It took the threat of vote-of-no-confidence proceedings by his own party to get Jacob Zuma, decidedly the most inept – and venal – President South Africa has ever had, to vacate the Union Buildings on Valentine’s Day. Just under three months earlier, the ruling Zanu-PF party in neighbouring Zimbabwe had to resort to a similar course of action to end Robert Mugabe’s nigh-four-decade-long dictatorship.

This tendency to hold on to power for as long as possible is commonplace on our continent. This was particularly so among the founding fathers of our nation States. Nelson Mandela was, of course, the exception that proves the rule. Although he remained in charge for all of 24 years, the late Julius Nyerere can be considered to be among the better early leaders in this regard, as he was sensible enough to realise that he had failed the Tanzanian people and relinguished power of his own volition in 1985 – when it was very much unfashionable to do so.

If he were still alive, he would celebrate his ninety-sixth birthday next month – on April 13, to be specific. But before discussing why I think he should be remembered as one of Africa’s true heroes, let me recount a titbit about him that I first heard when I was in journalism school back in the mid- to late 1980s – yes, I am that old!

I will never know whether the story – narrated to us by our political science lecturer – is true or not. I have scoured the Internet for it on countless occasions, drawing a blank each time. Anyway, it goes like this: sometime in May 1963, the leaders of recently independent African countries converged on Addis Abba, the Ethiopian capital, to prepare for the launch of the Organisation for African Unity, the precursor to the African Union. They included luminaries like Nyerere himself, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt’s Abdel Gamal Nasser, Guinea’s Sekou Toure, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta (the father of the country’s current President), Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria and, of course, the gathered dignitaries’ host, Haile Selassie.

At one point, the debate focused on whether Madagascar should be admitted as a member of the new continental body. One view was that, being located off Africa’s coast, its request for membership should be declined. Nyerere saved the day for the Madagascans. If my old lecturer is to be believed, he calmly made a remark to this effect: “When people speak of Europe, they do not say Europe and Great Britain – they simply say Europe.” That silenced the objectors. Little wonder he was known by the honorific of Mwalimu (teacher in Swahili) by his people.

Back to why I think he should be regarded as one of the greatest Africans of all time. During the 1970s, he introduced his socialist philosophy of ujamaa, or family-hood, under which rural Tanzanians were collected into villages and communes. An estimated ten-million peasants were moved and many were forced to give up their land. The policy was a spectacular failure that had disastrous consequences for food production and the economy generally. Nyerere was humble enough to admit that socialism had not worked, stating when he stepped down: “I have done all I can to help my country.”

There are many other positives on his scorecard. For example, by emphasising a nationwide public school system, Tanzania’s adult literacy rate rose to become the highest in sub-Saharan Africa by the early 1980s, at about 70%. His policies of not showing favouritism towards any of the country’s 100-odd ethnic groupings and imposing Swahili – East Africa’s lingua franca – as a national language helped build a true nation in every sense of the word.

Nyerere’s Tanzania also played host to liberation movements fighting to topple supremacist regimes in Mozambique, South Africa and what is now Zimbabwe.

And when, in neighbouring Uganda, Idi Amin’s excesses in the late 1970s became intolerable, Nyerere did not hesitate to mobilise his own troops and Ugandan exiles to invade the country, leading to the dictator’s fall in 1979. This moment of moral triumph will, no doubt, be cherished by historians in the same way that the defeat of Adolf Hitler during World War II is cherished in Europe.