Lost Opportunity for Economic Empowerment

Abstract

Tanzania celebrated 50 years of mainland independence. In the past half a century, cooperatives were denied the opportunity to promote economic empowerment because of the state’s anticapitalist policies and practices. When malpractices were observed, the state used government officials to replace leaders instead of strengthening the legal framework. After the Arusha Declaration, the state began molding cooperatives into socialist institutions. Alongside this the cooperative sector was made into an arm of the ruling party to control farmers, and in the end they were abolished altogether. In this paper we argue that cooperatives are institutions of the capitalist economic system designed to function as agencies for ameliorating the problems of capitalist progress, and that a lack of this understanding was responsible for their destruction in Tanzania.