Administration and Economic Planning in Eastern Africa: A Ford Foundation Program Evaluation    1977                                                                p. 5 of 8     

C. 1. d. “The establishment of a lasting, effective planning process, indigenously staffed, widely spread and used throughout Government” 

This highly ambitious objective, introduced to the documentation of this project as recently as 1970, can only be addressed in a rather speculative way. I take the term “planning process” to mean the whole range of procedures devised for systematically bringing rational analysis to bear on investment and policy decisions. Whether these procedures have become such an integral part of the functioning of Government in Kenya that they would survive the departure of the last advisor from any source is difficult to say. Even more difficult to know is the extent to which surviving procedures would retain their functions, as well as their form. 

One can consider the degree of establishment of the planning system in terms of its horizontal spread through ministries of Government, and vertical spread through provincial and district levels. Secondly, one can look at the adequacy of the staff available to man the system. Thirdly, one can observe the degree of political commitment to rely on this type of system as a basis for decision-making.  

Before viewing the question through these three lenses, however, it may be useful to note that for several reasons the economic problems of Kenya, and hence the need for economic advice and planning, are likely to increase in the future. The relatively easy industrial growth through import substitution is probably over, and the problem now will be to force these highly protected infant industries to become more competitive. This means that the rural areas must become the source of a higher proportion of Kenya’s economic growth. Agricultural growth will henceforth need to come from more intensive farming rather than from bringing new areas into production, but here again the easier gains have already been made. African farmers were barred from raising coffee and tea until less than a decade before independence. The good performance of the agricultural sector since independence is in part due to increased participation in growing export crops. Internationally, foreign exchange may become a serious constraint in Kenya, as the international economic climate, with inflated prices for fuel and capital goods, is not favorable. Higher coffee prices have, however, taken the pressure off the balance of payments situation for a year or two. Domestically, population pressures on the land and the cities are becoming more acute, while the quality of the administrative services is gradually deteriorating. One could add that this set of adverse factors is likely to affect Kenya less than most countries in Africa, but that is hardly a cheerful perspective. 

The spread of functional planning units in the operating ministries is still uneven. Sometimes this results from a lack of qualified staff or technical assistance, but there are cases of high-level resistance to bringing planning into the affairs of ministries. In other cases, an example being the Ministry of Agriculture, a planning unit has been in existence for a very long time with rather disappointing results. As previously noted, the Ministry is currently embarking on an ambitious technical assistance program to remedy this situation. Planning units now exist, in addition to Agriculture, in the Ministries of Cooperative Development, Tourism and Wildlife, Works, Education, Lands and Settlement, and possibly Natural Resources. Some of these were originated by Foundation staff: Roeske in Power and Communica­tions, Stabler and Williams in Education, and Davis in Tourism. 

The extension of the planning process to provincial and district levels was seriously attempted in 1967, unsuccessfully. Edwards noted in a 1968 paper on planning in Kenya that the lack of good communication with the public, particularly in the rural areas, was a serious flaw in the planning process. He felt that people at the district level should participate in setting their agricultural targets. The attempt to engage district-level participation ran counter to the tendency at that time to reduce the powers and responsibilities of local government. Local inefficiency and ineffectiveness in providing health services and primary education, and in building feeder roads, housing and water facilities, led to the increasing centralization of responsibilities in the appropriate ministries. In addition to this counter-tendency, the shortage of manpower with even rudimentary training in economics at the district level was acute. 

New plans are afoot to spread planning responsibility to the provinces and districts. In addition to the appointment of provincial and district planning officers, the Government is insisting that the service ministries allocate substantially greater proportions of their budgets to rural areas. These ministries are to work with the provincial and district-level planners, the result being a disaggregated plan that remains consistent with national priorities. That, at least, is the intention. One must remain skeptical of the success of this effort because of its complexity, the continuing shortage of adequately trained staff, the problem of generating meaningful communication between levels of government and across great distances, and the still-doubtful degree of governmental determination. 

Much has already been said about the quality and quantity of the Economic Service. It seems clear that the planning system cannot yet rely exclusively on Kenyan staff, nor will the full range of competences be found locally for some time to come. This does not mean that Kenya is necessarily dependent on external advice, but the departure of all foreign advisors before the end of this decade would, in my opinion, rapidly alter the role of economic analysis in the decision-making process. Planning procedures and the issuance of quinquennial plans might very well be maintained in form, but perhaps not in content. This view is disputed by Kurt Savosnik, a long-term planning advisor still resident in Kenya, though outside of government, and by Harris Mule. Savosnik believes that if every expatriate economist left Kenya tomorrow, the system would slow down but would survive as a meaningful process in government. Mule similarly believes that planning has been accepted as an integral part of government and would survive with wholly indigenous staff. 

In 1969 David Anderson made a statement concerning administrative procedures he had helped to introduce in Tanzania, which I think is pertinent to this point: “We ought not to retain staff in this field any longer than is necessary to demonstrate the techniques and to prove the need, but we should realize that if we withdraw our staff too early, either they will have to be replaced by other expatriates or the system will fall into disuse, and there will be a reversion to the old methods of instinct and pressure bargaining.” 

This tendency may be illustrated by example. The prices of several key agricultural commodities, sugar, rice, wheat, beef, maize, and millet, are set by Government in advance of the growing season at farm level, at the wholesale level (handled by parastatal marketing boards), and at the retail level. The Cabinet sets these prices on the recommendation of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Finance and Planning (MFP) (MEPD and the Ministry of Finance were re-combined in 1971). The MFP generally makes an economic analysis and discusses the ensuing recommendations with the Ministry of Agriculture before forwarding them to the Cabinet. 

Administered prices of this sort create an alluring opportunity for a reversion to “the old methods of instinct and pressure bargaining” because of the powerful interests (of both producer and consumer) directly affected by the decisions. 

Political pressures for expedient decisions are likely to rise as the economy enters more difficult phases. Even if the Economic Service has the competence to produce sound analyses, its views could be overridden in the interest of political expediency. This overriding may occur under any conditions, but it may be at least retarded if forceful and prestigious advisors are available to the ministries. This is not to argue that economic considerations ought always to outweigh political considerations, but to the extent that political choices are made with full knowledge of their economic cost, one can hope for better decisions. 

This leads to the important question of the political determination of Government to implement its own plans and policy statements; that is, to use the decision-making and planning systems it has established. 

The 1974-1979 Plan was probably the first five-year plan in the world to be solidly based on the Redistribution with Growth doctrine. One of the Plan’s principal draftsmen expressed serious doubt, as we have noted, that the Government in fact intended to make a determined effort in the direction of redistribution. Up to the present time, doubts must remain concerning the strength of this determination, although the unanticipated rise in oil prices and the subsequent worldwide recession are mitigating factors.  

Nevertheless, powerful groups in Kenyan society may be expected to resist the redistribution doctrine in their own interests. Within Government, ministries often are reluctant to reallocate a greater share of their efforts to rural areas because of the difficulty of inducing staff to leave the capital. It is simply too early to say whether a meaningful decentralization of planning and decision-making will occur, the rural works program will be successfully implemented, and the Ministry of Agriculture will divert effort from the large farmers to small-holders and from prosperous to less affluent regions. One cannot be assured that even with strong political determination the Government would have the organizational and staff capacity to succeed in significantly altering the pattern of income distribution, but one can be certain that without that determination, income misdistribution will increase. 

A final factor concerning the degree to which a planning system has been established in Kenya will be alluded to here but discussed in more detail in a later section. This has to do with what one might call the ecology of planning. Economic planning and analysis represent a rather artificial and abstract approach to problems. The requisite analytical techniques go beyond the boundaries of intuition and common sense and as such frequently arouse hostility and mistrust among the uninitiated, as anyone who has attended a sociological convention will have observed. For a planning system to be established and used effectively by a government, an environment will need to exist in which this style of abstract thinking is respected. In most of the central ministries, as we have noted, economic analysis has been held in very high regard since the early years of independence, but whether this condition can be maintained over time and spread through provincial and district levels is problematical. It would seem to me that increased efforts to strengthen the professionalism and the sense of professional identity of the members of the Economic Service would be useful in bolstering their self-confidence and the respect they can command from other elements of the public service.

C. 1. e. Program Duration  

The reduction in support of this program by the Foundation since 1971, and the departure of the last advisor in 1976, was apparently sufficiently gradual to permit the Government to make the necessary adjustments. Advisory assistance is plentifully available from other sources and, with one major exception, Mule appears satisfied with the Foundation’s decision to withdraw. The exception is the post of senior economic advisor, which was vacated by Edwards this past year. Mule considers this position to be so important and so sensitive that he and the Minister are unwilling to request assistance from a bilateral donor. The Government has requested the UNDP to fill this post but, after nearly a year, no suitable candidate has yet been offered.

C. 2. Economic Planning in Tanzania    

C. 2. a. General Outcome

          The outcome of the Foundation’s economic planning program in Tanzania has been very different from that in Kenya, although, as we have noted, there were several initial similarities. For a decade after independence, central economic planning performed a similar function in Tanzania as in its neighboring state. 

During the period of the Foundation’s involvement with planning, and particularly during DevPlan’s heyday (1968-1972), the Foundation’s advisors were well used and were able to take considerable professional satisfaction from their assignments. Lewis and Helleiner, in 1970, observed that these advisors had contributed to an effective incomes policy, the creation of the Regional Development Fund, the decision to abandon the original village settlement approach, the negotiation of the East African Treaty, the establishment of state banks, and even the setting of targets for primary education. 

DevPlan was somewhat less involved with policy initiation than MEPD in Kenya, but Green, Van Arkadie, Waide and probably others prepared a number of papers for Cabinet consideration and participated in discussions with the Economic Committee of the Cabinet. The advisors also worked with Tanzanian colleagues who later moved into leadership positions in the public corporations and the state banking system. 

Formal training programs were less successful than in Kenya, due largely to the relative scarcity of candidates. Lewis and Helleiner forcefully spotlighted the training problem, but it was always difficult for DevPlan and other economic ministries to release trainees. Some M.A. students were expected to carry on with Government duties and attend courses in their off hours. The returns are not yet in from the program at the University of Dar es Salaam, which is now in its final year of Foundation support, but the Toronto program never succeeded in getting the numbers or quality of students from Tanzania it wished to have. 

Lewis and Helleiner hit the crest of the wave in 1970, yet even as planning seemed to flourish, the success was in a sense illusory. Planning and analysis were done almost entirely by expatriates. It may have seemed to some Tanzanians that economic development was a matter of engaging foreign analysts to plan the use of foreign capital. This image didn’t appeal to President Nyerere and his TANU colleagues in the least, because dependence on either foreign advice or capital seemed to limit independence. The call for self-reliance at Arusha reflected a desire to be able to dispense with both foreign advice and capital. 

Allied with this desire for self-reliance was a sense of suspicion and aversion regarding technical expertise. John Malecela, in opening a conference on cooperative administration in East Africa in 1971, held forth at length on the irrelevance of planning by foreign economists to the real development situation of a country like Tanzania. He felt that experts who came to stay only two or three years could hardly be expected to make a meaningful contribution to a development plan for the benefit of people they did not know. The tenor of Mr. Malecela’s speech was not hostile to economists, but clearly resistant to becoming dependent on foreign technical analysts. 

Planning in the late 1960s was also too centralized a process to suit the President. As earlier noted, he wanted first to make each ministry responsible for planning its work, leaving DevPlan in a coordinating role; later, he wished to spread planning participation to the regions, and eventually he intends people to engage in the planning process at the local level. Parallel efforts along all of these lines have been made in Kenya; the difference is not so much in the objective of spreading participation in the planning process as in the means selected to implement the notion. 

Beginning in 1970, an annual rolling plan was to be prepared, incorporating regional and ministerial priorities. In practice, this was difficult to do. Communications difficulties led to the omission of regional views from the first annual plan, and in the second it appeared that regional submissions bore little resemblance to the intentions of ministries for work in the regions. Ministries in fact were not accustomed to planning in regional terms, and there was no mechanism for integrating their views with those of the regional economic secretaries. 

Before these difficulties could be worked out, TANU issued in early 1971 an important statement concerning Party and public participation in decision-making. The statement, called Mwongozo, had almost as much impact in Tanzania as the Arusha Declaration itself. My impression is that the Arusha Declaration, and the basic policy statements concerning education and rural development issued in 1967-8, were primarily the work of the President himself, but Mwongozo signaled the emergence of TANU as a principal vehicle of policy initiation in the country. This is important to a review of the evolution of the planning process because it meant the decline in importance of the Cabinet in setting major policies. 

Although a case can be made that vital policy decisions taken in Tanzania since 1967 follow logically and naturally from the Arusha Declaration, they often came as surprises to DevPlan because the arena of discussion was in the Party rather than the Government. This meant that the planners were somewhat less engaged in anticipating trends and problems than was the case in Kenya. 

After the Arusha Declaration, there was a gradual but perceptible shift in priorities away from economic growth and towards social and political objectives. This was reflected in many ways. In the Declaration itself, the qualifications for leadership restricted the activities of Government and Party leaders in economic fields in order to prevent the rise of social classes; and peasants who planted more than they could harvest with their own labor were criticized. The Regional Development Fund, initially created in 1967 to encourage economic projects, was increasingly used to induce cooperative production efforts. Government services were supplied preferentially to Ujamaa villages (see below), as distinct from private farmers, as a matter of policy. Project evaluations de-emphasized output considerations in favor of socialist productive relationships, etc. 

All this is not recounted as a criticism of Tanzania for choosing to abandon a more orthodox model of economic planning. Indeed, Tanzania has received favorable attention from scholars in many parts of the world for daring to take radical measures to avoid the social inequities and conflicts that result from the typical dual society, with distinct modern and traditional sectors. My own value judgments will be reserved for the concluding section of this paper. But here it is necessary to offer some of the reasons why, for good or ill, the Foundation’s efforts to help build economic planning systems had such different outcomes in Kenya and Tanzania. 

To delve further into the reasons for the different outcomes, it may be useful to trace the evolution of two central themes of Tanzanian policy: villagization and decentralization. 

C. 2. b. Villagization 

Strong economic and social arguments for inducing Tanzania’s scattered rural population to live in villages have been recognized for some time. The prosperous Kikuyus in Kenya’s Central Province may owe some of their good fortune to being resettled in villages during the Emergency, although land registration, access road construction, and the cultural characteristics of the people have obviously also contributed to their success. 

In Tanzania, the influential World Bank Mission of 1959 noted the highly satisfactory rate of increase of agricultural products over the previous 15 years but warned that traditional African farming methods would lead increasingly to depletion of soil fertility and to erosion. Even though Tanzania was one of only six countries to have an annual compound rate of increase of total crop output of more than 5% per year since World War II, this was two-thirds due to an expansion of acreage. Only a quarter of the increase was attributable to higher yields. The Bank recommended that a transformation of agriculture would need to occur for the longer run, so that more productive use could be made of the land while protecting its fertility. 

The Bank did not specify how one would deal with transformation as contrasted with improvement programs, but Nyerere saw that the resettlement of the rural population into progressive agricultural villages could meet the economic requirements outlined by the Bank and at the same time provide a framework for social integration. 

Consequently, in late 1962, a village settlement program was launched. Regional Party and Government leaders, inspired by a Nyerere speech, promptly began organizing new settlements, often with little or no regard for soil fertility or cropping feasibility in the areas selected. These ill-planned ventures were up against heavy odds and most of them quickly failed.  

The central government set up a commission and organized five pilot projects, which were expected to grow to 60 settlements within the 1964-69 Five-Year Plan. Capital investments were to average 150,000 pounds each and the villagers were expected repay 130,000 pounds over time. These schemes failed too, both socially and economically. The villagers, reluctant to acknowledge the debt incurred by their settlements, continually raised new demands for additional governmental support. Partly as a result of research by a group of Syracuse University scholars, sponsored by the Foundation, Government recognized fairly early the failure of the heavily capitalized village settlement schemes; the Ross Mission of 1966 officially sealed their fate.  

The Village Settlement Commission and the Ministry of Agriculture then looked for new methods to accomplish agricultural transformation, but it was President Nyerere himself who designed and enunciated the new policy. 

In September 1967, the President issued a declaration entitled “Socialism and Rural Development.” It began with a romantic version of traditional African family life extolling the virtues of mutual respect, common ownership of property, and a general obligation to work. This was the concept of Ujamaa, or familyhood, in which every member of a family must have a minimum standard of food, shelter, and clothing before anyone receives anything extra. The President had referred to Ujamaa before, but in this document he extended the implications of the parable considerably. He said that selfishness and individual advancement concepts stemmed from colonialism, and he criticized as leading to larger farms and more competition the very cash crops which had fueled the country’s growth and output since World War II, and even since independence. The President explicitly said that when a farmer needed to employ labor either to plant or harvest his full acreage, the traditional system of Ujamaa had been killed and a class system in the rural areas had begun. 

As a remedy he proposed the creation of economic and social communities where people would live and work together for the good of all. The President expected that this would not happen in a short time, nor would the basic productive unit be the same in different parts of the country. He suggested that to begin with, people should be persuaded to move their houses into a single village, then to plan a communal plot, and finally to grow all plots communally. Although he grounded this idea firmly in Tanzanian traditions, the plan of action is reminiscent of Chinese experience. There the peasants first joined mutual aid teams, then elementary cooperatives, which were supplanted by advanced cooperatives and later by communes. In China, the entire process took nine years. It is also notable that the theme of “self-reliance” was prominent in China and in the Arusha Declaration. 

The spread of Ujamaa villages was to be a voluntary process, but TANU and the Government bureaucracy were directed to hasten acceptance. Under the 1969-1974 plan, Government services were to be made available to Ujamaa villages on a priority basis. James Finucane, a scholar living in the Mwanza region in 1969 and 1970, reported a number of distortions in the program as it evolved on the ground. Officials from the region were inclined to report that Ujamaa villages had been formed when in reality very little had changed. Sometimes large farmers formally established Ujamaa villages to ensure their access to credit and inputs, while they effectively retained control. Finucane also reported a distortion in the allocation of Government resources; for example, 40% of the field staff worked only on the district’s four Ujamaa villages, which had a total population of 155 out of the 260, 000 rural dwellers of the district. 

In southern Tanzania, the Ruvuma Development Association was one of the few successful survivors of the original villagization program, but it was in effect destroyed by increasing Government and Party interest in its activities. Although it had effectively achieved local-level control, and was doing its own planning in accordance with the President’s express wishes, its independence seemed threatening to TANU leaders and they took it over. The result was a decline in production, a loss of membership and eventually the disbanding of the association. 

Despite such setbacks, impatience with the slow pace of voluntary villagization reached the point where the TANU Conference in 1973 determined that all rural people should be induced to join villages within two years. At the Conference, the President reported that slightly over two million people were living in villages. In June 1975, he announced that over nine million were in villages, and this year he proclaimed virtually complete success: thirteen million people living in 7,684 villages. Around 70% of the population of the country moved their houses in a three-year period. (Nyerere 1977). 

It is difficult to generalize about the success of this movement in either economic or social terms. Agricultural production was down very seriously in 1974 and 1975, necessitating food imports that have virtually eliminated Tanzania’s foreign exchange reserves. Adverse weather played an important role in these production trends, but opinions are divided on the impact of the villagization program. The Government’s official line is that the entire drop was due to climatological factors, but some say that meteorological data do not substantiate the contention that weather was the main source of declining production. A reasonable guess would be that the non-voluntary nature of some of the recent village formation and the speed with which the program has been carried out have led to significant losses in production. 

The extent of coercion employed in the campaign is difficult to assess. The President freely admits that some unacceptable methods were employed, but points out that neither the Party nor the State has the power to force eleven million people to move against their will. One knowledgeable observer guessed that more than half of the new villagers would not return to their former more isolated existence if they were now given the choice. The recent drastic rise in kerosene consumption indicates that people now prefer to sit up and talk in the evening, rather than go to bed when the cooking fires die down, as was commonly the case. They may not be eager to return to a more isolated existence. 

Food production recovered somewhat in 1976 as compared with the previous two years. If readjustments are made in cases where villages have been wrongly sited in terms of water availability or the carrying capacity of the land, there is no reason to suppose the program will lead to lower production in the next few years. In order to ease the task of supplying government services (one of the principal objectives of the program), most villages have been located near roads, thus concentrating the distribution of people and animals on the land. Doubts have been expressed that the fragile Tanzanian soils can sustain permanent habitation and cultivation at this heightened density in the longer run. 

C. 2. c. Decentralization 

Like Ujamaa, decentralization is a concept with a considerable history in Tanzania. The President and his TANU colleagues had apparently concluded even before Independence that the old parish councils should be replaced by development committees at the village level, in order to get the participation of local people in planning for their own betterment. In 1962, Village Development Committees were officially established and linked, through district and regional levels, to the national economic planning process. This arrangement lasted for seven years and was replaced in 1969 by Ward Development Committees, which were somewhat larger geographically and coincided with district council boundaries. The usefulness of the VDCs was rather limited; Finucane describes in depth the problems they encountered. 

In addition to Village Development Committees, popularly elected district councils were instituted, which provided important local services and had their own tax resources to pay for a substantial portion of them. As in Kenya, the district councils performed unsatisfactorily. In the late 1960s they were progressively stripped of their responsibilities for the construction and maintenance of rural roads, the payment of primary school teachers, the control of rural dispensaries, and the collection of most local taxes. 

The President’s commitment to local decision-making was, however, an integral part of his policy of self-reliance. He repeatedly stated his intention to find ways to permit people to make their own decisions on things that affected them directly, so that they could accept willingly their responsibility for carrying those decisions out. In 1971, Mwongozo called for a larger voice for the people, acting through the Party, in resource allocation decisions. This position could of course be as easily explained in terms of Party-bureaucracy rivalry as in terms of decentralized decision-making. 

A number of factors may help to explain the difficulty of instituting effective decentralized decision-making. There is, first of all, a contradiction between the aspirations of a government to effect rapid economic development and social change, and the wishes of the people for more immediate consumption. For example, the people prefer education and health services to feeder road construction, cattle dips and agricultural extension. Secondly, Tanzania had an acute shortage of trained local personnel able to handle management and accounting functions. Thirdly, political and governmental leadership at regional levels was often authoritarian, despite the frequent admonitions of the President. Finally, there remained the fear that local loyalties were so strong as compared with national loyalties that too much local autonomy was to be guarded against. 

The President in 1969 appointed a commission headed by a Foundation consultant, Professor Cranford Pratt of the University of Toronto, and Amon Nsekela, Executive Chairman of the National Bank of Commerce, to examine the decentralization issue. Later the management firm McKinsey and Company was given a million-dollar contract to design a genuine decentralization program for the Tanzanian Government. This move, to hire a western management consultant firm to design a socialist decentralization program for one of the world’s least developed countries, was as audacious as anything Nyerere had done.  

The plan involved shifting real power and also Government staff from Dar es Salaam to the regional capitals and then downward to the districts. Regional commissioners attained the rank of minister and became responsible for planning the development of their own regions. Foreign assistance agencies were encouraged to work out programs with regional authorities directly, after reaching agreement in principle in the capital. Some expenditures, such as national defense, would need to be allocated on a national basis, but 40% of the national budget was to be allocated by the regions. 

It is too early to tell what the outcome of the decentralization will be, but the University has mounted an elaborate research project, financed by the Foundation, to evaluate the program. As one would expect, difficulties have arisen over the flow of information among regions, and between the center and the regions. Production data are said to be less reliable. Economic coordination was made the responsibility of the Prime Minister’s office, which, to complicate things further, has been transferred to the new capital, Dodoma. Although the regions were expected to control 40% of the national budget, in 1972-3 they received only 10%, and by 1975-6 the proportion had increased to only 14%. On the other hand the shorter line of financial control, from the grass roots to the purse strings, has reportedly led to faster action. 

It is evident, from the policy and structural changes that have occurred in Tanzania since 1967, that the centralized planning system which the Foundation contributed to, and which Lewis and Helleiner thought in 1970 was gaining acceptance, would not be appropriate to Tanzania today. The locus of planning shifted to the Prime Minister’s office and the regions, and policy initiatives gravitated to the Party Executive and Central Committee. Most recently, the center of economic analysis is said to have moved to the President’s office, where a staff of ten concerns itself with the serious economic condition of the country. 

It seems doubtful that the Foundation should have persisted in its economic advisory efforts beyond when it did, despite evidence that economic factors have received too little consideration in the last few years. The last advisor, an agricultural economist attached to DevPlan in 1974 and 1975, was not used to his fullest capacity and felt somewhat handicapped by being the only Foundation advisor in Government. C. D. Msuya, now Minister of Industry and formerly Principal Secretary of DevPlan, commented that the Foundation’s planning assistance had been valuable and that he thought it was phased out at the right moment. 

One wonders whether the outcome of this program might not have been different if it had begun, as in Kenya, at the time of independence. By the time our first economists arrived in Tanzania, a short-run plan had served for three years and the first five-year plan was already halfway through its life span. It is at least conceivable that economic considerations would be more persuasive today if a highly qualified advisor with broad development perspectives had been requested by the Tanzanian Government six years earlier.