This is Part 3 of a series of commentaries on Udadisi Blog entitled Tanzania Institutional Diagnostic: A Response and Comments By Andrew Coulson
Chapter 3: Politics and Business
Samuel Wangwe has a lifetime of research and writing on industrialisation in Tanzania, and it comes to the fore here on chapter 3. He also makes very good use of other sources especially Barker et al.’s African Industrialisation: Technology and Change in Tanzania (1986), Bryceson’s Liberalizing Tanzania’s Food Trade(1993), and Gibbon’s (ed.), Liberalised Development in Tanzania(1995).
However, two recent publications take the historiography to another dimension:
Chambi Chachage’s A Capitalizing City: Dar es Salaam and the Emergence of an African Entrepreneurial Elite (c.1862-2015). Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2018
Ali Mufuruki et al.’s Tanzania’s Industrialization Journey: From an Agrarian to an Industrialised State in 40 Years. Nairobi: Moran Publishers, 2017.
The first part of Chambi’s dissertation is a retelling of the history of capitalism in the colonial period and early years of Independence. Much of it is a reworking of John Iliffe’s (ed.) classic mini-biographies of the African capitalist pioneers and their struggles. The later part includes mini-biographies of key members of the current business elite, and the many challenges they have faced, and, for them at least, overcome. It will be published as a book in the not-too-distant future.
In my opinion, the Mufuruki book is profound not only because of the originality of some of its proposals, but because it is a political statement of a successful Tanzanian businessman (his life story is summarised in Chambi’s dissertation). His main intellectual influences are Ha-Jung Chang and Justin Lin, basically following the South Asian model (Vietnam, Malaysia and, implicitly South Korea). It is a sad reflection on the discourse in Tanzania that it was not widely discussed after its launch, and is only now being taken more seriously. For me that says a lot about who controls the Tanzanian agenda on industrial strategy – a group including key donors, politicians and economists. The Mufuruki book was produced outside this framework, and said things many in this group did not want to hear – such as that energy policy should not be so dependent on gas and oil. It also supports what amounts to the Ethiopian strategy for labour-intensive export-oriented manufacturing, e.g. of textiles or shoes, which has been rejected, or not accepted, by most of the Tanzanian policy-makers.
There have been times, attending REPOA Annual Research Workshops, when I felt that Tanzania was being offered a different industrial strategy each year, without relating it to, or comparing it with, what had been said in the previous years. Thus, Justin Lin was the keynote speaker in 2016, and proposed a version of the Ethiopia strategy. Lant Pritchett was the keynote speaker the next year, and offered different advice, to the effect that the best strategy was to export as many different products as possible. No one pointed out that this was diametrically opposed to what Lin said the previous year.