watching his every move. But he is not totally on his own — if he
has problem and needs outside help to solve them quickly he
knows where he can turn

Such an arrangement keeps control of the factory and all its
operations in local hands. There is no possibility of accounting fid-
dles to benefit some overseas company. The Tea Authority retains
the last word on what should be done (it can and has rejected
some of the advice given). Central services such as sales and
provision of accounting systems can be provided by the Tea
Authority headquarters.

A similar visiting arrangement has been negotiated for
Lupembe estate and factory, and under it in less than two years
the operation has been pulled out of debt and is now being ex-
panded. For the Tukuyu factory George Williamson have agreed
to supply similar services. These companies know that their per-
formances as visiting agents will be compared, and in any case
they have no obvious incentive to give advice which is not of the
best. So far their experience has proved to be of great value to the
Tea Authority, and this is reflected in the encouraging per-
formances (not least with regard to quality of tea) of both the
Mponde and the Lupembe factories.

It is, however, important to note that the Authority has now
started an organised management training programme (involving
work and study in a variety of tea factories) which will produce
fully experienced Tanzanian managers. In future there will be no
need to take the risk that was taken in starting the Mponde fac-
tory.

If full management agreements are so open to abuse, what con-
clusion should we draw? We should not for example conclude
that all that is required is better legal drafting of the agreements.
No doubt this would help in that it would give the Tanzanian
majorities on the Boards of Directors the authority to prevent
abuses once they discovered them. But we have seen that the
number of possible abuses is very large, and that whoever has day
to day control of a factory has many opportunities for concealing
things from even an attentive Board of Directors.

Nor can we conclude that if different companies had been
chosen as partners the picture would have been very different.
0O.C.C for example was part of a very reputable Dutch engineering
consortium, and this (together with other experiences from

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