Benjamin Mkapa, diplomat and regional peacemaker, dies at 81

Former Tanzanian President Benjamin William Mkapa, who died in Dar es Salaam Friday at 81, was famed in diplomatic circles for not mincing his words, even though he remained a diplomat par excellence.

In Kenya, he is remembered for his role in restoring peace following the disputed 2007 presidential election, as part of a mediation team known as the Panel of Eminent African Personalities mandated by the African Union in January 2008 to stop weeks of post-election violence.

The others were former UN Secretary-General, the late Kofi Annan, who chaired the Panel, former South African First Lady Graça Machel, Mozambique’s Joachim Chissano, Botswana’s Katumile Masire and Zambia’s Kennedy Kaunda.

The team led the peace process that culminated in the Agreement on the Principles of Partnership of the Coalition Government, which was signed by President Mwai Kibaki of the Party of National Unity (PNU) and Orange Democratic Movement leader Raila Odinga on February 28, 2008.

During the negotiation process, Mr Mkapa was instrumental in including the public in the negotiations.

“With the vital aid of President Mkapa, Kofi Annan would take it upon himself to include the people in the process as much as possible through media transparency. While downplaying the harsh realities behind closed doors when the process seemed to go off track, he would reassure the nation with his steady optimism,” wrote Ms Elizabeth Linden Mayer and Josie Kaye in A Choice for Peace? The Story of Forty-One Days of Mediation in Kenya.

It is Mkapa who reminded the PNU and ODM factions that they had worked together before and that common ground should not be so hard to find.

A breakthrough in the negotiations came on February 26, 2008, when Mr Annan, after consulting with Mr Mkapa, decided to temporarily suspend talks with the negotiating teams and engage directly with Mr Kibaki and Mr Odinga.

“The gap between the positions of the parties and the desires of their leaders, as well as the lag between the speed of progress in the room and the crisis happening on the ground, could no longer be tolerated,” Mayer and Kayer write.

The final negotiations that birthed a deal took place at Harambee House behind closed doors and only involved five key members despite attempts by both sides to have more people around the negotiation table.

Recalling the Kenyan assignment in his memoir, My Life, My Purpose, Mkapa wrote that locking out William Ruto – the current Deputy President – and Narc Kenya leader Martha Karua from the mediation team in 2008 helped secure the power-sharing agreement. At the time, Dr Ruto was part of Mr Odinga’s ODM negotiation team while Ms Karua acted for PNU.

“The atmosphere changed when we got Kibaki and Odinga together without Karua and Ruto present…. When these two (Ruto and Karua) heard that they were being invited to witness the signing of the agreement, they were furious, saying there had been a conspiracy to persuade Kibaki to agree,” wrote Mr Mkapa.

He described the Kenyan experience as his toughest mediation assignment outside his country. At home, he navigated talks in 2000 to block attempts by Zanzibari president Salmin Amour to extend his stay in office for a third five-year term.

Mr Mkapa will also be remembered for his role as the mediator and facilitator of the Inter-Burundi Dialogue (IBD), a process that was instrumental in chaperoning Burundi towards its first ever democratic presidential elections and the smooth transition thereafter.

But on February 1 last year he lost his cool and shocked East African heads of state during a summit in Arusha when he announced that he was giving up his role as facilitator of the inter-Burundi dialogue. The reason for his decision was that the government in Bujumbura had not demonstrated sufficient commitment to the peace process and he, therefore, saw no value in further dialogue.

Mr Mkapa had been irked by the fact that the Burundi government side had not only skipped several rounds of the negotiations, but had even gone ahead to stage a referendum that removed term limits from the Constitution and extended the presidential tenure from five to seven years without even bothering to consult him as facilitator.

On the few occasions it had been represented at the talks, Bujumbura frustrated the process by sending delegates that lacked the authority to make binding decisions. For those reasons, he was throwing the facilitator’s role back to chief negotiator Yoweri Museveni.

Dramatic as it might have appeared to the casual observer, to those who knew him, such forthrightness is what made Mr Mkapa’s diplomacy stand out. Variously described as blunt, open and pragmatic, he was an open book, not given to intrigue. He was open about his views on any issue and this made those around see him as an honest and dependable individual.

Mr Henry Okello Oryem, Uganda’s Minister of State for International Affairs, describes him as a mentor.

“When I had just started out as a young diplomat, I learnt a lot from him. He was not used to sugarcoating reality and said everything the way it had to be said. He came from a new school of diplomacy that has now gained currency,” said Mr Oryem.

He added Mr Mkapa exuded an air of authority, which often put people in their place well before he had even said a word.

“He was a well-educated, informed and straightforward person. You had to be really confident to take him on,” said Mr Oryem, who knew Mr Mkapa at both a personal and official level.

In the aftermath of the fall of the regime of Idi Amin, the “Moshi Spirit” was, for Ugandan politicians, the gold standard for resolving any differences or calling out any deviations from the principles agreed upon by a diverse group of exiled Ugandans who spent months charting out a post-Amin order in the Tanzanian town of Moshi. It is significant that the reference was to the “spirit” rather than the written text of a document.

It had taken Mr Mkapa’s willpower, discipline and candour to beat the incongruous group of Ugandan intellectuals, separated by bitter historical, political and ethnic differences, to rally around a common vision for Uganda after eight years of a murderous dictatorship.

Years later, when he became President of Tanzania, that ability to put aside emotion and focus on the issues and desired outcome would come into play during negotiations to revive the East African Community.

The uncontained failure of the EAC in 1977 had resulted in a disproportionate sharing of the community’s assets that appeared to favour Kenya. This had left a bitter aftertaste in the minds of a section of the region’s citizenry, outside Kenya. While the average man in Uganda, informed by nostalgia, saw revival of the community as a pathway to the good old days of cheap consumer goods, peace and free passage across region, in Tanzania, the political leaders had a tough job uniting the country around the idea of a rejuvenated community.

So while the three Ms before him — Moi, Museveni and Mwinyi — were generally sold on the principle, progress was slow. When he became president in November 1995, he neatly fitted into the other M slot, picking from where his predecessor Ali Hassan Mwinyi had stopped. It took Mr Mkapa’s sense of purpose and ability to impose his views that Tanzania finally came on board with enthusiasm, marking rapid progress that even opened the door for Rwanda and Burundi to join the EAC.

Mr Mkapa was different from his pears in a unique way. With an education journey that took him through Kenya and Uganda, he had social experience and appreciation of the region that could not be claimed by most of the people he had to deal with. He also had a good Western education and earlier postings as his country’s representative to Abuja and Washington gave him a rich worldview.

These are attributes that would come in handy not just in his external engagements, but even as president, when he had to preside over the ideological and structural transformation of the Tanzanian economy from decades of a socialist orientation, through the painful pangs of the transition to a market economy.

President Uhuru Kenyatta yesterday announced three days of national mourning in honour of the Tanzanian statesman. Many leaders, including Mr Kibaki and Mr Odinga, described him as a great friend of Kenya and a Pan-Africanist.