Paul Bo Man I served as an Ambassador to Washington since February 1972.
Education
After Ikizu Secondary School he joined Williamson’s Diamond Mines as a cashier from 1945 to 1947. He took a correspondence course in accountancy and became assistant secretary, and later secretary, of the Mwanza Cooperative Society. He went on to form the Lake Province Cotton Cooperative and to do further studies at Loughborough Cooperative College in Britain. He returned and, by 1955, had become the general manager of the largest marketing co-operative in Africa the Victoria Federation of Cooperative Unions.
Career
Active in the Tanganyika African Association since 1952, he joined the Tanganyika African National Union, when it was formed by Julius Nyerere in 1954. Nominated to the Legislative Council under the colonial government, he was the sole voice of the party. He stood and won his seat in the 1959 elections and was made Minister for Agriculture and Cooperative Development in 1960 and Minister for Finance from 1962 to 1964. In the 1965 elections he was one of the two senior ministers who lost his seat, but Nyerere appointed him to one of the official seats as Minister for Economic Affairs and Development Planning from 1965 to 1967. At the time of the Arusha declaration in 1967, which stated that public servants could only own one house, he sold his own for £40,000 to the Japanese Ambassador.
He was Minister of Commerce from June 1967 with Industries added to his portfolio in November 1970. In February 1972, when Nyerere brought in a new wave of young men, he was quietly dropped from his ministry, to re-emerge as Ambassador to the USA.
Personality
Earge, deceptively slow-moving, he comes from a nationally famous Tanzanian family, but he did not bother with anything but a rudimentary education. Instead, he threw himself with energy into building co-operatives, being secretary of a huge union at the age of 22. He was the first Tanganyika African National Union MP in the Legislature and then served in most important economics ministries. An excellent businessman, he has always been politically to the right of most of his political colleagues.