Claims to eat ming’oko can alternatively signify regional belonging in the southeast or a rural (v. urban) lifestyle. Depending on the context, claims of eating the roots can take on seemingly negative connotations of backwardness or, alternatively, resourcefulness. 179 participated in what he refers to as the peaceful march prior to the 2013 protest, asked, “How can relationships (between government and citizens) improve?” (Amari 2015). Amari has lived in Mtwara for the majority of his life and has seen one of his main careers, journalism, face incredible scrutiny from local government in the aftermath of the 2013 conflict. In contrast to Abdul, he cannot see an easy reconciliation or return to cordial relations with government representatives. Like many men and women in urban Mtwara, however, he saw no solution to the grief and unease felt by many. This unease and hopelessness is reflected in Amari’s summary of a friend’s difficult situation: People have lost their houses. My friend, a reporter for TBC1, lost his house worth 70 million shillings. Many people understand. Many people have completely lost things. They’ve been returned again to zero. Like my friend who had been retired for eight years and had built a 70-million-shilling house—now he is back down at the bottom. He has to start again. He left the area completely. (Amari 2015) Amari’s friend has had to remove himself from Mtwara, altogether, in order to survive. The version of development conceptualized by Amari marks a relationship with the government that cannot return to what it what once was. This assessment reflects actors’ efforts to reconcile the violence with the version of the Tanzanian state assumed within the social-development imaginary. He cannot view the state as solely the primary driver of business within Tanzanian political relations. A version of collective development ensured or at least promised by the state has been lost or challenged in the conflict for Amari. Within this chapter, I further contextualize urban residents’ conceptualizations of the state and development in the theme of “tumesahaulika” (We have been forgotten). The phrase evokes a history of suffering and a lack of regional development in the lead-up to gas extraction. At the same time, however, the term frames development as an articulative, moralistic field within the social-development imaginary. In the wake of state violence, considerations of 180 “amani” (peace) challenge the government’s capacity to continue to uphold the moral premise of national belonging to the Tanzanian nation in Mtwara. In reflecting upon development as a critical mediator of national belonging, I borrow from Askew’s (2002) framing of nationalism as a “series of relationships” that may undergo contestation (12). Rather than nationalism as a shared, collective series of relationships, however, development within the social-development imaginary operates as the relationship-based, collectively held vision of belonging that emphasizes “the possibility of dissension” (Askew 2002, 12). By performing the abstention from social relations and /or activities that is central to invocations of the social-development imaginary, Mtwara residents critiqued the 2013 exercise of state violence and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. They attempted to invalidate the state as conceived of and authorized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. The state conceptualized within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary is expected to facilitate private sector-based development by any means necessary, including the exercise of violence against citizens. Meanwhile, Mtwara residents’ efforts to contest conflicting models of development and the state demonstrate the influence and relevance of nationally informed premises of political relationships and action within extractive enclaves. In Mtwara, the oncoming natural gas projects signified potential for national recognition according to the regionally informed expectations of residents. In line with the Tanzanian government having effectively premised national belonging and unity on state-mandated development ideology, wana Mtwara have historically performed and projected development expectations onto the central government. Residents’ continuing invocation of the social-development imaginary suggests that they are not willing to give up their 181 roles as co-creators in a national project of collective development or allow state actors to abandon the role assigned to in the social-development imaginary. “Tumesahaulika,” Revisited In conversations on gas development, the interjection, “tumesahaulika” (we’ve been forgotten), often served as vital context for making sense of residents’ raised development expectations following natural gas-based promises of national growth. Prior to having received news of the petroleum discoveries, wana Mtwara had interpreted the central government’s treatment of their region as neglectful. A neighbor of mine often situated reflections on the gas sector in an understanding of Mtwara’s sustained state of underdevelopment: “Mtwara kwa jumla, ni mkoa ambao imesahaulika” (Overall, Mtwara is a region that has been forgotten). (Chadema member, resident of Mtwara Town) Apart from natural resource extraction, residents applied the verb “kumesahaulika” (to have been forgotten) to other areas of development planning such as the regional road infrastructure and educational system: Unakumbuka sehemu la kusini ni sehemu limesahaulika sana kwa sababu nyingi sana. Lakini ukanda moja ni watu ni maskini sana. Mabarabara yanayakata mikoa ya kusini na mikoa ya kazkazini yaklimalizika juzi juzi. Ukitaka kusafarisha gesi kwenda Dar, kwa nini umeshindwa kurekebisha mabarabara? (Isaak 2015) (You (must) remember that the south is an area that has been forgotten for many reasons. One (part of that) is that people are very poor. The roads connecting the southern and northern regions were completed a long time ago.) This narrative deserves attention as it demonstrates infrastructural development’s utility as an index of national belonging and a premise of state authority in rural southeastern Tanzania. “Kumesahaulika” (to have been forgotten), for instance, implies consideration of the region’s former inclusion and acknowledgement (through nation-building projects such as villagization 182 efforts under Ujamaa). For wana Mtwara to have been forgotten, they first had had to have received some form of recognition. During focus groups in rural Mtwara District, a participant from the “wazee” (elder) participant pool used the phrase as a disclaimer before listing some of the ways in which they— as villagers rather than urban Mtwara residents—had experienced neglect from the state: “Unajua? Tumesahaulika” (You know, we’ve been forgotten). (Focus Group participant, Nanguruwe). While the Mzee’s (the elder’s) personalized expression of having been forgotten (“we’ve been forgotten” rather than “Mtwara, as a region, has been forgotten”) may derive from his compounded experience of isolation as a Mtwara resident and rural villager, my research clearance did not allow for a more nuanced study of the perception of neglect in rural settings. Furthermore, urban residents also used the term “tumesahaulika” to express their perceived personal and regional neglect. The substitutability of “tumesahaulika” (we’ve been forgotten”) with “limesahaulika” (Mtwara’s been forgotten) highlights the regionally informed, collective framing of residents’ interpretations of central government. The central government’s positioning of Mtwara as an ideal region for national ideology through development policy tied the structuring of development planning, in general, to state planning and ideology. For instance, when Mtwara region demonstrated a moderate increase in cashew profits following the implementation of villagization in the early ‘70s, TANU party officials adopted the region as a rural role model for the adoption of Ujamaa practice and ideology. In the wake of neoliberal reforms, Mtwara’s entrenched state of underdevelopment gained recognition for having fine-tuned models of participatory development under the auspices of global NGOs and foreign partners such as Finland. CSO leader Msalya interpreted Mtwara’s significance as a model for rural development programming in national terms: "We brought these 183 big guys from Dar to train them here! We were becoming very powerful back then, and we had the resources to do that. They were expecting something very special to happen in this part of the country” (Msalya 2015). Mtwara region’s ability to outshine Dar es Salaam in national recognition for forwarding refining development methods articulates a causal relationship between underdevelopment and expectations of recognition at the national level that surfaced throughout my fieldwork. “Tumesahaulika” highlights that wana Mtwara maintain ties to key expressions of national belonging through their state of underdevelopment. The narrative introduces the potential for sacrifice and decades of economic stagnation to be met by eventual recognition of regional worth by the central government. In signifying the unjust, sustained neglect, “tumesahaulika” invites participants in conversation to confirm the injustice. More than that, however, the term projects an idealized moral order in which residents’ expectations of central government recognition in the form of development made sense. Narratives of Suffering and Sacrifice: Mtwara on the Forefront of Liberation Efforts During my dissertation research, the majority of wana Mtwara anchored understandings of the recent gas conflict and subsequent state violence within specific historical narratives articulating the region’s worth to the project of nation-building. Even though retellings differed as to residents’ own interpretations and perceptions of the central government, community members pointed to the moral value their region had played in modelling ideal citizenship norms, such as nationalistic sacrifice, over time. These stories often emphasized the extent to which the territory gave up resources and even lives in order to contribute to nationalistic projects such as anti-imperialism. Political scientist Zachariah Mampilly’s (2013) observation following his own visit to Mtwara in the wake of 2013’s conflict speaks to the level of moralistic 184 pride Wana Mtwara took in their past involvement in state-sponsored development: “Under Nyerere, people largely accepted the moral logic of national sacrifice despite the unequal costs borne by the region. Indeed, their patriotic ardor remains far more substantial when compared with folks who live in Dar es Salaam.” (Mampilly 2013). As a relatively impoverished yet virtuous model of villagization and farming practices in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mtwara often received positive mention (if not action) from the central government (Lal 2012). Wana Mtwara requested resources from state officials based on their merit as sacrificing subjects from the state throughout this period, highlighting their gross state of underdevelopment in light of their contributions to Ujamaa through participation in villagization (Lal 2012). In present-day Mtwara, numerous residents reference the period of early independence fondly and first President Julius Nyerere, Mwalimu (teacher), in a positive light. Ethnographic research demonstrates that community members broadly characterize their relationship with the state in early independence as preferable to the state of politics under more recent leadership (Lal 2012). Nyerere’s name, in particular, connotes a moral register of discourse that politicians and citizens adopt to distance themselves from failed neoliberal promises (Fouéré 2014; Becker 2013). Hassan, a Muslim man in his forties who worked as a driver for the Nalindele Research Center, proudly tied his CCM party affiliation to the paterfamilias of ruling-party politics in Tanzania, Julius Nyerere: Wote ni wapenzi wa Chama cha Mapinduzi—hata mimi. Ukielewa wa taarifa ya Baba Taaifa, Nyerere, sisi tunaangaliana. Tunasaidiana hali ya mali. Sasa hii chama cha mapinduzi watu hawa na. Ukabila hawa na nao. Hakuna tofauti ya ukabila. (Hassan 2015) (All people love CCM—even me. If you’re familiar with the work of the Father of the Nation, Nyerere, (then you know that) we look out for each other. We help each other out with things. Right now, CCM? People don’t have tribalism. There’s no tribal differences.) 185 The deep admiration for which Hassan, born and raised in Mtwara, held for northern-born Nyerere rested on the leader’s success at fostering national cohesion and discouraging ethnic violence. Furthermore, Hassan’s declaration that “all people love CCM” evidences the enduring importance of entrenched political hierarchies and networks to the functioning of politics in present-day Mtwara. Despite Mtwara residents’ opposition to the CCM-engineered pipeline project and the southeast’s reputation as a stronghold for the opposition parties, many still associate the party with the interventionist social development state under the single-party political system. Even though the majority of urban residents who identified as Muslim supported opposition parties rather than CCM, it was not unusual to find several who backed CCM. The ties and relations of dependency to politicians of influence within ruling-party higher offices that residents fostered under Nyerere are still active today. In present-day Tanzania, CCM stands for more than a platform of political beliefs. It also signifies social development-era participation in key structures of political favors and opportunities. CCM’s enduring appeal throughout the southeast may reflect the effectiveness of historically informed, CCM-situated political hierarchies in contrast to the liberal rights-based language84 of many opposition parties (Philips 2018). At the start of fieldwork, my neighbor M. Bright Msalya had introduced me to his personal library of paralegal, civil society, and political party-related documents. After having 84 Within political economy, rights can broadly be understood as freedoms guaranteed by ties of citizenship and/or the standard freedoms set by international institutions informed by liberal humanism epistemology. International Development agencies draw on abstract rights discourse to set national standards of justice through policy. Anthropologists such as Englund (2006) analyze how citizens of postcolonial African states engage normative human rights discourse (or use rights-based language) to navigate situated political exchanges. Phillips (2018) recognizes citizens’ reliance upon rights-based language and established relationships within political and social networks as different means of gaining access to resources in postcolonial Tanzania. 186 asked him questions pertaining to Mtwara’s regional reputation, he handed me the 1982 pamphlet Siasa ni Kilimo (Politics is Farming) by CCM member P.E. Ladda. The CCM text includes the section Mchango wa Mtwara katika Ukombozi Tanzania (Mtwara’s Contribution to the Liberation of Tanzania), detailing Mtwara’s rise as a model region for the implementation of early postcolonial models of development. Written to stoke nationalistic fervor around the holiday of Saba Saba (the day on which the earliest iteration of Tanzania’s ruling party was formed) throughout the southern region, Mchango frames revolts orchestrated in the territory against German colonialism as an early indicator of the value Mtwara would later embody as a model of relative agricultural success and TANU efficiency in 1982. In this pamphlet, ruling- party politicians attribute the region with a narrative arc of sacrificing for and standing in for the Tanzanian nation that extends back to precolonial resistance against German colonizers (Ladda, 1982). Local political leaders and professionals referenced the Maji Maji Rebellion as the first display of southern sacrifice against imperialism for the nascent nation. My meeting with NGO leader, local paralegal, and Mtwara neighbor M. Bright Msalya proves a particularly poignant example of the significance in which residents hold Mtwara’s historic roles as the unifying thread in sustaining successive iterations of Tanzanian nationhood. When wana Mtwara mention Maji Maji, the origins of which are explored in Chapter 2, they mostly emphasize the outcome of the quelled revolt. German colonial measures of punishment and procurement have been well documented as particularly severe, and wana Mtwara reference (proto)nationalistic sacrifices carried by the southeast once Germans (and even successive state authorities) conspired to politically and economically deprive the South through violence and the disruption of food distribution networks (Wembah-Rashid 1998). 187 In accounts of Mtwara history following 2013’s protest, residents pointed out that the founding father of Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere, respected and supported the southern provinces and had made a point of visiting the entirety of the territory. A driver for a locally based Nalindele agricultural research institute, Hassan, mirrored other residents’ historical understanding of Nyerere as the catalyst for not only unifying but educating the southeastern region following the German colonial state’s campaigns of enforced famine and neglect of fostering educational infrastructure: Najua? Sisi hatujasoma. Yote na serikali ya zamani—iliyotokea na waJerumani? Mzee Julius, aliwaelimisha hawa (watu wa kusini) (Hassan 2015) (You know? We hadn’t studied. All that the past government did—(after) all that which happened with the Germans? (Elder) Julius (Nyerere) educated the people of the South.) According to many wana Mtwara, the region had embraced the nationalistic ethos of Nyerere’s anti-imperialism in contributing to the War for Mozambican Liberation. At the same time, sacrifices made for the effort further entrenched Mtwara’s postcolonial stagnation in underdevelopment. Literature suggests that wana Mtwara treated and sheltered soldiers from the Mozambican nationalist army, Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), at FRELIMO hospital within their regional borders (Schneidman 1978, 60). In terms of casualties and damage wrought, the southern regions bordering Mozambique suffered bombing raids and violent attacks. Mtwara’s bravery and contribution to Mozambican liberation reflects in the naming of Mashujaa Park (Heroes Park) in honor of wana Mtwara who had given their lives for the cause (Mampilly 2013). This space is adjacent to the Mtwara–Dar es Salaam-Road and lies in close proximity to the main bus station. Wana Mtwara ranging from NGO leaders to Masasi’s DAS referenced Mtwara’s role in supporting Mozambican liberation efforts against Portuguese colonial rule on the topic of equity 188 in gas development. Contemporary residents referenced the hardships that Wana Mtwara and fellow southerners faced resulting from their contributions to Mozambican liberation. Some participants such as Mr. Msalya suggested Mtwara lived with the consequences of aiding FRELIMO while the rest of the country could only speak rhetorically of supporting liberation efforts. Mr. Msalya, a CSO leader and paralegal who had worked as a rural development facilitator for 30 years as a part of a rural development program for the government of Tanzania, in partnership with the government of Finland, referenced the particularly high price Mtwara paid to aid Mozambique in rebelling against their colonial oppressors: The actual liberation activities (were) taking place in these two regions. Cause when you speak about Mozambique—because Mozambique borders Mtwara— these regions were in the forefront of the actual activity of liberation. And because of that, (when) compared to other regions in terms of development, the pace was slower because of the liberation efforts. Now, connecting that with the gas discoveries—the people thought that now, because they have participated so much in the liberation activities, naturally, they thought of special treatment. (They thought that) probably now, there will be focus in these two regions. After the second world war, the government started the government scheme—they built the railroad line, the pipeline, the project in Chongwe. But in later years, the railroad was uprooted and the pipeline (was deconstructed). In terms of infrastructure, it was no secret that in those days it was very difficult. So, naturally, when there (were) these discoveries, people expected more. (Msalya 2015) In conversation with Masasi’s Mtendaji Mkuu (Chief Executive Officer), he made sense of Masasi district’s positive growth within recent years through acts of national and regional sacrifice. In his administrative offices, he viewed the intensive exchange of cultural and social ties across Tanzanian and Mozambican borders as stemming from Mtwara (and Masasi’s) efforts in helping Mozambique attain independence (Masasi DAS, November 24, 2015). Residents’ explicit references to the region’s past sacrifices for the nation reveal a moral component of Mtwara’s development orientation: underdevelopment indicates a commitment to nation-building. The context of underdevelopment, in this situation, takes on a moralizing tone, 189 as residents express their expectation for development through references to the underdevelopment (e.g., unpaved major roads) that surrounds them. Additionally, regional contributions in support of Mozambican Independence supported Pan-Africanist measures central to early-independence nation-building. Narratives of Suffering and Sacrifice: Mtwara as the Model Rural Region While state propaganda may have painted Mtwara as a model participant in the expansive state-directed development project of Ujamaa, villagization stories loomed large in residents’ retellings of the territory’s sacrifices (Lal 2012). When Tanzania gained independence in 1961, President Julius Nyerere set Ujamaa (familyhood) as governing philosophy within the nascent political system. Nyerere’s Ujamaa celebrated a socialist approach to African familyhood that highlighted communitarianism as well as self-reliance. He instated Ujamaa as formal state ideology in the 1962 Arusha Declaration, and the organizational logic of village structure positioned Tanzanians in direct community with fellow citizens and their nation (Green 2014; Lal 2012). Doctrine suggested communities reorganize to reflect the ethical and moral guidelines of Ujamaa: one nuclear family formed a “kaya;” ten kayas formed a village, and collectivized units would continue forming ascending relational tiers all the way up to the level of the nation (Lal 2012, 214-15). Coercion and inducements including increased access to water supply and development funds from TANU party officials encouraged numerous Tanzanians to resettle in Ujamaa villages. The southeast’s low agricultural productivity and sparsely populated tracts of land qualified it as ideal territory on which to demonstrate the potential for cooperative communal farming. 190 Residents’ involvement in voluntary and non-voluntary villagization85 brought about marked improvements in Mtwara’s agricultural output which somewhat distanced the region from its reputation as backwards. The region’s high percentage of villagization units and higher rates of capital investment from the central government in an effort to make the villagization program successful led to notable improvements in the region’s agricultural output. This, in turn, provided useful, attractive statistics in TANU propaganda. Lal (2012) highlights how the government used Mtwara’s relative success at villagization to bolster government support toward the end of the Ujamaa period. At this time, Mtwara boasted moderate increases in agricultural output due to the temporary popularity in sales of cashew crops. Mtwara, which housed over 60% of the village units introduced through voluntary or involuntary resettlement, served as a useful counter narrative against prevailing opinions that the villagization program was a failing social and economic venture (Lal 2010, 228). As such, CCM party officials used Mtwara’s improved cashew sales in light of the area’s entrenched underdevelopment to reinvigorate support for the CCM-ruled government. The success of the region also propped up the socialist government with a case study of prosperity through embracing Ujamaa rather than demanding handouts or special services from the government (228). In other words, Mtwara could become renowned as a developmental success not only because of the region’s astonishing progress in implementing villagization (according to quantitative measurements), but also because of the challenging conditions under which it had achieved such rapid and extensive resettlement” (Lal 2012, 228). 85 The various iterations of village resettlement programs from 1967-1975/6 (Lal 2010). 191 The romantic framing of Mtwara’s transformation from underdeveloped territory to celebrated model of agrarian-based nation-building did not escape the skeptical censure of the southern region’s residents: in a series of contemporaneous letters to the editor, a chorus of voices from within the region challenged these glowing assessments, protesting that the southeast’s neglect by national officials violated the principles of the socialist production of national space envisioned by Ujamaa. The first letter asserted that ‘in Tanzania, there are two groups of people. Those in northern and central regions are the ones who enjoy the country’s fruits of independence and those in southern regions are left behind without any progress.’ The letter concluded by asking, ‘Is this country really a socialist one and yet is in two parts? Why do the northern people enjoy the fruits of this country? Why are the southern people ignored?’62 (Lal 2012, 228) Such archival evidence demonstrates southerners’ long sense of suffering and acknowledgement of sacrifice (met with varying degrees of recognition). Furthermore, the letters showcase residents’ clever leveraging of Mtwara’s protracted state of underdevelopment to question the area’s role in nationalistic nostalgia. Despite Mtwara’s valorization as a villagization case study and in Nyerere’s Kilimo ni Kwanza (Agriculture First) venture, documents and historical narratives largely demonstrate that Wana Mtwara interpreted the North as monopolizing the rights and benefits of citizenship. Wana Mtwara creatively drew upon their positioning within nationalistic propaganda to acknowledge their immoral treatment at the hands of state bodies. State norms positioned them within the moral high ground, and they used this vantage point to expose inconsistencies within state narratives. In more recent years, Mtwara’s regional status has featured in political claims for resources and even election campaigns. Mtwara-born politicians such as MP Katani Ahmadi Katani from the district of Tandahimba have used Mtwara’s sacrifices for national independence at the border to rationalize increased road funding from the central government. Addressing 192 Parliament, Mr. Katani asserted, “You’ve forgotten that Mtwara is an area where people called upon to fight for freedom. Today, people have already received freedom. If the people of Mozambique have won, increase funding for Mtwara so that wana Mtwara can have paved roads.” (Ahmadi Katani 2014). In the lead-up to the 2015 Presidential Election, natural resource governance emerged as a lightning rod issue.86 In the wake of Jakaya Kikwete’s public corruption charges, many opposition candidates87 structured their campaigns around the themes of ensuring transparency and accountability within the extractive sectors. In doing so, opposition leaders articulated their sympathies with the plight of wana Mtwara, even emphasizing the region’s moral sacrifices for the nation in condemnation of ruling-party tactics. In order to effectively challenge CCM’s attempts at pushing their preferred version of a constitutional draft in 2014, the opposition parties of CUF and Chadema joined with the National Convention for Construction and Reform-Maguezi (NCCR-Mageuzi) and the National Democracy League (NLD) to form the alliance Umoja wa Katiba ya Wananchi (UKAWA). The CUF was founded on the semiautonomous island of Zanzibar88 that shares regional and Islamic 86 Outgoing President Jakaya Kikwete intended to harness natural gas optimism as a distraction from his administration’s (2005-2015) involvement in widely circulated corruption scandals (Bofin et al. 2020). Meanwhile, CCM presidential candidate Magufuli’s 2015 campaign presented him as an ideal candidate based on his reputation as anything but the consummate party politician. Instead, Magufuli campaigned as a scientific, practical, even “politically neutral” leader by a Voice of America article announcing his October 2015 presidential victory (“Ruling Party’s Magufuli Wins”). 87 Within the past twenty years, opposition groups have gained increasing appeal among the Tanzanian citizenry, challenging CCM’s (formerly the Tanganyikan—and then Tanzanian—African National Union) monopoly of the presidency and seats of parliament even following Tanzania’s adoption of multi-partyism in 1992. In the 1995 election, Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (Chadema) emerged as a rival party. Since the mid-90s, Chadema has gained an increasing foothold in urban areas. Meanwhile, the Civic United Front (CUF) has strong support in the Zanzibar archipelago and coastal regions. 88 Prior to their unification in 1964, Zanzibar and Tanganyika existed as two separate sovereignties. Different political, religious, and colonizing influences had informed their history, but economic and social exchange had existed between the mainland and islands for centuries prior to Tanzania’s formation. Their union has been characterized by power-sharing struggles as nationalist contingents from the islands of Zanzibar seek varying 193 influences with mainland southeasterners and has gained traction in Mtwara within recent years. Muslims, who comprise the majority on Zanzibar, also form CUF’s voting base. Securing increased autonomy from mainland Tanzania and opposing CCMs’ monopolization of political influence have formed critical aspects of CUF’s platform.89 Evidencing CUF’s increasing influence, the opposition party won two new Parliamentary seats from southern regions in the 2015 election (Pallotti 2017). In 2015, 0pposition candidates paid particular attention and lip service to Mtwara’s precarious position in the country’s strategy for natural resource extraction and distribution, decrying the region’s legacy of underdevelopment and poor infrastructure in their challenges to ruling-party monopolization. On December 31, 2014, Zitto Kabwe leader of the political party ACT Wazalendo delivered a speech entitled, “Azimio la Mtwara” (the Mtwara Accords) in which he lays out several objectives to be met by the government of Tanzania in regard to natural gas extraction. Kabwe organized his speech around the politics of natural resource extraction and management and called into question the capability of the ruling party to honor the democratic governance norms associated with natural resource management. He gained some favor in the southern regions for demanding government representatives inform wana Mtwara of the details concerning royalty taxes payouts to communities near sites of gas extraction. Kabwe’s manner of rationalization for the transparency measures, however, warrants particular attention. During his trip, the politician suggested that the region had contributed to the security of the Tanzanian degrees of sovereignty. Political stand-offs between CCM and Zanzibar-based CUF led to violent clashes in 2000, and tensions between mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar continue to fuel charges of election fraud against CCM. 89 In response to growing support for CUF in national elections, CCM party officials have attempted to frame the organization as an Islamic extremist group. CUF leaders, however, publicly dismiss this claim and refrain from identifying as an Islamic organization. Political parties in Tanzania are not allowed to be based upon religious or ethnic identity. 194 nation to the detriment of their own development. This recognition of moral sacrifice positioned them as deserving recipients of natural gas wealth: Nimekuja pia Mtwara kwa sababu huu ni Mkoa wa kipekee katika historia ya nchi yetu. Mtwara ni Mkoa ambao kwa miaka zaidi ya miaka 25 baada ya nchi yetu kupata uhuru ulibaki kuwa ngome imara dhidi ya mabeberu wa Kireno. Wakati mikoa mingine ikisonga mbele katika maendeleo ya kiuchumi na kijamii, Mikoa ya Mtwara na Lindi ilibaki nyuma kwa sababu ya kulinda heshima ya mipaka ya nchi yetu. Hii ni historia muhimu sana ambayo vijana wetu inabidi waijue na waithamini. (Kabwe 2014) (I’ve come to Mtwara because this is a unique region in the history of our country. Mtwara is a region that for more than 25 years after our country gained independence it remained a fortress against Portuguese colonialism in neighboring Mozambique. When other regions were at the front of economic and social development, the regions of Mtwara and Lindi stayed behind in order to guard the integrity of our borders. This is very important history that our youth should know and value.) While opposition leaders such as Zitto Kabwe and opposition candidate Edward Lowassa asserted that the rights of wana Mtwara should be enshrined in law, however, many urban residents reacted coolly to reasoning based upon policy specifics. While attending a campaign event hosted by an NCCR-Mageuzi MP in the middle of Chikongola neighborhood, on-lookers expressed their consternation at the specifics of the candidate’s argument. In general, the specifics of legislation seemed distant and abstract to citizens. The three bills eventually rushed through Parliament in 2015 failed to outline specific details as to how national gas profits would be ultimately returned to Mtwara.90 Although opposition parties actively sided with wana Mtwara in opposing how the central government had introduced and overseen the pipeline project, however, urban residents 90 In general, older urban residents conveyed feelings of confusion regarding the content upon which opposition leaders built their arguments. Alienation from the so-called rights of citizenship or human rights discourse was conveyed during a focus group session in Madimba by an mzee (elder): “Sisi... haki bado” (Us... we don’t have rights yet). 195 with whom I spoke responded more positively to securing lasting development by voting in the political connections and institutional knowledge popularly associated with CCM. Despite incursions from opposition parties, CCM continues to hold such a stranglehold over formal and informal networks of governance that citizens still frequently view CCM as synonymous with independent Tanzania (Brennan 2006; Hunter 2015; Pallotti 2017).91 Even urban residents who espoused hostility against CCM often interpreted the 2015 CCM candidate as strategically poised and situated to instill an enduring form of development in Mtwara. Additionally, older male residents of Mtwara Town did not find purchase with the liberal rights discourse to which many opposition candidates appealed. The run-up to the election illustrated the significance of 91 CCM candidates drew upon Nyerere’s credentials as a moralistic founding father to secure their ties to an imagined patrilineage of ruling party descent. Association with this lineage promised valuable wealth, knowledge, and virtue in the face of economic disintegration caused by structural adjustment plans and privatization policies. By the end of his presidency, Nyerere’s name as well as the national philosophy of Ujamaa (familyhood) had lost popularity and merit in the eyes of the Tanzanian public. After the leader’s passing in 1999, however, citizens resurrected his name and legacy as an indictment against the hypercapitalism and wide-scale corruption (Fouéré 2015). Tanzanians had become increasingly nostalgic for the model of moral embodiment set by Father of the Nation. In their recent articulations, the name and legacy of Nyerere are no longer anathema to neoliberal policy or norms of governance. In the 2000s, candidates and administrations invoked Nyerere’s memory to attribute themselves moral virtue. Kikwete adopted the president’s memory in order to redeem his own political value, and CCM made a strong effort to associate CCM candidate John Magufuli’s work ethic and no-nonsense attitude with the memory of Nyerere. In a speech given at Namfua Stadium in Singida during the run-up to the 2005 presidential election, Kikwete claimed that, “opposition parties were still ‘too young’ and ‘hungry,’ drawing on gendered and generational stereotypes to cast Civic United Front (CUF) candidates as teenage troublemakers: out-of-work, discontented, with illicit appetites, and bearing all the strength of youth, but using it toward violent, self-serving, or exploitative ends (Philips 2011). Such images make the case that a political father must himself be so well nourished and able to provide for others that he would have no reason to use his position for material gain. A ‘hungry’ politician in this view is one who lies outside the wealth, access to state resources and patronage networks of the dominant party, and one who will be more focused on eking a subsistence from the system than doing the state job of development” (Philips 2018, 111). Presidential Election 2015 discourse reflected a moral reckoning amongst CCM party officials, as they attempted to rebuild trust in the ruling party amongst Tanzanians in the wake of public scandals. In order to restore faith, they wielded the language of authority effectively by emphasizing their ownership of Tanzanian state legacy and drawing parallels between Magufuli and Founding Father Julius Nyerere. My friend, a vocal UKAWA supporter, likened Magufuli to Nyerere for his dedication to practicality as the former Minister of Works. His esteemed practicality and seeming distaste for extravagance and frivolous spending, according to the opposition party supporter, reflected Nyerere’s often-celebrated modesty and distaste for the trappings of the elite. 196 maintaining access to political networks of influence associated with historically informed moral models of development associated with Nyerere (Becker 2013; Fouéré 2014). Overall, this section has shown how Mtwara residents and even politicians from outside the region draw on the area’s reputation as sacrificing and sacrificial to make claims on political relationships and access development resources. While not always successful, this strategy demonstrates the relevance of development as entailed within the social-development imaginary for many urban residents in Mtwara. Moreover, establishing the relevance of this narrative among Mtwara residents highlights the frustration and betrayal felt by southeastern residents in response to the central government’s actions in 2013. Central state actors made efforts to frame Mtwara underdevelopment as evidence of national disloyalty rather than loyalty. Greedy Enemies: Wana Mtwara in the Shadow of Protest The discovery of petroleum in 2010 had marked a critical watershed moment in Mtwara’s development imaginary, as promises and predictions of regional growth suggested national recognition would soon arrive. Mary, a university-educated paralegal in her late twenties, had arrived in Mtwara from northern Mara Region five months prior. She had accompanied her husband to Mtwara Town after he had received an appointment in the local government. As a relative newcomer to the area, she had born witness to how gas discoveries had changed the ways in which other Tanzanians viewed wana Mtwara and how wana Mtwara viewed themselves: M: Mtwara is an area that is very behind. I should say that it's more behind than all other areas. Even we (Mary and her husband), if we inform people that we’re going to Mtwara, they’ll be shocked. You would certainly be shocked if you heard that I come from Mtwara. It stems from the infrastructure. Travel to Dar can take a week! From the morning, you will arrive at two o’clock. But development? Right now it’s different. If you look over there this building is new. It’s 197 completely different from the older style of houses. Universities are coming. Gas, gas... it makes development happen fast.... But this area was completely forgotten by the government. The government remembers Dar, Arusha, but Mtwara? (No). R: Even now? M: No, now everyone thinks Mtwara will grow because of the gas. (Mary 2015) Residents’ attempts to act on these predictions of growth met resistance once Home Affairs Minister Emmanuel Mchimbi deployed the PDF on May 23, 2013, assuring MP that he would maintain “law and order” within Tanzanian borders (Balile 2013). Mchimbi went on to further label protesters as “betrayers of the nation” in the news media (''Gov't: We’ll Pursue the Inciters” 2013). These accusations refused protesters recognition as citizens, likening their acts of outrage to treason. Since the 2013 protest, central government relations with wana Mtwara further castigated residents as disloyal and greedy (“Maelfu kujiandikisha kuzuia Gesi” 2013). This central government narrative shifted focus to wana Mtwara as disloyal rather than sacrificing. Following initial shock at the degree of severity with which the army treated civilians (“Pregnant Woman Killed” 2013), national government figures had acted fast to direct the framing of events throughout the rest of the world. Underlying government admonitions of residents’ behavior suggested that the southern Tanzanian subjects could not fall in line as economic actors. Using the impoverished reputation of the region to back their claims, Kikwete and his coterie of ministers (including former Minister of Energy and Minerals Dr. Sospeter Muhongo) quickly argued that the root of the problem lay in education, namely the miseducation of Mtwara residents (“Maelfu kujiandikisha kuzuia Gesi” 2013). the ruling party further attempted to frame the natural gas conflict as stemming from the radical actions of Mtwara’s impressionable, underemployed youth (“Tanzania Police Arrest 90 after Mtwara Gas Pipeline 198 Protest” 2013; “Maelfu kujiandikisha kuzuia Gesi” 2013). Elite CCM members cast protesters as unfit workers, unaccustomed to the duties of citizenship. Such duties, in light of Tanzania’s development trajectory of industrialization through natural resource extraction, had fit the description of Foucault’s (1979) “homo economicus”—the market-oriented subject of interests derived from the rationality and calculability of economically-informed choices (272). Their comments and criticisms assumed that if wana Mtwara had been more familiar with revitalization of national economies through natural resource wealth, then violence would have not occurred. Government representatives leaned on popular understandings of wana Mtwara as backwards and uneducated to reinforce the notion that residents are incapable of playing the modern roles expected of them (“Gov’t: We’ll Pursue the Inciters” 2013). Minister of Energy and Minerals Dr. Sospeter Muhongo is quoted in that same article as saying, “I have concerns about the education of those responsible for the gas without understanding. I want for them, first, to return to school. Those who act to rile up citizens and citizens who involve themselves in that are just nonsense” (“Maelfu kujiandikisha kuzuia Gesi” 2013). In contrast to the valorization of underdevelopment and sacrifice in Mtwara during Ujamaa, Mtwara community members’ familiarity with underdevelopment had been interpreted as a moral failing. Former President Jakaya Kikwete famously reminded the Tanzanian nation of how the extractive industries operate for developing countries: “Rasimali inayopatikana popote ni mali ya Taifa nzima” (Natural Resources that are available anywhere in a nation are the wealth of the entire nation) (Kikwete 2013). Furthermore, he emphasized that other communities throughout the developing world understood that a nation’s mineral wealth belongs to the entire nation. Mtwara could be no exception to the rule (Balile 2013). According to the former 199 president, wana Mtwara had greedily demanded more. Former Regional Commissioner of Mtwara, Gen. Joseph Simbakalia implied protesters’ anger had derived from the manipulations of political figures rather than the intentional efforts of residents: “Given the prospects of high revenue earnings from economic rents of oil and natural gas, unchecked greed of business, political or other social leaders can foment and precipitate “resource conflicts”, which manifest as civil wars, regional conflicts involving neighboring countries which share common borders, as well as in-country social divisions which weaken national solidarity” (Simbakalia 2013). Such remarks offer examples of politicians’ and top government officers’ framing of Mtwara’s underdeveloped history and status as evidence of its residents’ inability to function without the direction of outside leadership. Perhaps most importantly, however, central and local government actors’ neoliberal- extractivist framing of natural gas development promotes a version of development in which underdevelopment is no longer viewed as virtuous or loyal. Whereas the central government had previously lauded rural Mtwara residents for their capacity to contribute as participants in Ujamaa and as defenders at the southern border to Mozambique, residents’ inability to prosper despite the optimal business setting fostered by the Tanzanian state suggests, in line with the logic of the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary, that they are incapable of fulfilling their duties as citizens in seeking out entrepreneurial opportunities. The seeming opportunity for development at onset of gas extraction has functioned in government propaganda as a dismissal of the southeast. According to the version of citizenship fostered within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary, the absence of development indicates a failing on the parts of residents. The premise of choice-based individualistic development, furthermore, discounts the discursive, relational 200 premise of “tumesahaulika,” absolving the state of responsibility in the facilitation of development to rural citizens. Violence Several days prior to the anniversary of 2013’s protest, Amari, an established reporter from Mtwara in his forties, provided his account of May 22- 23, 2013: The day of the violence (May 23) was not the same as the days of protest (mainly May 22). On days of protest, people protested peacefully. I’ve never seen a large protest like that in Mtwara prior to that. I don’t think the government did enough (at this point). The police confronted (protesters) without sticks or rifles. On the day of the violence, there was not a protest. People woke up in the morning. First, they went on strike. Merchants closed all their businesses. No one was told (to strike), but there was some sort of communication. We woke in the morning— there were no markets, no stores, no travel, there was nothing (because) people were striking. Therefore, after the government saw this, they thought—will people open their businesses tomorrow? Then cars from Masasi came here. We, they started to strike (organize) in the street. They started at the main market here (down the street)—then there was violence everywhere. They (government soldiers) entered here (the other end of Sinani Street) and you know what events took place. I’ve never seen, in the life I’ve lived so far—I’ve never experienced two days of war like that in my life. I hope I won’t again. It happened right outside, coming from this office. There wasn’t a person selling—if you did, you would be in danger. If you opened your store, you would be in danger. There was no food. There was no water for two days. I’ve never seen anything like that. This is a small picture of what it was like. (Amari 2015) In addition to identifying key developments in the progression of May 2013’s conflict, Amari’s summary of events highlights the disorientation that occurred when the loosely organized protest and business strikes escalated to overwhelming government violence. This disorientation echoed in other residents’ silence on or careful navigation of the confrontations in casual and interview-based conversations. An understanding seemed to hold amongst community members that May’s violence remained an unsafe topic for discussion. Wana Mtwara willing to 201 discuss the topic relayed that neither the PDF nor local forces had been held culpable in the protest’s aftermath. Several residents suggested only higher-ranking members of the community had even received remuneration for houses and property that the national guard had destroyed. My own early attempts to broach the subject of May 2013 in conversations reinforced the topic’s sensitivity. Referencing the topic too quickly with Chikongola neighbors would lead to a quick change in subject matter that soon taught me to exercise more caution and sensitivity in future conversations. Even after I had restricted myself to asking after the subject only when inside a private space without additional company, a friend had still felt the need to warn me to, “act carefully” (David 2015). As a rule, I made sure to allow participants to broach the subject before asking for their impressions or opinions of the violence. Across discussions with urban residents, categories of sociocultural differentiation such as gender affected even the likelihood of conversation: for example, in Mtwara Town, I found it incredibly difficult to engage with the women on the subject of gas violence. My friend and neighbor on Sinani Street, a woman in her mid-thirties whose uncle owned several businesses in Mtwara, mainly shook her head in reference to the brutality of the confrontations. Except for one female reporter, none of the women with whom I spoke claimed to have been involved in the actual protest. Those women who shared commentary on the protests tended to work in a professional career (such as paralegal, CSO officer, or local government official). One woman working as a paralegal commented on the degree to which Tanzanians were afraid of Mtwara region, in general: upon learning of the violence, she said, her own friends exclaimed, “Unaenda Mtwara? ahhhh! Kuna jeeshi na watu wanapigwa muda wote. Na vurugu, vita!” (You’re going to Mtwara? Ahh! The army’s there, and people are getting killed all the time. And violence— 202 war!) (Anonymous, 2013)92. Overall, I found more women willing to talk to me about their plans for the protest anniversary in 2015. Such conversations tended to focus more on the maintenance and organization of social relations within urban Mtwara Town. Even when I found individuals willing to speak on the subject of the protest, the charged nature of the subject led wana Mtwara such as Abdul to correct my terminology. One such encounter led local radio DJ Abdul to suggest I refrain from referring to the outbreak of violence as “mapigano” (physical fighting, hits) from the transitive verb “kupigana” (to hit and be hit): (It’s not “mapigano” because “mapigano” carries weight. If its “maandamano” (protest), then you (attach a different picture to it). Protests have rights these days.)” (Abdul, 2015). Abdul framed 2013’s conflict as a legal form of protest, distant from depictions that may have drawn accusations of unlawfulness to the police or community members. Participants' accounts of violence range according to a wide variety of variables, including one’s participation in the actual protest. A Muslim NGO employee in his thirties told me that soldiers had launched smoke bombs through the windows of his home in the midst of fighting. The emissions from the bomb scared his young daughter who had quickly drawn his attention to the situation. For a journalist friend I had made toward the end of research, however, street coverage of the protest quickly escalated into a dangerous situation. After having been struck by a rock, she escaped into a nearby private home. There, she hid from uniformed officers until the violence had lessened. Residents willing to speak on the subject of post-conflict relations between the government and citizens often situated them in a familial context, transforming officers and 92 All participants who have contributed statements regarding 2013’s protests are either referred to as anonymous contributors or have been assigned aliases. This is done to preserve their confidentiality. 203 Wana Mtwara into parents and children. Numerous scholars have highlighted the ways in which Tanzanians employed this idiom of familial relations to stake moral claims and access particular services from the government (Monson 2009; Hunter 2013; Fouéré 2014; Philips 2018). The founding Ujamaa ideology of the Tanzanian state prescribed the nuclear family as the ideal social unit. Nyerere’s ideology, however, intended for every level of social tier—ward, village, region, nation, continent — to envision itself as belonging to a unified African family. Institutionally, government officers fostered tiered levels of government and governance that instantiated a sense of family unity and heightened relationality from the head of the nation down to village officers through protocol and bureaucratic norms. Politically, the language of family membership bore particular weight within Tanzania’s political party system. Leading political figures in contemporary Tanzanian politics maintain political legitimacy, in part, by invoking kinship with founding father Julius Nyerere. In likening the moral ties and duties between parent and child to that of patrimonial nation and citizen, residents highlighted the intimate nature of violence conducted by government officers against community members. Rendering the conflict as a familial drama, however, did not seem to offer clear resolutions or make the violence any less inscrutable: Nikiwa mtoto na tabia yangu ni sitaki kwenda shule… na mzazi wangu amekasirika and chukua fimbo na nipiga. (he gestures losing an eye)…. Kwa hiiyo mtawala yetu hawezi kukasirika sana, si kweli. Lazima urudi kazini na kaa… bas. Kwa hiivyo mzee alionyesha kasirika mno.” (Hassan 2015) (If I were a child and had the kind of temperament to not want to go to school, and then my parent got angry, so took a stick and hit me makes the gesture of losing his eye? (Shakes his head) Our ruler (shouldn’t) get too angry, not really. It is necessary that you must return to work and sit—that’s it. (But) the (parent) showed too much anger.) Kwenye familia, mtoto akiwa na tabia mbaya katika familia, utastuka? Kwa sababu ataleta aibu kwa familia. Hii aibu inaweza kusababisha kuharibia kipato 204 chako na mtu kupoteza kazi au kupata sifa mbaya na kutaka mzazi… (the parent will discourage this behavior in a child if it starts). Atasafisha, atasimama mstari, ataendelea kupata marafiki ambao atapenda… uliweza kukutisha ukipata tabia ya mbovu. (Abdul 2015) (In a family, if the child has a bad character, what will you do? The child might bring shame to the family—this can damage status and cause a person to lose his job or get a bad reputation. He will clean up; he will stand in a line; and he will continue to make better friends. You will scare a child, if necessary, to fix a bad character.) Abdul, an Mtwara-based radio DJ originally from northern Tanzania, made several comparisons between the relationship of child and parent and that of citizen and state in interviews, interpreting state violence in the wake of May 2013’s gas pipeline protest as necessary, if harsh, measures of oversight: When are you in school, you are under the care of your parents who care for you and give you money for school fees. They are expected to have a good character and do well by their parents. They (the youth who do well) make sure that they succeed in their studies. You won’t go to clubs. You don’t use drugs. The youth who live their lives like this are thought of well by their parents and, it will be easy for them to explain to them the business of development. (Abdul 2015) According to this interpretation of the government/citizen relationship, it is the citizen’s (child’s) role to transform themselves into the ideal subject under the tutelage of parents. Meanwhile, testimonies such as Hassan’s suggest that the government had overstepped its bounds as enforcer of law, allowing for nuanced condemnations of the Tanzanian state in light of the country’s strong reputation for peace and stability. This voice is an increasingly important one in the context of Tanzania’s supposed meteoric rise to Middle Income Earning Country status. Hassan reflected the views of many other Mtwara-born community members in disparaging the degree of violence with which the government responded to protests. Older men in Mtwara Town shared a sense of frustration with urban youth but tended to convey a balanced 205 interpretation of the May 2013 confrontation. While Hassan conveys that the chastised child in his story had been punished far too brutally, he does not suggest that the child rise up in anger against his parents. The narration closes with the child returning to school and continuing to live with the repercussions of the parent’s harsh punishment. That the parent overreacted is a criticism yet not a rejection of the relationship. Although the unspeakable nature of May 2013’s violence related to fear of local government reprisals,93 wana Mtwara who shared their opinions on the conflict with me found it difficult to reconcile the development attention finally afforded them with the violent disavowal of their development interests. State violence ordered by the central government and authorized by local state representatives undercut residents’ claims for development and recognition premised upon past regional sacrifice. The government and officers who enforced orders in May 2013 displayed disregard and even disdain for the reciprocal relations that many residents maintained with political authorities in the region and in the central government. The May 22 Anniversary and “Amani” “On the 22, stores won’t open. Not even the soko (market) will open that day.” (Chairman of Sinani Street, 2015) Once friends started making inquiries into my plans in early May, I became aware of the significance of May 22’s protest anniversary. Because my identity as a white foreign female researcher did not qualify me as a potential target of violence but suggested I might be ignorant to its potential, many of the young women with whom I regularly interacted on Sinani Street took it upon themselves to inform me of the upcoming date. Neighbors’ discussion of travel 93 Local and regional authorities had already caused several local reporters to flee due to the harassment they had received from government officers and ruling party members to enforce media censorship. 206 plans or arrangements for avoiding potential conflict on the date marked one of the most casual, accessible inroads to touching upon 2013’s protest violence. For instance, Brenda, a supporter of CCM who actively avoided conversations in politics likely to draw the attention of her younger brother who favored the UKAWA opposition coalition, volunteered that she had wanted to travel to Dar to avoid the anniversary but was not sure she could take off work for a period long enough to justify the arduous bus trip. I had even received confirmation from a few smaller shops that they would not open their doors on the 23, as a helpful reminder for me to stock up on necessities. At the same time, I heard one local government representative claim for my benefit (in English) that many of the shops would, in fact, remain open. Officials and local politicians grappled with the specter of potential violence that loomed in the lead-up to the day. In preparation for May 23, some residents included me in conversation on the habits of consumption and travel that they would have to interrupt in order to stay comfortably at home and avoid danger. These conversations provided broad sketches of the actual activities and practices that participation in the anniversary entailed. On Sinani Street in Chikongola, a central location of protest violence situated near the bus station and main market, residents had suspected dukas or stores to be closed. Although no one explicitly identified the boycotting of businesses on May 22, 2015, as the intended reenactment or performance of activities that had taken place in the lead-up to state violence in 2013, residents emphasized the centrality of business closures in partaking in the anniversary. The closures were meant to mirror—to reenact—those that had occurred on May 22, 2013. As it had in 2013, residents’ refusal to take part in their daily business routines generated great anxiety among local government officers. The potential for action and violence loomed large in exchanges over the May 22, anniversary. In resident accounts such as Amari’s, the potential for sustained, organized business 207 disruption had seemed to particularly provoke the ire and anxiety of the local government in 2013: “there were no markets, no stores, no travel, there was nothing (because) people were striking. Therefore, after the government saw this, they thought—will people open their businesses tomorrow?” (Amari 2013). In 2015, disruption of the working day served as the most tangible evidence of the anniversary’s approach and intentions. While moving from Chikongola neighborhood to the more affluent Shangani Peninsula for the duration of the anniversary, I had entered in a stressful exchange with a local government officer and shopkeeper near the maduka makuba (“big stores”), a business area that boasted several shopping markets and attracted foreign and affluent clientele, over the likelihood of businesses remaining closed in honor of May 22. I had directed the question to a familiar small shopkeeper whose business was situated on the opposite side of the street from the area’s larger businesses. I had asked whether or not we should expect places to be closed. After replying that he, himself, would not be open, a well-dressed man with a nametag contradicted him in saying that “oh yes, they will be open.” The exchange had turned tense, and I had come away from it not knowing whether the man had been referring to maduka makubwa’s larger grocery stores and cell phone company offices that lined the area’s stone street, or if he had meant to directly contradict the shopkeeper I had inadvertently drawn into the situation. In the wake of May 22, 2015, friends informed me that no one had walked outside or visited the market on May 23. The streets had been virtually empty. (From my guest house in Shangani, I had only been able to overhear the whirring of a few bajajis (three-wheeled small transportation vehicles) throughout the day.) In the aftermath of the date, the potentiality of disruption or reckoning for 2013’s violence had eased considerably. The subject of closing businesses and disrupted social behavior no longer occupied conversations. In its absence, 208 residents continued to make sense of state violence as it had been directed at community members. For those observing the anniversary of state violence, assessing the likelihood of peace restoration offered room in which to critique the premise of national belonging. Interviews on the subject of government and community relations in post-conflict Mtwara projected the validity of state-driven development planning when the moral premise of national belonging—the region’s sacrifices and participation in past development schemes—had been violently disavowed. In the aftermath of violence, questioning “amani” (peace) formed a critical underpinning of national belonging through which residents could articulate. Mary, a paralegal whose husband had recently been relocated to Mtwara from northern Tanzania, commented on the shock and fear many people associated with Mtwara in the protest’s wake but clarified that the violence did not challenge the country’s sense of peace: M: After hearing that I was going to Mtwara, everyone was surprised. (They said) “Mtwara? Ahhh! There’s an army and people are beaten and there’s violence there all the time!” When we came here there was silence. I thought they didn’t want to talk about the topic of gas. It’s still not over. R: Do you think people are afraid? M: They’re not afraid, but they don’t want to talk about it. It’s a matter of peace. They believe. Whether or not the gas leaves, they will ensure peace is kept. On May 22, 2015 all stores will be closed. People still have bitterness. They just sit, quiet. (2015) While Mary’s perception of wana Mtwara indicates that there is no option but to keep peace in the region, other research participants made sure to highlight the referencing of “amani” indicated the possibility of its contestation. what happened was that people said we were just remembering—but people died… businesses were closed, and people continued with their lives as usual. People were saying our relatives our friends were murdered, we need to remember them. (Ahmed 2015) 209 Apart from directly touching on the subject of improving relations, residents reflected on the degree of influence the potential for violence held for Mtwara’s development landscape: Sisi watu wa Mtwara tunapenda maendeleo. Lakini hayo maendeleo, haigusi wananchi watu wengi watanzania hasa watu wa chini, inatokea kwa sababu serikali wanalazimisha. Itakuwa nbaya zaidi. Na watu wanakufa. Kuhusu investments—nina shaka, kubwa tu kuhusu huo mradi…. Tunapenda amani sana... (shakes head) (Isaak 2015) (The people of Mtwara love development. But this development does not reach all citizens, especially not poor people because the government makes sure it doesn’t. It will only get worse and people are dying. About “investments,” I have doubts, big ones about this project. We really love peace...) Isaak, an opposition party supporter, claimed that wana Mtwara love peace not as reassurance— instead, his statement regarding peace carried the tone of sad concession. Isaak indicated by shaking his head the unlikeliness of amani maintaining amidst development in its current articulations by government. Only one individual with whom I spoke admitted that he no longer believed that government relations could improve in Mtwara following 2013’s gas conflict. Something had irrevocably shifted: siwepo amani… amani imeharibika.” (I don’t have peace. Peace has been broken) (Amari). In the midst of these tense considerations, still others highlighted amani as an inalienable characteristic of Tanzanian character. Hassan framed amani’s permanence in Tanzania as a product of its naturally polite, gentle people. “Watu wa Tanzania ni wapole sana. Amani ipo.” (People of Tanzania are very gentle. There is peace.) (Hassan). Abdul’s consideration of government relations allowed for acknowledgement of state violence but reasoned that one could not simply give up the pursuit of development: “If you lose someone important in your life, would you lose the will to live? If the chances for development are there, you must take them.” (Abdul 2015). 210 For wana Mtwara, the performance of mourning interrupted the temporal and spatial pace and rituals of daily life by reenacting their memories of May 22. Unlike Kikwete’s display of Pan-Africanism at the Inauguration Ceremony of Dangote Factory, residents intended the protest anniversary to highlight separation and distance from a particular configuration of political authority that reflected the influence of the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary in Tanzanian political culture. The mourning drew attention to existing tensions between the social- development imaginary and the neoliberal one through disruptive acts of abstention. Mourners’ acts of disruption implied movement away from the development-based projections of state authority. Participants in the mourning did not appeal to government authorities in order to highlight commonalities but, rather, stayed within the private space of their homes and residences to mark unreciprocated relations of obligation and sacrifice between residents and the state. As performance, disruption was meant to be viewed and experienced with anxiety by government officers, but mourners did not actively entreat government representatives to consider their mourning of the state as conceived of in the social-development imaginary: premised through discourse and practice on the collective upliftment of rural citizens and the African continent. Conclusion By taking part in May 22’s anniversary, wana Mtwara referenced and grieved the unmooring of their development imaginary from its former configuration of moral underdevelopment. Prior to conflict, discussion of underdevelopment had maintained ties to the nation and fostered an atmosphere of indebtedness in which residents could imagine how central government development might manifest in the future. The phrase “tumesahaulika” signified residents’ expectation of government recognition for past sacrifices (in particular, sustained 211 underdevelopment). In the midst of natural gas extraction and speculation, central government promises seemed to lend credence to residents’ expectations. State authorities’ early exclusion of wana Mtwara from the natural gas pipeline planning process and deployment of the armed national guard in response to regional protests on May 23, however, betrayed residents’ sense of moral logic and expectations. In this chapter, I have maintained that considerations of “amani” allowed wana Mtwara to mediate, mend, and even threaten the viability of development in the aftermath of state violence. In withdrawing from social and economic routines on May 22, residents mourn the potential for moral recognition that their experiences with state-mediated development discourse and practice had fostered. In refraining from business and common expressions of public social exchange, wana Mtwara articulated their own uncertainty in the capacity for development to foster moral ties of national belonging. Mtwara residents’ observance of the protest served as a performative critique of and accusation against the moral logics that had at one time bolstered individuals’ personal and regional senses of national belonging (Askew 2002). The anniversary and discussions of “amani” also reconfigured relations on the ground in Mtwara, as preparations and conversations on the potential for disruption provoked anxiety throughout Mtwara Town’s social landscape. Altogether, these contestations demonstrate creative, disruptive efforts by urban residents of Mtwara Town to forward a particular kind of development relationship with the state premised on nationalistic sacrifice and obligation. 212 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION: DEVELOPING MTWARA IN MAGUFULI’S TANZANIA A far cry from Ferguson’s (2006) typology of the cut-off extractive enclave, rural and urban residents of Mtwara Town contested their versions of development and the state by engaging two national imaginaries that each hold conflicting premises of the state, development, and citizenship: the social-development imaginary and the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Within the social-development model, gas wealth had initially amounted to recognition by the central government for past nationalistic sacrifice and underdevelopment. State pipeline plans and then the government’s deployment of the military to subdue 2013’s protests in Mtwara Town, however, challenged the sacrificing premise of residents’ ties to the state and their own senses of national belonging. In response to the promise of gas wealth amid a knowledge economy of heightened insecurity, meanwhile, government workers and CSO officers experienced varying motivations to produce images of the state and development as they are conceived within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. In the conflict’s aftermath, government representatives, CSO officers, and community members in Mtwara continued to contest and contribute to the direction and content of national development. Within the context of the extractive industries governance, local government actors upheld the image of the neoliberal-extractivist state through increased measures of knowledge restriction through historically informed bureaucratic processes of planning (Chapter 3). An exploration of local Mtwara government drawn from media reports and interview evidence establishes situated actors’ efforts to promote the Tanzanian state as an adept business broker, capable of attracting foreign investment and defending domestic interests. Kikwete made an effort to strike this balance with the performance of a trickle-down, neoliberal pan-Africanism at the Dangote Factory Inauguration. relations. In in interviews with local government officers, 213 their reliance upon the bureaucratic language of planning referenced the existence of knowledge on natural gas policy at the highest echelons of government but also denied non-government actors’ access to this presumed information. This invocation of knowledge and then refusal to distribute it supported the neoliberal-extractivist model of the state. Within the neoliberal- extractivist imaginary, the state is understood to hold exclusive knowledge that would allow it to astutely and adeptly set an optimal investment environment for the Tanzanian economy. In order to make their own roles and functions relevant, government actors referred to abstract protocol to reassure residents of the validity and efficiency of the Tanzanian state. Acts of knowledge restriction concealed the potential insecurity of the state and a lack of knowledge. At the same time, these actions safeguarded local government officers’ positions within clientele networks. In their efforts to secure their assumed access to natural gas knowledge, district officers rarely considered structural, collective problems facing Mtwara residents as a result of extractive industry projects. Instead, they perpetuated models of development and the state as conceived within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Within the context of focus groups facilitated by ward secretaries, however, conflicting visions of the state’s role in ensuring development emerged between rural residents and state representatives. In one exchange, a ward officer asserted that rural citizens held full responsibility for finding their own development opportunities. Municipal and ward officers, who are elected by peers rather than appointed by the central government, made more visible efforts to consider the logic of the social-development imaginary as presented during focus groups. For instance, certain villagers suggested that state leaders should make direct changes to the parastatal company TANESCO so that larger swaths of the population experience benefits from natural gas development. survival. 214 My findings presented in Chapter 4 argue that the uncertainty and ambiguity born from immature extractive industry oversight has encouraged CSO officers to promote the image of the neoliberal-extractivist state. An analysis of two different kinds of civil society organizations— advocacy CSOs and cultural CSOs— reveals that CSO workers often produced the effects of the neoliberal-extractivist state through their efforts to maintain positive government relations, perform cultural celebrations, and seek new funding opportunities. In interviews with civil society officers, I found they positioned the state as inscrutable as well as uniquely invested with expert knowledge. In order to make their own organizations legible and attractive to donor networks within the context of Tanzania’s nascent gas industry, the advocacy CSO focused on accessing all available information on transparency initiatives and the most current information regarding extractive industry policy. Given the highly secretive practice of central and local government actors in regard to gas policy, however, the advocacy CSO met frequent obstacles and restrictions. The information MRENGO received clearance to print projected an image of the Tanzanian state and citizens’ roles in securing development for themselves that upheld the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. Addressing the constraints faced by CSOs in accessing state resources and navigating government censorship in post-conflict Mtwara complicates Green’s (2012, 2014) model of anticipatory development. Through the adoption of specific procedures, materials, and processes associated with particular forms of development (e.g., workshops and seminars), citizens can come into proximity of highly valuable donor networks (even if they lack the immediate capital to actively participate in a venture). Green (2014) recognizes that Tanzanians mediate their relations with the state through development, yet views development as form of governance through which citizens may bypass the state, if needed. While the cultural CSO continued to 215 experience some flexibility in navigating donor networks and government agencies in post- conflict Mtwara, the threat of exposing the government’s lack of knowledge concerning natural gas policy managed led state actors to place heightened restrictions on the advocacy CSO’s mobility and work. Advocacy-centered CSOs, more than cultural CSOs, faced restrictions on mobility and the content of their activities. As western agencies expect advocacy CSOs to hold national governments accountable to global standards of extractive sector conduct, Tanzanian government restrictions challenged the work of advocacy CSOs such as MRENGO. Mtwara Town residents’ observations of 2013’s protest anniversary and deliberations over prospects for development and peace in Mtwara marked a discursive shift in the meaning of underdevelopment in Mtwara. Following the 2013 protest, central government actors framed underdevelopment as evidence of selfishness and disloyalty rather than nationalistic sacrifice. In response to this regional recasting, Mtwara Town residents questioned and critiqued recent expressions of state authority (Chapter 5). In particular, anniversary participants reflected on the potential for Tanzania’s most recent political administrations to foster peace and moral development. Development as championed by many urban wana Mtwara entailed the state’s enduring facilitation of widespread development. As participation in May 22’s anniversary, many wana Mtwara criticized 2013’s state violence by withdrawing themselves from the pursuit of development at the level of community. Residents’ retreat from practices of personal development such as work accomplished more than to draw attention to state violence. These disruptive performances drew recognition to the immoral exercise of state authority. Abstentions from daily exchanges generated anxiety over the potential eruption of violence amongst government officials and critiqued the government’s abandonment of state responsibilities as conceived within the social-development imaginary. Resident’s refusal to take up work or visit 216 the market suggested that displays such as 2013’s were contradictory to the neoliberal model of development that elite state actors have embraced and government representatives often employ. Analysis of social exchanges situated within post-conflict Mtwara elucidates the active role of social actors in contributing to and contesting the meaning of national belonging at sites of resource extraction (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Contextualizing these processes in social and political Tanzanian history centralizes the positions of wana Mtwara as they draw on different development imaginaries to contest the relationship between development and the state and the content of national development in Tanzania. Tanzania presents a case study in which extractive industry activity has formed a critical setting for residents’ performance and contestation of the role of the state in development in present-day Tanzania. Looking to the Future Under the administration of President John Magufuli, Mtwara region has proven a critical stage for spectacles of state authority. Following the conclusion of my dissertation fieldwork in 2016, the political style of Tanzanian governance pivoted under President Magufuli’s leadership. Scholars and media, alike, recognized him as an autocratic president whose image devolved over time from no-nonsense, practical politician to violent dictator. While his administration had first established a platform of “nchi yangu kwanza” (my country first) to promote unity and solidarity for development, Magufuli soon would place increasingly strict restrictions on extractive sector dealings, political expression, and the freedom of press (Oforo, 2017). In particular, Magufuli presented his defense of domestic interests against the imperialist ventures of IOCs as a matter of state secrecy. This secretive atmosphere enabled the president to legitimate and conceal his contradictory exercise of authority. On one hand, Magufuli echoed Kikwete in blaming domestic failings on the greed and predatory practices of IOCs. Magufuli 217 intensified this narrative, however, in casting Tanzanians as victims of an “economic war” against western capitalist forces (“Foreigners Sabotage” 2019). This economic war manifested in Magufuli’s dealings with the business mogul Aliko Dangote, as reflected in media coverage of the two figures’ tense and tenuous relationship (Mohammed 2016). In 2016, Magufuli had intended for a ban on coal imports to kickstart domestic production and justify investment in the construction of Tanzanian smelters. Its implementation, however, threatened to increase production costs for Dangote Cement Factory.94 In response to Magufuli’s coal ban, Dangote suspended activity at the plant. In order to resolve issues with his reputation as a domestic defender intact, Magufuli secured a private deal with Aliko Dangote in which the government provided the cement factory its own private coal mine. This act demonstrated Magufuli’s penchant for exercising authority unilaterally and in secrecy. In the conflict’s aftermath, Magufuli’s reputation as a skilled broker of industrial contracts strengthened (“Let Dangote Mine Coal Locally, Orders Magufuli” 2017). In 2017, Magufuli had Acacia Mining investigated for fraud and tax evasion for their perceived non-compliance with an earlier ban issued on gold and copper concentrates (“Tanzania’s President Signs New Mining Bills into Law,” 2017). The escalating conflict with Acacia Mining and their parent company, Barrick Gold, transformed into a corporate-political drama that culminated in the following: the resignation from office of high-profile politicians such as the Minister of Ministry and Energy Sospeter Muhongo; the stipulation that Tanzanian bank accounts would hold mining revenues; and a large increase in state ownership of stocks in Barrick Gold (Acacia Mining’s parent company) (Roder 2019). Even as public displays of 94 Prior to this ban, Dangote had imported coal from South Africa rather than southern Tanzania, as the former proved more cost-effective (Nsehe 2017). 218 domestic defense such as the dispute with Acacia Mining Company further bolstered Magufuli’s image as a defender of domestic interests, however, his approach to business obstructed crucial projects associated such as the construction of an LNG plant in the Lindi Region. Under Magufuli’s leadership, the planning met multiple murky obstacles and lent further uncertainty to the timeline and content of future extractive industry projects in Mtwara. In November 2018, Magufuli’s efforts to project a unified development sector under an authoritative state escalated with his ordering of the national guard to purchase cashew nuts crops from farmers in Mtwara region the Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank funds (“Why Tanzania’s Army” 2018). Unprecedented in Tanzanian history, the government’s purchase of 220,000 tons of cashews in the South marked an unusually direct intervention of the state in the market (“Magufuli Steps in, Deploys Army Amid Cashew Nut Saga” 2018”; “Tanzania Deploys Military” 2018). According to President Magufuli, he intended the move to prevent a fall in the export price of cashew crops, as private trading companies had refused to meet the original cashew prices set by the government (2018). Dissatisfied with several businesses’ offers to pay $1.3 per kilogram for the crop, Magufuli ordered the Tanzania PDF to purchase cashews at $1.43 per kilogram from the southern farmers (“Tanzania’s Magufuli Deploys” 2018). The president’s failure to secure Parliamentary permission prior to PDF deployment attracted criticism from opposition party leaders. In the aftermath of 2018’s “cashew crisis,” several media reports had suggested Magufuli’s incursion into the South as self-appointed defender of Mtwara farmers really stemmed from wanting to curry favor in an opposition stronghold (“Tanzania’s Magufuli Deploys” 2018). Incidents and political dramas in which President Magufuli acted with great autonomy and secrecy demonstrate how he balanced his role as defender of the Tanzanian nation against 219 imperializing corporate interests with his focus on inviting foreign investment (2019 Roder). Calling out the predatory activity of foreign companies such as Acacia Ltd. While implementing secrecy at the top levels of government sometimes obscured Magufuli’s private management of foreign business investment in the Tanzanian economy. Demanding increased measures of secrecy in regard to financial and political matters naturalized and justified his exclusive access to financial and political expertise. Following Magufuli’s passing on March 17, 2021, it will be crucial to follow how political successors and members of the Tanzanian public utilize his image and reputation in the pursuit of development in Tanzania. On one hand, Zanzibari-born President Samia Suluhu Hassan (2021–), Magufuli’s successor, has already attracted moderate praise for orchestrating a development plan to combat the presence of COVID-19 in Tanzania.95 Additionally, she received acclaim for vowing to repeal her predecessor’s ban on the freedom of the press. Despite these positive signs, however, President Hassan’s recent efforts to block of constitutional review measures and restrict opposition party activities have encouraged national reporters to liken her to Magufuli (Mutambo 2021). To the frustration of many Tanzanian citizens, President Hassan has refused to consider public demands for rewriting the constitution. In a recent interview, President Hassan specified that growing the economy needed to be prioritized over constitutional review measures (Mwehozi 2021). This economic focus is reflected in her eagerness to push forward corporate dealings with IOCs on construction of the long-awaited LNG plant in Lindi Region. It is still too early, however, to predict how southeasterners might view the progression of Lindi’s LNG project and contest the future of national development under the leadership of President Hassan. 95 Under Magufuli’s rule, the president famously denied the viability and efficacy of vaccines. 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