ambiguities in the managers’ role, no mention of a need to check
their conservative propensities or to educate them. The premises
one senses to be lurking beneath the surface of Kahama’s speech
are much more badly exposed in a speech to the same Dodoma
Conference of Managers by Ferene Cszogoly, an Eastern
European advisor to N.D.C. who argued, when discussing
Mwongozo and workers’ participation, that ‘the danger of con-
fusion of rights and duties of management with that of social
bodies is very real. I would strongly insist therefore on the basic
principle, that management’s responsibility should remain full and
intact in any respect without mixing it up with misty excuses’.%?
And as was suggested in Section 3 Mckinsey and Co. have ex-
perienced much the same difficulty in integrating genuine par-
ticipation and control from below into their sophisticated
organisational charts. Small wonder that 1.J. Maseko could con-
clude a recent case-study of workers’ participation in two
parastatals with the following observations:

The reason for lack of total acceptance to the circular in both en-
terprises has always been supported with reasons that the workers are
not educated and competent enough to assume the managerial role.
Though there is some validity in this argument this is not the main
reason. The main reason is that the management is not willing to fully
integrate the workers in decision-making. They only want to give
piecemeal rights of participation.®’

Within such a context the panacea of ‘workers’ education’ thus
becomes a two-edged sword. Wielded by the elite, the argument
workers must be educated to shoulder their duties ‘responsibly’
can be an excuse for witholding vital information, stacking the
councils with officials, and generally delaying the emergence of a
real working-class presence within the decision-making process.
Not that education is unimportant; we have seen the ambiguities
in the workers’ socio-economic position and it is also true that the
workers have not in the past produced, spontaneously, much
pressure for socialist solutions. But the education which is
necessary must be of a certain type, a type which the elite them-
selves are generally least able to provide — as much political
education, designed to raise consciousness, as ‘technical
education, designed to provide information about the enterprise it-
self. Mapolu has criticised the ideological content of the syllabus
laid down for the original crash programme in workers’ education

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