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industrial development remains premised on the shopping-list ap-
proach: 385 ‘possible’ projects for the Second-Year Plan period!
Under such circumstances, even if care is taken to safeguard ‘in-
ternal economies’ on a project-by-project basis the choice between
projects will almost inevitably be dictated as much by short-term
opportunity and accident® as by more relevant criteria. Moreover,
as we shall see, even when increasingly successful efforts (on the
part of the Treasury, the Planning Ministry, or financial in-
stitutions) are made to coordinate activity and plug project-
planning into a broader framework these efforts also break on the
reef of lack of principle and strategy; fully effective criteria for the
exercise of such critical control are, quite simply lacking.
Moreover, it is into such a strategic vacuum that there rush the
various purveyors of ‘soft options’ which cumulatively forestall
radical structural transformation: those wielders of ‘management
agreement’ and ‘partnership’ proposals about which Shivji has
correctly urged suspicion, those donors of what is, measured
against any broader criteria, very costly ‘aid’ (the Canadian
bakery, for example, and the Danish-funded Mount Meru Hotel),
those ‘advisors’ of caution and convention, of which Harvard's
Development Advisory Service (recently called in to help in the
‘industrial strategy’ field) is only the most odious.® And, of course,
there are the home-grown guarantors of this pattern: the national
elite which mans, formally, the commanding heights of the
bureaucratic decision-making apparatus. As noted earlier, Tan-
zania’s class structure also vitally affects parastatal performance!
The elite’s situation is somewhat more equivocal in Tanzania than
it is in a lot of other countries in Africa, of course. A real struggle
has begun to be waged for the committment to socialist goals of a
growing proportion of this ‘petty-bourgeoisie’, and in the course
of this struggle some real sacrifices — in amour-propre, in privileged
access to surpluses and in private sector economic aggrandisement
— have been exacted from them. Obviously some of these changes
can only serve to facilitate socialist economic development: thus
income redistribution begins to undermine some of the logic of
luxury good production, for example. Moreover, the Tanzanian
emphasis on activating ‘workers and peasants’ to underpin and
push forward progressive demands and policies may ultimately
transform even more of the texture of the inherited system. Yet in
the short-run it can hardly be said that most members of the elite

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