Where did this land come from? The district councils and village councils, even the village council committees on land, had no legal basis for distributing land in leasehold agreements to settlers. The ‘Land Planning and Utilization Act’ did allow for the creation of new tenure agreements and the cancellation of existing ones, but it was never invoked. It seems that operation Tanzania was illegal even by the constitutional and statutory regulations of Nyerere’s Tanzania. President Nyerere had great discretionary power with which to influence the making of laws, but there seems not to have been a law that allowed for forced villagization. The Villages and Ujamaa Villages act was repealed in 1982 by the Local Government Act of that year, but the point remains that previllagization customary land rights—recognized by colonial law and maintained in Tanzanian law—collide with post-villagization allocations. That the President was able to act in the spirit of the law instead of in the name of it is testament to President Nyerere’s enormous, even dictatory power, in Tanzania.
Section II - Economic Analysis The Role of and Problems with Parastatals in Nyerere’s Tanzania Parastatals were the semi-autonomous nationally owned corportations that were the economic interface between the people of Tanania and the government. They had tremendous economic importance as the only entities that could engage in large scale commerce legally.57 They suffered from gross inefficiencies though that were partly derived through the same bureaucratic pathologies through which Nyerere influenced other parts of the national apparatus in Tanzania. 57
World Bank, Tanzania Agricultural Sector Report, 1983, pg. 69
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