topdown

The first approach has led to such episodes as the groundnut fiasco at Kongwa, Tanzania. This is a glaring example of bad development practices. Had it not been so catastrophic towards the local environment and economy, it might have been comic.

The Tanganyika Ground Nut Scheme (TGNS)

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nobody has heard of Kongwa. Fifty years ago in England, Kongwa was in the news every day. Kongwa is a small town in Tanzania, then the British colony of Tanganyika. It lies six degrees south of the equator and three thousand feet above sea level, in the Central Highlands of Tanzania. In 1945 it was chosen as one of the main sites of the African groundnuts scheme. With austerity reigning still in war-creased Britain, the giant British corporation Unilever was having trouble getting its fats and the problem was expected to get worse. Unilever, then as now, made (among many other things) Lux and Lifebuoy soap, Stork and Blue Band margarine - all of which required a plentiful supply of vegetable oil.

The man responsible for supplying these oils was Frank Samuel, the MD of a Unilever subsidiary called the United Africa Company. Samuel was deeply worried by what he saw as an impending vegetable oil famine. But his experience of Africa had taught him that vast uncleared spaces, possibly suitable for agriculture, lay untended in Tanganyika. As luck would have it, the British Colonial Government had also been eyeing this land and wondering what, if anything, could be done with it.

Back home, the newly elected post-war Labour Government was trying to allay public fears that it was about to cut the food-oil ration. John Strachey, Minister of Food, liked the look of Samuel’s plan to clear 2.5 million acres of Tanganyikan bush for growing groundnuts, or peanuts. The idea was shown to a former colonial director of agriculture for Tanganyika, who saw in it a convenient plan to solve the mounting economic woes of British colonies.

This man, John Wakefield, believed that the main reason for the apparent barrenness of Tanganyika was local primitive farming practices that would be easily solved by Western equipment. He spent three months evaluating the scheme - with extensive field visits to different parts of the country. He settled on an area called Kongwa in the central belt. Pedologists said the soil was fertile enough, and native people, it appeared, were already growing groundnuts. Scientific information on rainfall was inadequate, but there was a railhead nearby - out of Dar-es-Salaam. The almost impenetrable scrub would have to be cleared - Wakefield recommended 3.25 million acres over six years. But how difficult could that be for modern technology? Somebody, they reasoned, would have the equipment and know-how. One Major-General Desmond Harrison was appointed to oversee the task, and set up operations in Kongwa, preparing for battle.

The Groundnut Scheme was based on a feasibility study which stated that it was possible to grow peanuts in that area. True. What it didn’t say – and what the locals could have told them – was that conditions were only favourable on average for one year in five. For the remaining four it was an utter waste of time trying. Four historical factors combined to make the scheme attractive to colonial administrators in Africa and to the public in Britain. First, the impending demobilisation of large numbers of African soldiers who had helped defeat the Italian and German armies in Africa. These soldiers had become expert in handling machinery of all kinds, and needed opportunities to put their skills to work in the civilian economies of their homelands. Second, the existence of great quantities of surplus earth-moving equipment that had been used in the African campaigns to build roads and airfields and was now lying derelict on old battlefields. Third, the need for a high-protein staple crop that would help to feed the rapidly growing populations of East Africa. Fourth, the existence of large areas of scrub jungle, left untouched by the white settlers who had appropriated most of the good agricultural land for their own farms.

Politicians in London and soldiers in Africa shared a dream. They dreamed that skills acquired by the Africans in six years of war could be put to better use in the pursuits of peace, to create a prosperous economy in East Africa based on mechanised agriculture. Given large areas of land, with the machines to make it productive and the skills to operate the machines, the Africans could build a modern economy independent of white settlers. This was a seductive dream, especially for the Attlee government that came to power in Britain in 1945 after defeating Winston Churchill. For the leaders of the government in London, the groundnut scheme provided a unique opportunity to demonstrate the blessings of socialism to the Africans before setting them free.

As the years went by, news from the front lines of the groundnuts campaign trickled back to England, and the news was not good. It took a long time to organise the transport of surplus war equipment to East Africa and to build adequate roads to the areas where it was to be used. Much of the equipment, when it eventually arrived, was found to be unusable. After the work of land-clearing began, it turned out that tree-stumps were unexpectedly resistant to mechanical digging. Many of the stumps had to be shattered with high explosives and excavated by hand. Local large baobab trees were also hard to remove and the task was made more difficult by the fact that one of them was a local tribal jail, another was a site of ancestor worship, and many had bees' nests in their hollow trunks. Some of the workers had to be hospitalised for numerous bee stings. On other occasions, workers had to face angry elephants and rhinos.

The fact that the site was far from easily accessible water sources caused further problems. The water had to be ferried in and poured into a concrete-lined pool. Locals insisted on using it for swimming, despite protests by the European workers.

The progress of stump-clearing was so slow that only one-tenth of the area intended for agriculture was cleared. After the decision was made to go ahead with the planting of groundnuts on the reduced area, more disasters struck. The removal of the natural vegetation made the underlying soil unfit for any sort of agriculture, even if it were fertile enough. A single season of exposure to the tropical sun converted the soil into laterite, a hard material resembling baked clay or brick. After the soil was baked, it could not be ploughed and groundnuts could not be planted or harvested. Such matters had not been investigated, because the soil scientists had only been asked to comment on the soil’s fertility, not its setting properties. Also, the area had insufficient rainfall for growing groundnuts; the plots on which the native people grew groundnuts were small enough to be irrigated. In the end, the total harvest of groundnuts was less that a hundredth of the quantity predicted by planners. The scheme was quietly abandoned and the soldiers went home to their villages, leaving nothing behind but rusting machines and patches of baked red clay that had once been forests.

The Government had embarked upon a massive overseas venture of the scale of a Soviet five-year plan, on the basis of practically no reliable information whatever. And in charge they had placed a very competent military man, well used to planning military operations – which differ from all commercial operations in the one crucial respect that their cost is never an issue.

After the collapse of the project, the government set up a commission of enquiry to investigate the causes of failure. Many mistakes were identified, two of which were fatal. First, the decision to launch the project was made by people ignorant of the ecology of East Africa. Any competent expert in tropical forestry, or any local farmer familiar with the region, could have predicted the failure. The organisers of the project were not only ignorant of ecology but also unaware of the depth of their ignorance. They never thought of asking for the advice of experts before plunging ahead. It would not have been difficult to find competent experts. Groundnuts were then, and still are today, successfully grown in many parts of Africa where climate and soils are suitable. But the organisers were politicians, dazzled by the political advantages of the project and unconcerned with technical details.

Their second fatal mistake was their failure to listen to bad news when it came. From beginning to end of the project, there were plenty of reports that things were not going well, plenty of opportunities for redirecting efforts or for cutting losses. But leaders of the project would not listen because for them failure was unthinkable. That generation of politicians and soldiers had learned too well the lessons of World War Two. After all, we have beaten Hitler, they said, and we can beat the African jungle too. They failed to understand that the African jungle was a more sophisticated enemy than Hitler. They planned the groundnut scheme like the invasion of Europe in 1944, as a military campaign. Once the scheme was launched, there would be no second thoughts and no whispers of defeat. So, when the bad news came, it was unheard or ignored. The project was administered without any regular procedures for assessing progress and reporting failures. There was no way for the leaders to learn from failures and change plans in timely fashion. Since small failures along the way were unacknowledged, the project ran blindly ahead of its catastrophic end.

Besides the mistakes that the government commission of enquiry identified, there was a third mistake that the commission did not include within its terms of reference. The third mistake was philosophical rather than technical. The philosophy of the organisers was enlightened despotism. They knew what was good for the Africans, and they intended to give the Africans what was good for them. They did not ask whether, even if the project had been technically successful, the majority of Africans would have considered it good. Would the conversion of large areas of virgin jungle to mechanised agriculture have done more good than harm, to the local African economies? The answer to this question wasn't obvious - the Africans were the only people who could have answered it authoritatively. Since the project failed, we will never know what their answer would have been.

The Government sank £49,000,000 into the scheme - an astronomical sum at the time, which by today’s values would easily be of the order of £1,000,000,000 plus! After two years, only 2,000 tons of groundnuts were harvested, 50 percent of what had been originally purchased as seed. Later in the project, the Groundnut Army tried to switch to growing sunflowers for their oil, but a heavy drought destroyed the crop. No extra food oil at all ever reached the market. Meanwhile, it was left to journalists to expose the fiasco, which eventually became the subject of a book by Alan Wood (1950) and a famous exposé by legendary investigative reporter Fyfe Robertson. Until the gaff was blown, newspapers had carried wholly fantastic reports cobbled together in London from colourful PR material in an act of laziness and complicity that was frankly shameful. About the only end product was a port which was used by about five ships per month, a matrix of roads leading nowhere in a sisal plantation, and a pub, affectionately known by all as “The Dysentery Arms”, run by one Vic Bobbett, an eccentric character and onetime Colour Sergeant in the Welsh Guards!

ORGANISATIONAL	PERSONAL
Aggressive and distant control Intense micro-management Enforced compliance Punishing systems and structures Imposed bureaucrats and excessive bureaucracy Performance driven towards “hard” outcomes Decisions made by people who are not affected by changes No “stake” held by local people, whose input is often ignored Often time-limited, one-off projects, with no comeback for failure	Dysfunctional, hierarchical relationships Hot, angry confrontations or cold withdrawal Energy draining interaction Defensive posturing and legal positioning Hidden agendas Lack of sense of ownership Negative feelings feed into negative work ethic leading to reduced productivity Low self esteem: “I am nothing more than a statistic to be counted, or a box to be ticked”