national investment criteria. Indeed, since such criteria must be
derived from national development strategies their formulation
awaits the tackling of this much larger problem.

What makes the lack of national investment strategies and
criteria doubly serious is the manner in which many projects seem
to originate in Tanzania. Often the initiative comes not from the
parastatal itself, but from foreign machinery salesmen. The per-
suasiveness of these characters in pushing dubious projects on to
parastatal managements which in addition to having no clear in-
vestment guidelines often suffer from a lack of competent staff,
necessitates extremely careful control over parastatal affairs by
ministerial planning bodies. The irony, is, however, that in the
present situation the scope for ‘control’ is limited to avoidance of
the worst abuses, for effective control presupposes meaningful
planning of activities and, without this, control operates in a
vacuum. Until the parastatals are effectively integreted into the
planning system and until the fundamental problems of strategy
and criteria have been resolved there will be severe limitations on
the meaningfulness of the formal control system.

This formal systerh has been dealt with by Carvhalo in his ar-
ticle ‘The Control of Managing Agents in Tanzania in Parastatal
Organisations with special reference to the N.D.C’. He neglects
the growth in the importance of the state central, commercial and
investment banks since 1967 in the control of parastatal but other-
wise presents a reasonably, comprehensive picture. The major
weakness in his presentation is, however, a failure to differentiate
between the formal legal and administrative controls, and the ef-
fectiveness of such controls in practice. For instance, Carvhalo
argues that the activities of foreign management agents are con-
trolled by board of directors of parastatals. ‘It is through the
budgetary control that the main control lies. Any deviation from
the approved budget will require an explanation from the
managing agent.’?® The formal mechanism is clear, but the finan-
cial year 1971/72 was the first one in which N.D.C. companies
were required to draw up budgets and only 30 out of 39 attempted
it.3° Budgeting in NAFCO and T.T.C. is likewise in a very em-
bryonic stage and unlikely to provide the boards with the in-
formation that Carvhalo envisages. But even if efficient budgeting
existed, as it most certainly will in the near future, there is still a
large question mark over the ability of boards to effectively

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