So it is the system that is at fault — or to put it slightly dif-
ferently, if we invite overseas firms to send us management teams
we must expect outflows of our surplus, and if we also get profits
locally this will be because such profits can be easily made.

Even N.D.C. admit the ambiguity, when they write in Jenga,
‘Ultimately an agreement is based on trust’.?* Trust in what? Can
we really trust the international capitalist companies?

The Tanzania Tea Authority?

But is there an alternative to the exploitative management
agreement? The experience of the Tanzania Tea Authority suggest
that even with quite complex management tasks there is.

In March 1972 the Tanzania Government and the World Bank
signed a 10.5 million dollar loan for the development of the tea in-
dustry. It includes provision for nine tea factories, which will
process the tea produced by peasant farmers, block farms and
ujamaa villages.

When the agreement was signed the Tanzania Tea Authority
already owned three tea factories. One had been opened in 1967
as part of a plan to establish tea growing in a new area of the
country, and from the start it has run under a management
agreement negotiated by N.D.C. with George Williamson Ltd., a
British owned company with extensive tea interests in India and
East Africa. The estate and factory had come under the Tea
Authority in late 1971. It has never reported a profit.

Another estate and factory, at Lupembe in Njombe District,
had been owned by George Williamson, but was almost bankrupt
when it was bought out by the Lupembe Farmers Cooperative
Union and the Tea Authority early in 1971.

Finally an entirely new tea factory was built with funds
provided locally from the Government Development Budget and
through an earlier World Bank loan to the Tanzania Rural
Development Bank specifically to process small- holder tea. It
began operation in September 1971 at Mponde in the West
Usambara mountains. The first factory financed wholly by the
World Bank will be opened near Tukuyu in Mbeya Region before
the end of 1972, and it is planned to open one new factory in each
of the following six years.

The Tea Authority thus inherited one management agreement,

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