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Chapter 7 - Promotion and Independence
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61 Chapter 7 Promotion and Independence At the time I reported for duty at the office, after my leave, the political atmosphere in Tanganyika, especially in the capital, was heating up. As I said earlier, Sir Richard Turnbull, the Governor was much more receptive to the nationalists’ demands for early independencethanhispredecessor.HisgoodrapportwithMwalimu Julius Nyerere made negotiations for orderly constitutional changes easier, and many of the terms for change and pace of progress were now acceptable even to many of the senior civil servants, all of them British, who worked under the Governor. Elections into the Legislative Council, which had been approved and prepared by Sir Edward Twining, the previous Governor, were scheduled to be held in phases, in early 1959 and in 1960. Sir Richard decided to bring the second phase forward, so that these elections were held in September 1959. Prior to that, in July 1959, a number of Ministers had been appointed from among the elected Members of the Legislative Council. In the New Year, it was announced that the system of parity of the three racial groups in the Council would end in the following elections which, depending on the progress of the constitutional negotiations, would be held later in 1960 or early the following year. Soon after my reporting for duty, a Salaries Commission was appointed on the insistence of the new Chief Minister, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who considered that the Lidbury Salaries Commission, which had reviewed salaries for the whole of British East Africa, had pegged its salaries on European standards of pay and were, therefore, too generous for the Tanganyika Government to be able to pay. The chairman of the new Commission was Mr A.L. Adu, who was then Head of the Ghanaian Civil Service. It was expected to recommend salaries more in line with the ability of Tanganyika to pay, and Mr C.J. Chohan, the Chief Establishment Officer, was appointed Secretary to the Commission. In order to be able to follow up the many verbal and sometimes vociferous representations to the Commission by the Swahili-speaking trade 62 unionists, Mr Chohan requested that I be attached to the Adu Commission as Assistant Secretary. In this capacity I came to know Mr Adu well. Immediately after the Adu Commission Report had been accepted and implemented by the Government, the Recruitment and Training Section of the Establishment Department was redesignated ‘Africanisation and Training Division’. This was in March 1961, and I was promoted to Chief Establishment Officer to head it. My new post was graded in the Lower Super scale. This promotion meant that my annual salary jumped from 792 Pounds Sterling per annum to 1,660 Pounds Sterling . To be promoted in this way, just as I completed my formal probationary service of two years, was an outstanding achievement. Of course, this was an unusual period in the history of the Tanganyika Civil Service, and a number of other local officers were also moving fast. It was a period when ‘jobs were applying for local staff’ rather than the other way round. At this time, another ex-Ghanaian civil servant, David Anderson, joined the Establishments Department as Staff Development Advisor. David Anderson was sponsored and paid for by the Ford Foundation. I understood that he had been recommended to Mwalimu Nyerere, the Chief Minister, by President Kwame Nkrumah himself. From then on I was to work very closely with Anderson. David Anderson arranged for me to make a study tour of public administration training institutes in India, Pakistan, Thailand and South Vietnam from June to August 1961. This was my first trip outside East Africa and my Tanganyika colleague on the tour was Mr Brayne, the Principal of the Mzumbe Institute of Local Government Administration. The study tour was paid for by the US International Co-operation Administration (later renamed U.S.A.I.D) and included Ugandan officials, one of whom was Mr Y.K. Lule, the then Chairman of the Uganda Public Service Commission. I had known Lule as a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the time I was at Makerere University College. Later, he was President of Uganda for a brief period, following the ousting of Idi Amin. Presumably the American sponsors wanted us to see how they were handling training in South Vietnam, but Saigon was a very [44.192.132.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:46 GMT) 63 tense city at the time of our visit because of the war between the Vietcoms...