Comparative management problems of public Organization in Tanzania: the case of Cooperativve unions and district development corporations

To many people, including a good number of peasants who collect their cotton seeds and other agricultural inputs from a cooperative society stores, and sell their produce there, the difference between a cooperative Union and a Regional Cooperative Office is not clear. It is not known whether a cooperative inspector is an employee of a Union or of Cooperative Development Division. I used to belong to that category till 1972 when I served on the Cooperative Education Study Team. My participation in the deliberations of the working of the cooperative movement for I visited very many primary societies and Unions in a number of regions. But my fascination with the Cooperative movement was very much weaked in the course of the year because of the bitter critisisms by the local press. For example the Daily News of Thursday 14th December 1972 said. The problem of buying and transporting this year’s cashewnut crop in the Coast Region, took a new turn yesterday when peasant threatened that they would cut down their cashewnut trees because of frustrations Earlier in the same paper had reported cases of cotton “turning into air’ in the Nyanza Cooperative Unions. But the Cooperatives were not the only institutions that came under attack at this time. For example that Daily News of Wednesday 6th December, 1972 said, mwadeko (Mwanza District Development Cooperation) gives back 25 taken over butcheries.” Since both the Cooperative were under the control of the Prime Minister’s Office, it was felt that a comparative study of their management problems would be more meaningful than a study of just one of them. This feeling was crystalized in May 1976 when the Cooperative Unions were disbanded altogether. The basic question in this respect were, how did the performance of the Unions compare with that of the Distrioct Development Corporation? If the two fared equality, why were the unions dissolved while the DDC’s were retained? The study will address itself address itself to some of these questions.