Speeches of J.K. Nyerere in the UK, 1985

My Lord Mayor, Your Excellencies, My Lords, Aldermen, Sheriffs, Ladies and Gentlemen.
First of all, I want to congratulate you on your Swahili performance. And secondly I want to thank you for your warm welcome and the nice things you have said about myself and my country in your own speech.

At the conclusion of my speech in the Guildhall in 1975, I said that Tanzania was too poor not to pay its debts. In the face of my country's large overdue external payments a considerable proportion of which are due to the United Kingdom I repeat: that statement. But the experience of trying to do business with a chaotic world during the past ten years means that I can no longer stop there.

Tanzania is an underdeveloped country in a poor and underdeveloped continent. During the 1960s most cf Africa's newly independent countries including Tanzania made a promising start in economic progress. In the 1970s, and especially the last half of the decade, we ran into difficulty; the 1980s have so far been a period of economic disaster. Almost every African country is in trouble regardless of its political or economic ideology.