Oscar Kambona - The Beginning of The End

The Beginning of The End

A campaign by the government was started to vilify him again. First was the claim that he was not a citizen of Tanzania and had never been one even though he had served as the country's minister of home affairs, minister of defence, and minister of foreign affairs, and even led the struggle for independence with Nyerere in the 1950s.

Yet nothing was said in all those years that he was not a citizen of Tanganyika. It was only decades later, in the 1990s, that the government said he was not a Tanzanian but a Malawian. Others said he was a Mozambican.

The government even withdrew his passport on the same grounds that he was not a Tanzanian citizen. He could not even travel outside the country after his passport was withdrawn.

The vilification campaign against him by the Tanzanian government made the government look bad and it finally relented and gave the passport back to him.

Kambona himself had his own "revelations" concerning the national identities of other Tanzanian leaders including President Nyerere himself. He said Nyerere's father was a Tutsi from Rwanda who was a porter for the Germans and settled in Tanganyika and that he could prove it.

He also said Vice President Rashid Kawawa came from Mozambique, and John Malecela - who once served as Tanzania's foreign affairs minister, prime minister and vice president among other posts at different times - came from Congo where his grandparents were captured as slaves before they settled in Dodoma, central Tanzania.

But few people took any of those claims seriously any more than they did the claim that Kambona himself was not a Tanzanian citizen but a Malawian, from Likoma Island, or a Mozambican.

When Kambona returned to Tanzania, he also promised that he would tell the public how much money President Nyerere and Vice President Kawawa had stolen through the years and where they hid it.

Many people were anxious to hear that. But when he addressed a mass rally in Dar es Salaam, he had nothing to say about the money he claimed President Nyerere and Vice president Kawawa stole. And many people were disappointed. It also cost him credibility among many people who believed that he simply did not tell the truth and had nothing to say about Nyerere and Kawawa with regard to their "misappropriation" of public funds.