Yearbook 1996
Tanzania. The new President Benjamin Mkapa himself is considered impeccably honest, but the government is still troubled by the corruption suspicions that have dragged Tanzania into disrepute. Finance Minister Simon Mbilinyi was forced to resign after several import companies received unauthorized tariff exemptions, the same mistake that dropped his representative in 1994. Opposition leader Augustine Mrema was elected to parliament in October after a campaign aimed mainly at Mbilinyi.
- ABBREVIATIONFINDER.ORG: What does TZ stand for? In the field of geography, this two letter acronym means Tanzania. Check this to see its other meanings in English and other 35 languages.
| Land area | 947,300 km² |
| Total population | 58,552,845 |
| Residents per km² | 61.8 |
| Capital | Dodoma (official); Dar es Salaam (seat of government) |
| Official language | Kiswahili (Swahili), English |
| Income per capita | $ 3,200 |
| Currency | Tanzanian Shilling |
| ISO 3166 code | TZ |
| Internet TLD | .tz |
| License plate | EAU |
| Telephone code | +255 |
| Time zone UTC | +3 |
| Geographic coordinates | 6 00 S, 35 00 O |
The state-owned ferry Bukoba’s wreck on Lake Victoria in May, when nearly 1,000 people were killed, also drew attention to deficiencies in public administration. The ship had been allowed to leave with more than twice as many passengers as the rules allowed.
In June 2016, the president banned all political meetings until 2020. In response, the opposition called for peaceful protests under the slogan of the Alliance against Dictatorship in Tanzania (UKUTA). The consequence was that the police also banned internal meetings of the parties. Two opposition leaders and 35 members were arrested and charged with various matters, including calls for protest.
Police arrested 20 LGBTI people in Dar es Salaam in August. Most were released again after 48 hours. In November, authorities suspended the HIV/AIDS homicide prevention program.
In September, a court declared Chapters 13 and 17 of the Marriage Act to be unconstitutional. They allowed marriage for girls under 18. Tanzania has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world. 37% of girls under 18 are married. The state attorney appealed the court’s order.
Tourism played an increasingly important role for the country’s economy. In 2016, it accounted for 17.5% of GDP. Almost 1.3 million tourists visited the country for almost 600,000 in 2005.
Population 1996
According to Countryaah.com, the population of Tanzania in 1996 was 29,649,024, ranking number 32 in the world. The population growth rate was 3.300% yearly, and the population density was 33.4716 people per km2.
Tanzania has for at least two decades identified with rural socialism, the Ujamaa, a political project of JK Nyerere, president of the country since independence and a figure of great prestige in the process of decolonization of Africa. It was an economic-social experiment, based not on industrialization, but on agriculture managed, according to African traditions, by village communities, and aimed at freeing the country from dependence on Western powers. However, even if it guaranteed to Tanzania a substantial internal stability, rural socialism failed to trigger a development process, failing the objective of self-centered growth.
Starting in the late 1970s, the worsening of the terms of trade in raw materials hit hard an economy based on the export of few agricultural products, just as signs of opposition to the one-party regime began to emerge. The Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, Revolutionary Party of Tanzania), a party that in Nyerere’s intentions was to guarantee a ramified system of direct participation of the population, also ensured through the possibility of voting for different candidates, although all belonging to the party, progressively transformed in a rigid and centralized bureaucratic apparatus. In 1985 Nyerere’s decision to renounce the presidency favored, despite many difficulties and slowness, the transformation of the political system in a multi-party sense and the adoption of liberalizing economic policies, under the control of the International Monetary Fund. If on the one hand these last economic choices determined a growth in investments and in the domestic product in real terms, on the other they were at the origin of an overall worsening of the health and education indicators of the population.