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Administration and Economic Planning in Eastern Africa: A
Ford Foundation Program Evaluation
1977
part 6 of
8
C. 3. Public
Administration in Tanzania and Kenya
C. 3. a. Outcomes
It may be useful to consider
program outcomes in the public administration field in Tanzania and
Kenya simultaneously. Despite differences in the initial size and level
of Africanization of the two civil services, they have encountered such
similar problems that it is instructive to contrast each Government’s
responses to some of them.
We have seen that the first order
of business for both governments after independence was to gain
meaningful control over their societies by replacing Europeans and
Asians in the civil service with qualified Africans as quickly as
possible. The two governments approached this problem in very much the
same fashion, doubtless because their principal advisor on the process
was the same man, David Anderson. The same set of tools was employed in
both countries, i.e., inventorying key posts and scheduling
replacements, manpower planning, manpower utilization, and sharpening
the focus of educational and training institutions. Tanzania, starting
from a point well behind Kenya in the supply of trained manpower,
pursued these policies and programs with more vigor and determination
than Kenya, but both were serious about the need to take command of
their governments and both were successful in doing so earlier than most
observers on Independence Day would have thought likely.
It seems to me that in assisting
these governments with a liberal supply of the best advisors whom we or
they could identify, the Foundation performed a very considerable
service in a situation charged with the kind of emotion it is difficult
now to recall.
The job was first of all to help
find and train the people to move into the shoes of the departing
expatriates. Once that was
underway the task quickly broadened to include the creation of new
institutions and processes for spreading the benefits of independence
more broadly through the population of each country. This task required
a good deal of ingenuity as well as careful planning. The staff development advisor, with his colleagues, was central
to the process. They did not design the technical programs for spreading
credit, education, and technical knowledge in these countries, but they
were often called upon for assistance in organizing the institutions,
designing appropriate training programs, and integrating the new
instrumentalities with the rest of government.
Testimony to the effectiveness of
these efforts is found in both countries, where the functions of many of
the advisors have become institutionalized. Tanzania now has a Ministry
of Manpower Development. In addition to its manpower planning function,
it has a Manpower Services Division charged with many of the tasks of
the old manpower utilization advisors, and a Personnel Policy Division
that deals with much of the load formerly shouldered by staff
development advisors.
In Kenya, the Director of
Personnel, J. Gethenge, credits Anderson with making a real breakthrough
by enabling the Government to consider Africanization on a post-by-post
basis. There, too, the Management Services Unit thrives, despite the
misgivings of its designer, Warren Irons: a computerized personnel
roster remains valuable, and a Staff Development Unit continues to
assist ministries to work out their training programs. Gethenge does
feel, however, that the Foundation left the administrative improvement
field too soon, and too abruptly. Although long-term advisors are no
longer required, he would like to be able to rely on the Foundation for
ad hoc support for particular cases, such as specialized training needs,
which occasionally arise. A similar case was made by Mr. Mwasongwe,
Director of Training and Manpower Allocation, in Dar es Salaam.
Gethenge also made the point that
in his view the Foundation should have done more on administrative
training. Formal efforts along this line have been confined to the
construction of the CSTC in Dar es Salaam, and later the provision of
five man-years of staff time to the Kenya Institute of Administration.
The British Government and AID had in our view provided adequately for
KIA’s staff and financial needs, and while we may have been tempted to
become more involved in the East African Staff College on senior-level
administrative training, a viable opportunity did not arise. Nor was the
Foundation anxious to participate in relatively routine training
programs. A trainer cost the Foundation as much per year as an advisor,
and it seemed then as it does now that the recruitment of
highly-qualified administrative advisors was a better use of funds.
KIA and the Staff College have
come under attack recently from a group of British scholars. Bernard
Schaffer et al (1974) have made a rather elaborate case that the
colonial officers in East Africa, once they had accepted the fact of
approaching independence, made a belated but determined effort to train
African officers who would behave as much like their tutors as possible,
thus preserving the system. By replicating themselves as closely as
possible, and avoiding a radical change in the system after
independence, employment prospects would presumably remain good long
after independence had been achieved, because of the time it would take
to produce sufficient numbers of generalists of the high standard
demanded by the system. The argument is also related to the thesis
advanced by Cohn Leys (1974), who is one of the contributors to Schaffer’s
book, that the preservation of the system and the gradual replacement of
expatriates by an African “comprador-bourgeoisie” made possible the
continued exploitation of Kenya by world capitalism. Co-optation is a
word frequently employed to describe what happened to the Africans who
received the training.
I confess to some bafflement
about this line of thinking. It seems to be a minor skirmish in the
continuing class struggle between scholars and civil servants. Certainly
the colonial governments sought to leave their system intact if
possible, just as they left parliaments scattered around the world, but
their motives can in my opinion be put down to a desire to preserve what
they conceived to be the finest institutions for the purpose of
governance.
Another criticism of
foreign-aided training programs of the era, one with less sinister
connotations, is that they were unimaginative. It is easier to be in
sympathy with this charge, yet I’m not convinced that real change can
or should originate in training programs, or that those running the
programs could have been expected to know in what directions change
would take place. Although there is much truth made in the point by John
Malecela in Arusha that one can’t build an African house on the
European foundations left by the departing colonists, it should be
recalled that (a) there was no alternative African system available at
the time for managing a national government, and (b) the new governments
did depart briskly from their inherited institutional pattern by
introducing greatly expanded government services for consumption and
development purposes.
Although the public
administration program must be considered an impressive achievement in
both countries, two major areas of difficulty still inhibit the
effectiveness of public service. The Foundation has not focused
seriously on these problems, not because they were unrecognized, but
because they were unwieldy. They are the problems first of motivation
and morale, and second of local government and rural development.
C. 3. b. Motivation and Morale
Fairly early in his East African
career, David Anderson observed that, “while we have been fairly
successful in inducing specific skills for specific functions and thus
meeting the immediate need, we have not yet solved the longer-range
problem of producing a self-developing career civil servant. This is
partly a question of motivation and ethics on which we need some more
research.” (Anderson 1966)
This question of performance and
motivation occupied the minds of many people in the mid-1960s but no
research program emerged from the incubation. A Foundation
administrative specialist in 1969 made one proposal to study the
aspirations and motives of the work force, so that an incentive system
could be devised which catered to real wants and needs, but this idea
was stillborn. One can only guess at some of the reasons for the
Foundation’s inaction. The chief one I believe was the unpopularity of
the subject among many of the civil servants with whom we were working.
Job performance and motivation were not universally recognized to be
problems and one ran the risk of being thought offensive if one pursued
the subject with conviction.
Training institutions did of
course try to instill productive job attitudes in their students, but
the need for achievement apparently failed to survive the transition
from training to the job.
At a Foundation conference in Dar
es Salaam in 1973, B. A. N. Collins cited a study that found that good
relations with the boss, high salary, and security were valued more
highly by Kenyan civil servants than challenge or a sense of achievement
in a job. Also, better qualified people were more easily dissatisfied
than less qualified, and authoritarian patterns of management were
prevalent but resented. (Collins 1973)
Both Tanzania and Kenya set down
codes of ethics for their civil servants before the end of the decade of
the 1960s, and here the difference in approach to a problem is
revealing.
President Nyerere in the Arusha
Declaration devoted an extensive section to what he called “qualifications
for leadership.” There is
some evidence that this section of the paper was more important to him
than the self-reliance doctrine, which involved the nationalization of a
number of enterprises. His concern over leadership qualifications had more to do with
the danger of the emergence of a ruling class in the Party and the
Government than with productivity, and he consequently sought to
motivate his people through ideology rather than material reward. The
Declaration contained a set of severe restrictions on the uses of
influence and private wealth. No leader, government minister, or civil
servant down to the middle rank could in any way be associated with the
practices of capitalism or feudalism; that is, none should hold
directorships in private companies, have two or more salaries, or own
houses rented to others.
Typically, Kenya approached the
motivation question more slowly, more pragmatically, and more
methodically. In May 1971, a report issued by Duncan N. Ndegwa, Chairman
of the Public Service Structure and Remuneration Commission, proposed a
code of ethics for civil servants. The most striking feature of the code
was that under certain conditions it permitted civil servants to own and
participate in private businesses. The Commission reasoned that the
private sector, which Government relied upon for the major effort in
Kenya’s economic development, was able to pay salary scales much
higher than those of Government. If the public sector were to follow
suit, the serious gap already existing between the poor of Kenya and the
members of the public service would increase, and scarce resources would
be diverted from investment to consumption. On the other hand, if no
attempt were made to recognize the differential between public service
and private industry remuneration, Government could expect to lose its
most able servants.
These two policy declarations
have been immensely important in setting the tone and style of
government in Tanzania and Kenya. Tanzania’s strict rules have, one
gathers, been firmly enforced; and Kenya’s civil servants have lost no
time in making use of the opportunities their code permitted them.
Although one must rely here only on anecdotal evidence, it appears that
both civil services have declined in effectiveness since the
declarations were made. It may be incorrect to attribute this decline to
the statements themselves, as many do, because the decline began before
the policies were announced. It would seem more reasonable to attribute
the deterioration of these services to the gradual erosion of what Goren
Hyden calls “the administrative culture.” This term implies that a
bureaucracy embodies a set of professional ethics consistent with the
private ethics of the people who devised it, and who in most cases
continue to run it. In East Africa, following Africanization, the public
ethics required by Anglo-Saxon style institutions may have been
divergent from the private ethics of the individuals who now run the
system.
One example of this divergence is
the apparently inherent difficulty of assigning individual
responsibility for performance. A senior expatriate, who had worked
closely with a number of ministers in President Nyerere’s Government,
remarked to me that the quality of the ministers he knew was
extraordinarily high in terms of their abilities, determination, and
integrity. They were not, however, able to exact comparably high-level
performance from their subordinates at the middle or lower levels. One
reason for this was their reluctance to attempt to assign individual
blame. If something was not done which should have been, they would not
seek to identify the person in whom the fault lay. Consequently, the men
at the top were extremely dedicated and hard working, but they received
weak performances from their supporting staffs.
I pursued this topic in
conversations in Kenya and found much the same story. Although the
Ndegwa Commission led to the adoption of performance appraisals in the
civil service, they are not in fact much used. One reason for this is
that when a superior criticizes a subordinate, and that person happens
to be from a different tribe, the criticism is often taken as an ethnic
slur. I was told that there have been cases of Members of Parliament
rising to denounce civil servants who had criticized a fellow tribesman.
This reluctance to assign individual blame or responsibility may go even
deeper into the culture than the level of tribal competition. In any
case, it is deeply rooted in custom and ethics and it deprives the
bureaucracy of one of its most important formal sanctions on behavior.
Other cases could be cited where
there is a contradiction between private ethics and the ethics of the
system, but it may be more useful to turn to a contradiction between the
new national ethics and the ethics of the bureaucratic system. A number of observers, including Cohn Leys, have noted that
the administrative, executive and clerical grades of the colonial civil
service conformed racially to European, Asian and African occupations.
Since independence, the racial barriers have disappeared for Africans,
but the layering of the system remains, and promotion from executive
grades to administrative grades, for example, is uncommon. This is
widely regarded as fostering the growth of a class system in African
society, contrary to proclaimed ethics of the governments.
C.
3. c. Local Government and Rural Development
The Foundation refrained from
engaging directly in the complex problems of local government, despite
the strong belief by David Anderson and Frank Sutton that the
effectiveness of administration at the local levels was of the utmost
importance. This trepidation was based largely on considerations of
scale. The number of administrative units and the number of people
manning them made the problem awkward for an agency the size of the
Foundation. It was hard to see where the addition of a few high-quality
advisors or a grant for a single training center would make much
difference to the total picture.
Local government problems could
not be ignored by the central governments of Tanzania and Kenya,
however; and it is notable that around 1969 both found district level
performance so inadequate that they felt forced to centralize a number
of revenue collection and payment functions previously left to the
districts. This gathering-in of powers was done reluctantly in both
cases; it ran counter to President Nyerere’s expressed intention to
decentralize power and to Kenya’s concurrent attempt to institute
provincial and district-level planning.
Neither Government gave up its
intention to decentralize functions, but again the Kenyan response was
slower and more methodical, while the Tanzanian response was to make a
“great leap forward.” The
Tanzanian decentralization of 1972 constituted the great leap.
The literature on local
government and rural development in East Africa is extensive. The
picture is too complex to receive justice in this account, but some
observations from Philip Mbithi, James Finucane, Jon Moris, and Robert
Chambers may be noted.
Local government suffers from all
the problems of motivation and morale of central government, but these
are compounded by the factors of distance and isolation. Communication
is of tremendous importance, particularly when power and authority are
heavily vested in the ministries in the capital city. There is a
tendency for one-way communication, from the top down, to predominate in
these systems, for a number of reasons. These include the habit of
authoritarian relationships, which are common in the bureaucratic
hierarchies; the practice of promoting or transferring the more able
local government officers to the center; and the greater availability of
secretaries, typewriters and supplies in the capital.
Communication laterally among
ministerial representatives at provincial and district levels also tends
to be poor, and Philip Mbithi has written persuasively about the
problems of communication between local government officials and the
people.
Finucane notes that the practice
in most countries has been to rely on a modernizing bureaucracy as the
agent of change in rural areas, but that this practice is not notably
successful. He observes rather sourly that the Tanzanian leaders have
specifically rejected this approach, seeking instead to decentralize
power and involve the participation of the people in decision-making,
but that to date the result has been much the same as in Kenya where a
different philosophy of government prevails. Finucane and Mbithi emerged
from their studies with the strong conviction that increased
participation in decision-making at the local levels is essential for
genuine rural development. Just how this can be brought about is
somewhat less clear.
Jon Moris has had many years of
experience in rural East Africa as a scholar and administrator. In a
paper delivered to the International Conference on Management Education
for Africa in November 1976, he examined some of the reasons for poor
performance at the local government level in both Tanzania and Kenya. He
makes the case that the Western management tradition is inappropriate to
rural East African realities. His case is admirably documented,
thoughtful, and persuasive. He finds the western tradition culturally
inappropriate, dependent on value systems and thought patterns not
reinforced by the local culture, and requiring levels of equipment and
methods of organization that are simply unavailable at the local level.
Robert Chambers, who led a team
evaluating the Special Rural Development Program (SRDP) in Kenya in the
early 1970s, also focused on management as the chief obstacle to the
success of rural development innovations. He devised and tested a
programming and implementation management system (PIM), which worked
with some success in the SRDP but seems to require very high-level
analytical and administrative inputs at the top.
These and other valuable studies
point to the conclusion that local government is not performing
satisfactorily in either Kenya or Tanzania; but the studies and
additional anecdotal evidence give the impression that the situation in
Tanzania is considerably more desperate than that in Kenya. This
conclusion is drawn from a very unscientific sample of information
sources but there are strong reasons to believe it may be true.
The first is of course the
initial conditions, which favored Kenya over Tanzania. As a result of the Emergency, by the time of Independence the
Kikuyus in Central Province were already living in villages well served
by access roads, and a land consolidation and registration campaign was
fully underway. In addition, the educational infrastructure was
considerably more developed, providing more trained people to serve in
local government posts.
The second factor has to do with
the dynamism of local society in the two countries. Perhaps as a result
of Tanzania’s serious efforts to decentralize decision-making and
prevent the rise of unequal classes in the society, the only viable
rural organizations in Tanzania seem to be TANU and the government
bureaucracy. Finucane’s account of the decline and disappearance of
the highly successful Victoria Federation of Cooperative Unions
described a process that apparently also occurred in the Chagga area in
the coffee-marketing cooperative. Despite the emphasis on self-reliance
in Tanzanian ideology, it seems that Tanzanian peasants have become more
dependent than ever on the State and Party bureaucracies.
In Kenya a somewhat different
picture emerges. The Harambee self-help movement has received a good
deal of scholarly attention. Initially Harambee groups were organized to
construct school buildings, which the Government was then expected to
staff with teachers. The movement has been viewed critically as a method
of local extortion of governmental services. Occasional confiscatory or
coercive methods were used in gaining participation at the local level.
The movement, however, has not only survived but expanded to the point
where cooperative effort is no longer confined to a local clan or
community, often now encompassing provincewide cooperation for the
building of technical institutes. The number of non-aided schools in
Kenya is now said to exceed the number of aided schools.
An interesting feature of the
Harambee movement is its ability to command the participation of local
people who made good. Government officials in Nairobi are expected by
their home communities to contribute personally to the effort, both
financially and by working to secure the central Government’s support
for local projects. For one generation at least, the movement is
providing an important continuing link between the governmental elite
and the rural areas from which they came.
Chambers also refers to groups of
women in rural Kenya who banded together to raise funds to put iron
(mabati) roofs on their houses. Having achieved success in their initial
objectives, they have gone on to buying grade cattle, fencing dips,
building better kitchens and lobbying for improved services from
Government. In the Wakamba area, other women’s groups called Mweithia
have organized to do communal work such as bench terracing.
Much of the dynamism in rural
Kenya is due to private enterprise. Small shopkeepers and local
transport companies proliferate, at least in the more advanced
provinces. The transport companies may be particularly important. In
Tanzania one hears that peasants are reluctant to produce a surplus
because of the difficulty of obtaining transport from the nationalized
industry, and its cost when it is available.
All this is not to imply that
rural development is proceeding apace in Kenya and is totally stagnant
in Tanzania. The ILO Report and the 1974-1979 Development Plan both
indicate concern over the relatively slow pace of rural advancement in
Kenya, and certainly the pace of activity varies greatly among
provinces. Other reports indicate that agricultural and educational
innovations have been more rapidly adopted in Tanzania than in Kenya.
In general, however, the
impression I gained from talking with a broad range of people is that
the farmers in Kenya are doing better, and the people in general are
better off, than those in Tanzania. One comparative example may
illustrate the point:
A tea company with plantations
and factories in both countries finds that the production and processing
costs of the finished product is 5.85 shillings in Kenya and 7.35 in
Tanzania. In both count ties, smallholder production is processed in the
factories. The farmers in Kenya receive 1.20 shillings per pound and
those in Tanzania 0.90 shillings.
The difference, according to the
knowledgeable person who told me of these prices, is accounted for by
minimum wage laws in Tanzania, the low productivity of the workers, and
the fact that the Tanzanian peasant must sell to a state-owned marketing
organization rather than directly or through a cooperative. It may be
argued that the higher cost of production is to Tanzania’s advantage,
assuming that the market clears the amounts available for sale and no
expansion of this type of production is desirable. But it is hard to see
any advantage accruing to Tanzania from the lower price received by its
producers.
C. 4. Management
Program
The extensive and varied efforts by the East African governments
to wrest control over their economies from Europeans and Asians are too
complex to examine here in detail, but the difference in general
approaches is neatly summarized by the following excerpts, the first
from a speech by President Nyerere in 1968 and the second from
“African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya:”
“Ideological differences
between countries affect the method, not necessarily the fact, of
securing national control. The real ideological choice is between
controlling the economy through domestic private enterprise, or doing so
through some state or other collective mechanism. But . . . it is
extremely doubtful whether it is a practical choice for an African
nationalist. The pragmatist in Africa … will find that the choice is
between foreign private ownership on the one hand and collective
ownership on the other… a capitalistic economy means a
foreign-controlled economy … The only way in which national control of
the economy can be achieved is through the economic institutions of
socialism.”
“Under African Socialism the
power to control resource use resides with the State. To imagine,
however, that the use of resources can only be controlled through their
ownership or that the appropriate ownership will guarantee the proper
use of productive assets are errors of great magnitude. Ownership can be
abused whether private or public, and ways must be found to control
resource use in either case.”
The difference in these two
policy statements parallels those found in the section above: Tanzania
dramatically and ideologically confronting a problem while Kenya
approaches it more gradually and pragmatically.
President Nyerere’s
nationalization program, begun immediately following the Arusha
Declaration, was anything but a pragmatic move. Parastatal organizations
already in existence were having severe management problems; e.g.,
COSATA, a state trading firm set up by Government to compete with Asians
in distributing goods, had to be retrenched because of operating losses;
and big game hunting, nationalized in 1966, was denationalized in 1967
after the state company lost $250, 000. Investments by state enterprises
were running at only one third of planned targets. The President’s
decision to turn substantial responsibility for agricultural credit,
marketing, and milling over to state corporations thus seriously
increased the demand for managers at a time when they were already in
critically short supply.
Thus it was not surprising that
when the Foundation decided to shift its program from the staff
development field, where the Africanization process had largely been
completed, and to scale down its work in economic planning, it should
turn to public management as a high-priority field of endeavor. Training
was to be the main theme for the public management program, with the
objective of support for the development of African self-reliance. Since
self-reliance depends on attitudes and competences, training is
presumably the best way for an aid agency to foster its development.
Our work in staff development and
manpower planning was designed by David Anderson and Robert Thomas in
Tanzania, and replicated with some variations in Kenya, Zambia and
Botswana. The conceptualization of the program by Kingsley and Thurston
was valuable, but it did not and could not draw out an elaborate plan
describing the eventual evolution of these activities.
Similarly, the economic planning
program was designed in Kenya primarily by Edwards, working in the
Government itself. The representative and his staff maintained financial
control of expenditures but could not have designed the program as it
evolved.
The public management program
didn’t spring full-blown from the representative’s office; a great
deal of consultation with African officials and others working in the
management field went on, informally as well as in conference settings.
Nevertheless, the program did not evolve from within Government on the
basis of experience, as the others did, and that may have been a
drawback to its success. The fault cannot be laid at the door of the
Nairobi office. The operating style of the Foundation had so changed in
the ten years since work began in East Africa that it had become
necessary to articulate strategies and plan budgets one or two years in
advance, in ways that would be found convincing in New York. This
process always has an element of unreality about it because it requires
a degree of clairvoyance and creative imagination on the part of the
field staff, in addition to an ability to communicate a wide range of
intangibles concerning operational conditions.
A second factor affecting program
prospects in public management was that after ten years of independence,
the East African governments were less fluid and open to advice than
they were in the early years. At independence the new governments rather
desperately needed trustworthy advisors. The range of subjects on which
the opinions of Anderson, Thomas and Edwards were sought far exceeded
their specific tasks; they became trusted confidants, not just sources
of technical information. In the course of time patterns and policies
jelled, leaders became more experienced, and a greater supply of
qualified local manpower was available; consequently, it would have been
surprising if any outside assistance program could have had the vital
impact of the earlier ones.
Thirdly, full agreement was never
achieved on the directions the public management program should take. It
was less a question of strong competing strategies than a sense of
uneasiness that any of the strategies proposed would really make much
difference to the quality of management in East Africa. This reflected
an awareness of the depth and breadth of the problem and of the meager
resources the Foundation could devote to dealing with it. The East
African budget was declining in dollar terms, the dollars were declining
in value, and existing programs could not be terminated abruptly in
order to free up substantial sums for new projects. Consequently, the
East Africa office found itself attempting to do something about the
most pervasive development problem of the region simultaneously in five
countries, with pitifully small funds.
The above reasons are in
themselves fully adequate to explain the relative lack of success of the
public management program to date, but there remains a more nebulous
factor which needs to be considered: the cultural factor of management,
which Hyden, Moris and others have been grappling with.
Many people have commented on the
cultural dimension of management. It generally appears around the end of
the list of any diagnostic treatment of the shortcomings of management
in Africa, the Middle East, and probably Asia and Latin America as well.
Having labeled the problem, however, it is difficult then to devise ways
of dealing with it.
Most often cultural traits are
deemed to be obstacles to be overcome by training. Indeed, it is
difficult to avoid this viewpoint in the context of managing particular
industries. The technology of a steel mill or an oil refinery, for
example, dictates to a considerable extent the kind of behavior which
will be required to make it function effectively. One suspects that, in
less capital-intensive industries and service organizations,
technological demands are less rigid, but it is difficult to find cases
where management systems have been analyzed and designed to fit more
comfortably the values and attitudes of the people who are to run them.
One would think that it would be
possible to analyze the methods and skills employed in modern management
in order to determine the cultural sensitivity of each element. For
example, financial and technological subjects (with due regard to the
considerations of appropriate technology) would presumably be at one end
of the continuum, while personnel management and organization might
appear at the other. In other words, those elements involving financial
or physical dimensions would presumably have more universal qualities,
while those involving human relationships in the enterprise would be
tailored more particularistically. On the basis of such an analysis it
might be possible to devise management systems more appropriate to the
culture in which the enterprise is meant to function.
It is important to note here that
the tendency of international training programs to rely on a rather
standard western curriculum is not simply a question of cultural
imperialism, cooptation or some other evil design. Indeed from what
I’ve been able to discover, the westerners involved in the
Foundation’s public management program were more concerned about the
cultural problem than were their African colleagues. Significantly, both
Tanzanian ministers with whom I discussed our program efforts felt that
the Foundation had abandoned efforts in the management field too soon.
As one succinctly put it, “There is a science of modern management
which we need to learn.”
One can readily understand the
priority attached to the subject by these Tanzanian leaders. The East
African Standard carried an article in December 1976 that purported
to be based on a budget speech by the Minister of Finance on the state
of the Tanzanian economy. After detailing gloomy figures of declining
agricultural output and rising balance of payments deficits, the article
makes the startling statement that twenty-four major nationalized
companies between 1969 and 1973 had cumulative losses equal to 9l% of
their total share capital. This figure, which has not been denied by
Tanzania to my knowledge, lends credence to the raft of anecdotes about
managerial incompetence circulating in Dar es Salaam. The seriousness of
the problem is underlined by the fact, duly published in the Tanzanian Daily
News, that for the last two successive years the Government Auditor
has been unable to ascertain the financial position of many companies in
the parastatal sector because of the inadequacy of financial accounting.
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