The Culture of Self-Reliance and Foreign Aid to Least Developed Countries: The Case of Mosquito Bed Nets Distribution in Tanzania

Self-reliance was a cornerstone of Ujamaa socialism – the ideology of Tanzania from 1967 till the mid-1980s. In the post-Cold-War time, the socialist ideology has actually been abandoned, together with a really valuable concept of self-reliance. At present, similar to other least developed countries (LDCs),¹ Tanzania is crucially dependent on foreign aid. We argue that aid can have a positive affect on LDCs, including Tanzania, but only if it promotes their self-development which, in its turn, is possible only if a nation is or strives to become self-reliant. However, in contemporary Tanzania the culture of self-reliance has almost disappeared since national ideology has virtually changed, and many people rely on foreign aid and national government, not on their own hard work. At the same time, the union of foreign donors and corrupted national bureaucracy results for Tanzania in aid without development that, as in the case of mosquito bed nets aid, cannot promote self-reliance and, hence, socio-economic progress. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in two Tanzania's regions – Dar es Salaam (three urban municipalities, 67 filled out questionnaires and 18 structured interviews) and Morogoro (two rural districts, 58 questionnaires and 12 structured interviews).

Keywords: foreign aid, civil society, development, self-reliance, state, Tanzania.

Introduction

Self-reliance was declared the basic principle of Tanzania's development under Ujamaa (‘community’) socialism, the conception of which was elaborated by Mwalimu (‘The Teacher’) Julius Nyerere, the nation's founding father, and proclaimed by him in the Arusha Declaration in 1967 (Karl 1976; Okoko 1987; Lal 2012) the full official title of which is ‘The Arusha Declaration and TANU's Policy on Socialism and Self-Reliance’.² In Nyerere's opinion, self-reliance ‘…would allow keeping the feeling of uniqueness in the environment of technical modernization, would speed up development, and would contribute to saving human and material resources’ (Kosukhin 2005: 8). So, ‘the Arusha Declaration called for socialism and self-reliance, implying that the two aspirations were inseparable’; and nevertheless, ‘despite the recognition of the importance of self-reliance, the country has become more, rather than less, dependent since the proclamation of the Arusha Declaration’ (McHenry 1994: 159, author's emphasis; see also Rugumamu 1997). With the end of the Cold War which has seen aid beyond the inclinations of ideologies Tanzania continued to rely on the donating countries and did not transform her domestic production for self-reliance.

At present, though some, especially left, scholars and journalists argue that nowadays a ‘new scramble for Africa’ is on (e.g., Weinstein 2008; Cheru and Shubin 2009; Ingwe et al. 2010; Osita and Anigbo 2010; Carmody 2011), there is clearly no need for non-African powers to base their policy towards Africa on the Cold-War-time premises any longer. However, donations to Africa remain one of the biggest ideas of our time – millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Few would deny that there is a clear moral imperative for humanitarian and charity-based aid to step in when necessary, such as during the current drought in North-East Africa. Aid-supported scholarships have certainly helped send African children, especially girls, to school (disregarding the fact that most of them will fail to find a job in their native countries once they have graduated). This kind of aid can provide band-aid solutions to alleviate immediate suffering, but by its very nature cannot become a platform for a long-term sustainable growth. Yet, evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that in general, it is not the cooperation with African nations in promoting their development but the simple aid that has made the poor get poorer, and the growth become slower. We acknowledge our own field information on mosquito nets aid in Tanzania by saying that the supply of such kind of aid definitely will not lead to any significant development. The insidious aid culture leaves African countries more debt-laden, more inflation- and corruption-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets, more unattractive to higher-quality investment, and so on. Notwithstanding the calls for more aid to Africa which are getting louder among the non-African social activists on the one hand, and few African high-rank bureaucrats on the other (about the latter see, e.g., Malone 2008), mostly destructive and counterproductive role of ‘aid without development’ is evident for many scholars in and outside of Africa. For them giving aid is primarily a form of power hegemony that undermines African states' sovereignty but not a humanitarian intervention of donation giving (see, inter alia: Lancaster 1999; Orjiako 2001; Riddell 2007; Abbas and Niyiragira 2009; Moyo 2009; for a reflection of the opposite opinion in recent academic literature see Brown 2013).

Nevertheless, the harm of such aid is not only immediately economic, social, or political. In the present article using the mosquito net distribution in Tanzania as a case-study, we argue and discuss the argument that in the long-run, aid that does not promote development undermines and even atrophies the idea of self-reliance in many citizens' minds most importantly, the aid which is not sieved in order to determine what kinds of it can promote self-development, undermines and even atrophies the idea of self-reliance in many citizens' minds. It is a big trouble, as only such an idea can serve as the moral, mental (at the individual level) and ideological (at the national level) background for a true development: economic, social, cultural, and any other (Ogundowole 2004: 97–115). Only self-reliance makes people a nation and can promote economic and social development (Ikoku 1980; Ogundowole 1988; Olaniyan 1996; Rugumamu 1997). This idea is popular among researchers as well as among journalists, including African, whom one can regard as a mouthpiece of the most advanced (socially active, best educated and informed) part of African societies (e.g., Bajulaiye 2008; Jamieson 2010). Finally, the President of the USA Barack Obama blessed Africa's search for self-reliance in his famous speech to the Ghanaian parliament on 11 July 2009 by saying that ‘Africa's future is up to Africans’ (CBSNews 2009). ‘In one bold stroke, Barack Obama is now the world's most prominent spokesperson for African self-reliance. What the white global leaders have never been able to say – stand on your own two feet! – a black man with, as he put it, “African blood” coursing in his veins, has declared’, this is how the American Professor G. Pascal Zachary (2009) estimated the US President's statement.

Nowadays in Tanzania quite a few will argue that after many years of economic liberalization the state should return to Nyerere's precepts, as ‘with Mwalimu our economic policy was based on “Ujamaa na Kujitegemea” – Socialism and Self-Reliance – which gave the country a clear sense of direction’ (Kilasara 2008: 24). Indeed, nostalgia for socialism is present in the Tanzanian society (Kamat 2008; Mkenda 2010: 35; Gathara 2011), although this feeling is typical for only a part of Tanzanian citizens (Bondarenko 2010). In any case, explicitly or implicitly, this is an appeal for true self-reliance as the background for socio-economic development, which was actually achieved neither in the time when Arusha Declaration was the direct guidance to state and society nor later, after the end of the Cold War and liberalization in Tanzania since the mid-1980s, after Nyerere's resignation from the posts of the country's President in 1985 and the then only CCM party Chairperson five years later.

The Problem Statement and Research Methods

It is not our purpose to discuss (or rather speculate) what is better for Tanzania (Africa, the Third World, the humankind…): capitalism or socialism. Moreover, the existing literature on Tanzania and Africa in general, though vast enough,³ focuses mainly on immediate economic, social, and political aspects of interrelation between aid and self-reliance, while the cultural aspect, the most important in our opinion, is given much less consideration than it deserves. So, what we are trying to do is to find out to what extent the very culture of self-reliance is inherent among the common population of Tanzania today and, especially, if strengthening of this culture is supported or hindered by international aid.

The amount of foreign aid to Tanzania is great, and the scope of its use extremely varies: according to official statistics, in the 2011/12 fiscal year ‘[t]he component of development expenditure that was financed by foreign funds was shillings 1,450.4 or 47 per cent of the annual target of shillings 3,054.1 billion’ (Mgimwa 2012: 21). So, we have preferred to base our research on a case-study (namely, the practice of giving away imported bed nets to combat malaria) for a general reasoning on the subject. The fieldwork was conducted in two Tanzania's regions – Dar es Salaam (three urban municipalities) and Morogoro (two rural districts) in September – October 2011. The major reason for such a choice was that Dar es Salaam, the main city of the country, almost in every respect stands as an area with most up-to-date social structure in the state, while Morogoro, a region in Tanzania's central part, stands for an area where social composition has not changed considerably since the country's gaining of independence.

The project covered common people from 20 households in each municipality and district giving a total sample of 125 respondents (67 and 58 from Dar es Salaam and Morogoro, respectively) of both sexes and different ages who filled out the questionnaire in the Swahili language. Forty-four respondents (35.2 per cent) were mosquito bed nets immediate recipients while most of the others, the recipients' household members, were the nets users. Among our respondents, 40.8 per cent were aware of the fact that the nets were a part of foreign aid to their country. In addition, 30 structured interviews (18 in Dar es Salaam and 12 in Morogoro) were conducted, including with those persons whom we regarded as experts: people from higher learning institutions, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Ifakara Health Institute, Tanzania Investment Centre, etc.

Data Presentation and Discussion

Self-reliance and foreign aid (in mosquito nets)

Tanzanians' generalized views and attitudes

Do Tanzanians (to the extent to which our sample can represent the whole nation) view self-reliance as a necessity for their country? Most of the respondents (111 persons, i.e. 85.4 per cent) gave a positive answer to the question if self-reliance is necessary for Tanzania's social and economic development. Among them, 73.6 per cent argue that not pressing for more aid but a hard work is the true means of achieving economic independence. Also over half of them declared themselves as devoted to the idea of self-reliance at the personal level, while the number of the respondents who view self-reliance as something negative remained small (see Table 1).

Table 1

What is your personal attitude to self-reliance?

So, it looks like most of our respondents, although they are direct or indirect recipients of foreign aid (at least in the form of mosquito nets), praise self-reliance as a true value. However, they clearly see its achieving in Tanzania as a realizable strategic goal for the future rather than the agenda for the present (Table 2).

Table 2

Is self-reliance possible for Tanzania already now?

As for today, 69.6 per cent of the respondents believe that the government has no choice between accepting and rejecting aid, and 62.9 per cent of the interlocutors consider the donating states' pressure for their own profit as its main cause. The majority of them find it also unreasonable to reject foreign aid but would advise the government to accept it not in kind (particularly, in the nets) but in money and technology to launch local production. Just in accepting this strategy they see both the best and most realistic way of gaining self-reliance. The acceptance of mosquito bed-nets was rejected by most respondents and the idea of promoting local development through domestic initiatives was given consideration (Table 3). As an interlocutor in Dar es Salaam said, ‘it is proper not to feed someone for one day but to teach him how to farm for permanent feeding’.

Table 3

Which of the options is the best for the government and which is most realistic for it today?

Logically enough, our sample is generally negative in the estimation of the role of the mosquito bed nets aid in adoption of the idea and principles of self-reliance in the Tanzanian society: 95 (76 per cent) of the respondents are sure that it definitely does not lead to self-reliance among the Tanzanians. But what is important, is that the negative evaluation of foreign aid by the questioned Tanzanians is quite ‘theoretical’. As it has been pointed out above, most of them are either immediate recipients or users of the foreign mosquito bed nets. Furthermore, only 11.3 per cent of our respondents told that awareness of the foreign origin of the nets could influence negatively their eagerness to accept them. The rest 88.7 per cent confessed that this fact meant nothing serious for them, as they ‘just need a net’. A man in Morogoro said openly, ‘Let aid come from white people who have taken away our resources. We need their aid and they should provide us as many things as possible. If they can assure us of not working and they sustain us, it would be something good’.

At the same time, rather unexpectedly, 42 respondents (33.6 per cent) told it made difference for them from what country the aid came. Most of this part of the sample favoured China, as in their opinion this donor makes fewer demands as conditions for aid than other, especially Western, states. Thus, although the overwhelming majority of our interlocutors actually think that all donating states pursue the same goals and affect Tanzania the same way, others yet see China as more sincere, friendly, and altruistic (while some other Africans in different countries, including Tanzania would say that this is a manifestation of China's political and moral unscrupulousness [Bondarenko 2010: 5]). On the contrary, the Western donating states are sometimes openly suspected in using aid as the Trojan horse in order to exploit Tanzania, her people and natural resources within the frameworks of neo-colonialism or globalization, in this case virtually equated to each other: a number of Tanzanians (including 30.4 per cent of our respondents) consider the latter as the contemporary incarnation of the former, as the newest link in the notorious chain ‘slave trade – colonialism – neo-colonialism’ (Msellemu 2004).

If we look at the collected evidence even more closely, we will see that for many respondents the ‘theoretical’ denial of benefits from foreign aid means a call not for liberation from dependence on it but for its fair distribution by the Tanzanian public officers. Only 32.8 per cent of respondents argue that foreign aid is inevitably vicious, while 52 per cent are sure that it could be beneficial if not for the local bureaucratic corruption whose manifestations actually every Tanzanian faces from time to time on a variety of reasons (Afrobarometer 2006) and about which now one can read in periodicals (Tasseni 2010). The rest 15.2 per cent believe that the aid is or will be beneficial anyway. However, as has been pointed out above, although the public opinions on this point are divided (what is remarkable per se), many Tanzanians do not see any contradiction between orientation at self-reliance and acceptance of foreign aid. They believe that the latter, if used properly – for the sake of development, can promote instilling of the former in the future (Table 4).

Table 4

Is foreign aid necessary for self-reliance efforts?

The most widespread opinion (expressed by 69.6 per cent of the respondents) is that today the government still cannot but accept the aid from foreign donors but it must use it in a fair and reasonable way for the sake of social justice and future development. Furthermore, 30.9 per cent of the interlocutors expressed the conviction that the desire of those in power to get their share through corruption is the main reason for the government's acceptance of the aid. Thus, it becomes clear that for the common Tanzanians, the main enemy of their country's development is not external (foreign donors with their aid) but internal – corrupted bureaucracy. This argument makes us put the question, if self-reliance and foreign aid really stand in sharp opposition to each other in the Tanzanians' minds.

Self-reliance and foreign aid in the Tanzanians' minds: A false opposition?

Clearly, the Tanzanians' individual characteristics, social and personal, influence their attitude to self-reliance and foreign aid. In particular, our research has revealed that men are significantly more inclined to self-reliance than women, what we can regard as a projection at the national level of their social role (and psychological state) of pater familia, on the one hand, and women's smaller interest in the suprafamily – social and political – problems (almost 36 per cent of them are ‘indifferent’), on the other. The respondents who remember the time when self-reliance was an intrinsic part of the official ideology (those who were over forty at the time of our research) have a more positive attitude towards it than their younger fellow citizens.

At the same time, no correlation was found between the attitude to self-reliance and such variables as place of current residence (Dar es Salaam or the Morogoro area), place of birth (ranging from the village to the city), and degree of devotion to the values and practices of traditional culture. However, we have predicted that what really matters is not the place of residence or birth, or relation to traditional culture but the education level, and this prediction found confirmation in the collected evidence. A great part of the most poorly educated people demonstrate actually the lack of interest in the nation's problems: they simply do not think in those terms. The Tanzanians with secondary and high school education are much more concerned with the problem of self-reliance and are most positive about the necessity to follow this principle. Yet, the data obtained for college graduates show that the dynamics is far from simply unilinear. (The number of university degree holders in the sample is too small to be statistically significant.) The college graduates are most enthusiastic about self-reliance and at the same time most negative towards it. The former fact can be considered natural for well-educated persons. As for the latter one, we are inclined to consider it as a projection of many well-educated Africans' negative evaluation of the history of relations between Africa and the world as a constant exploitation and robbery of the Dark Continent. For a large number of these people it seems logical that now the world should pay for it by supporting Africa. From this standpoint, self-reliance is another ideological disguise for devastating Africa and escaping paying the bills.

Besides, some experts complained of the contemporary national education system as failing to promote self-reliance. They argued that Tanzania's education system should fulfil its socialization function by inculcating the culture of self-reliance again, as it was in the time when the Arusha Declaration was a real law of life – from 1967 to the mid-1980s. Indeed, the experts' argument is in line with that of Julius Nyerere, who chose the title ‘Education for Self-Reliance’ for his policy booklet published the same year the Arusha Declaration was proclaimed (Nyerere 1967). In those days ‘education for self-reliance’ ‘was a philosophy designed to produce primary school graduates equipped with an education suitable for integration into the predominantly rural Tanzanian society’ (Swilla 2009: 3; see also Mwansoko 1990: 52). Of course, today the objective should be interpreted in a broader context, and education system higher levels should be imbued with this philosophy not to a lesser degree for the sake of bringing up patriotic and socially responsible intellectual elite. In any case, ‘[n]o educational system will be able to serve the African people productively and socially without a strong nationalistic philosophical basis. This basis cannot develop out of peripheral capitalism’ (Lumumba-Kasongo 2000: 157). In Tanzania the idea of self-reliance can serve as such a basis, and should begin to play this role again: peripheral capitalism, symbolized vividly by aid without development, is really unable to propose a sensible alternative.

So, we can argue that the factors that influence people's commitment or non-commitment to self-reliance are sex, age, and education, while place of birth and residence, attachment or non-attachment to traditional culture do not matter significantly. The answers to the question ‘What does foreign aid mean for Tanzania first of all, in your opinion?’ are to clarify what the individual attitude to foreign aid depends on. The generalized picture looks as follows (Table 5).

Table 5

What does foreign aid mean for Tanzania first of all, in your opinion?

Let us recall at this point that generally speaking, the overwhelming majority of our respondents estimate foreign aid as a disaster. However, of no less importance is the fact that among these people there are much more of those who regard foreign aid as evil not because it works against self-reliance but because it enriches the corrupted Tanzanian officials instead of supporting poor common citizens. Obviously, if that was not the case, more than half of our respondents would not object but rather even welcome the aid. Note also that most of those who regard foreign aid as beneficial for Tanzania think so because it promotes the country's future self-development.

Women are more critical of foreign aid (while, as it was stated above, men are more devoted to the idea of self-reliance). It has also become clear that those Tanzanians, who experienced coming of age in the period when self-reliance was an inalienable part of the undisputable ideological doctrine, are much more radical and maintain in their assessments that foreign aid is not beneficial but disastrous for the nation. Meanwhile, places of residence and birth appear to be of no importance both with respect to foreign aid and to self-reliance.

Rather unexpectedly, people more committed to traditional culture are slightly more positive towards foreign aid in general and its role as a possible promoter of the country's self-development in the future, in particular. In our opinion, this means that traditionalism as a commitment to local ethnic culture cannot be easily converted into nationalism characteristic of modern nation-states. There are less traditionalist-minded people among the well-educated Tanzanians (Bondarenko et al. 2013). It is just among them one can expect an expression of nationalist feelings, and indeed, among people with college and university degrees there are quite a few fans of foreign aid. Moreover, they also form the only education group for the majority of which the negative effect of foreign aid is clear per se, as a manifestation of foreign dependence, intolerable under any circumstances: There are more college graduates who believe that the aid is disastrous because it ceases self-reliance and self-development than those who see its negative role in fostering corruption.

Foreign aid is still associated with the West to a considerable degree (although China and some other non-Western countries are now working actively and successfully on changing this impression). Also some people in Africa still view the West as Christendom. Hence, we have admitted that Tanzanian Christians could be more positive of foreign aid than Muslims. However, this assumption has proved to be wrong. Non-Western donors, especially China and also Japan, are already rather notable in Tanzania, besides the West is viewed as a colonizer to not a less (and actually even greater) degree than as a Christendom (Bondarenko 2010: 12), while commitment to a religion is not a keystone of the Tanzanians' identity (Bondarenko 2004).

So, the factors that determine the respondents' attitude to foreign aid are largely the same as those that influence their commitment or non-commitment to self-reliance (although these factors can work in a different way with respect to the two matters): sex, age, and education. Besides, in this case some importance can be attached to traditionalism.

As our evidence shows, the relation between self-reliance and foreign aid for the majority of respondents is not a simple opposition: it would be wrong to state that those who support the idea of self-reliance insist on immediate ceasing the foreign aid, while those who do not accept that idea are completely for the aid. As it has been pointed out, many Tanzanians actually tend to see the seat of the trouble not in foreign powers but in national bureaucracy. There are two forces that, working together, should eventually make Tanzanians and Tanzania self-reliant: the civil society and the state, whose efforts to promote self-reliance our respondents assess quite differently. While the society's efforts are estimated as more or less satisfactory (though not at all as good), people are much more critical of the government's efficiency in promoting self-reliance (what is especially evident in the distribution of opinions on dimensions ii, iv, and v in Table 6). In the sample, the general assessment of the situation with promotion of the self-reliance culture in Tanzania is negative either: 63.2 per cent are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with it (Table 6).

Table 6

How do you assess the efforts to promote self-reliance?

One should note that the questions in Table 6 are not on the assessment of the interrelation between self-reliance and foreign aid. Moreover, only 9.6 per cent of the respondents are satisfied with how the government utilizes domestic resources for self-development. Hence, the government is blamed not for accepting the aid but for neglecting internal possibilities for development, in addition to being charged with aid-related corruption. It is clear, that accepting aid does not exclude an active use of domestic sources of development. So, the respondents' generally negative assessment of the situation with promotion of self-reliance in Tanzania is not determined primarily by foreign aid. To a greater extent it characterizes the citizens' view of post-Nyerere national governments as corrupted and ineffective, their failure or even latent refusal to accept those governments' ethos and policy – ideological, social, and economic.

Conclusions

We agree with our respondents' generalized opinion that self-reliance as a strategy for the future is necessary and it can be compatible with foreign aid today. However, this aid can be worthwhile only if it promotes development, that is if it approximates the time when economic, political, and socio-cultural self-reliance will become really possible. Hence, foreign aid must be transformed into international co-operation. The problem is that in fact neither foreign donors nor national bureaucracy are interested in the Tanzanian nation's progress toward the goal of achieving self-reliance, and the alliance of the former and the latter promotes satisfaction of their own interests more than of the Tanzanian people's. Due to it, though ‘no Tanzanian can deny that an ongoing and open discussion on corruption has been allowed, and some action against corruption has been made possible by President Kikwete’ (Madaha 2012: 60–61), even though the Tanzanian governments' efforts to take control of aid and transform aid into partnership made since the mid-2000s are recognized by specialists as most active on the continent (Wohlgemuth 2008: 36–38), these efforts do not result in effective use of aid for the development of national production (including that of mosquito nets) and do not foster the nation's self-reliance. Reducing budgetary dependency on foreign aid still remains a task for the future, too (Mgimwa 2012: 53, 76). The Tanzanian government and the business community should jointly develop a home-based strategy to provide, in particular, mosquito nets production and distribution at subsidized prices. This would ensure developmental continuity and sustainability.

In the meantime, our analysis aligns with the views that the aid like that in mosquito nets we have studied is an obstacle to a positive thinking of self-reliance in Tanzania. In its turn, it does not allow the nationals to make a step to a sustainable development, for the ways of addressing problems using local means are monopolized. Today the common Tanzanians, though they criticize both the donors and the government, tend to rely on them more than on their own hard work. They regard aid as a reward rather than as supplement to development, welcome it, want to receive even more, and are convinced that donors are in historical and moral debt to them and must sincerely care of not their own but of the Tanzanians' interests. They actually wait for self-cleaning, self-reformation from the state that must paternalistically give people the good. This is especially typical for those who grew up after the self-reliance was silently withdrawn from the ideological agenda, but the virus of other-reliance has infected the older citizens, too. This situation hampers the economic and social development of the nation, leaves much room for corruption and other social evils that people themselves dislike. An important reason for all this is that both civil consciousness and civil society institutions are still relatively weak in Tanzania, although there are signs of their development, like the growth in number and public recognition of the national NGOs and CBOs (Lange et al. 2000; Kiondo and Nyang'oro 2006; Haapanen 2007; Nassali 2009). ‘[T]he role of civil society in Tanzania is growing and… it engages a good number of the people in activities and operations. …the impact of civil society in Tanzania is somewhat evident, but not yet at a high level’ (Civil Society Index 2011: 67, 66). Besides, Daloz's idea of the pan-African generalization can appear relevant for the particular case of Tanzania, at least on some occasions: ‘The significance of the massive proliferation of NGOs in Africa is essentially the reflection of a successful adaptation of the conditions laid out by foreign donors by the usual local Big Men who seek in this way to gain access to new resources’ (Daloz 2003: 279). Tripp (2012) argues and proves that foreign donors play neither an unambiguously positive nor a definitely negative, but a contradictory, dual role in the civil society consolidation in Tanzania. Be that as it may, self-reliance of a whole nation within international context is hardly possible without its citizens' self-reliance with respect to their own state.

It would be unreasonable to expect in the foreseeable future that the state's role in integrating the nation ‘from above’ will become secondary to the role of civil society's self-organization. The increased (compared to the West) role of the state in African countries is a natural outcome of these nations' characteristics. As a legacy of colonialism with its arbitrary conduct of borders within which very different, previously often unrelated (or loosely related, or even conflicting) local societies, peoples, and cultures were united, contemporary independent African countries cannot but have the state as the main integrative force. The present-day African nations are not imbued with the idea of national community to the level when civil society can substitute the state in this capacity. In the absence of internal preconditions for emergence within existing borders and with originally Modern European political system, most African nations were created ‘from above’ and still can remain viable only at the state's big role in social and economic spheres.

Thus, the problem of African countries is not that their states play a more crucial role than the states play in the present-day West. The real problem is that African states remain ineffective from the viewpoint of their own historical and socio-cultural logic (Chabal and Skalník 2010). An African state, including Tanzanian, can play a positive part in the life of society, including promotion of self-reliance in ideology and socio-political practice, but to achieve this it must really function for public benefit, not for its own. This is where two lines cross: the state will be forced to change only in the course of and due to the civil society's further development, its eventual transformation from other- (state- and donors-) to self-reliant.

We believe that from this perspective, Tanzania has even better chances to become self-reliant than most African countries. On the one hand, ‘The Teacher’ Nyerere's legacy can provide a solid ideological background for reestablishment of self-reliance as an important aspect of the national idea. It is obvious, that this idea has its own high value, so in the post-Cold War time it is no longer necessary to associate it with socialism, what could be unattractive for many citizens, especially well-educated. On the other hand, probably even more importantly, contrary to almost all post-colonial African states, in Tanzania national unity has originally pre-colonial cultural background – the Swahili culture and language (Bondarenko et al. 2013). Furthermore, this fact has been inflated and instilled in citizens' minds by official ideology since the first days of the country's independence (Blommaert 1999, 2006; Topan 2008).

As for now, 76 per cent of our respondents argue that mosquito nets aid definitely cannot lead to self-reliance among Tanzanians. But 60 per cent of them confess that in the future they would refuse to receive the nets through gratuitous foreign aid not if locally produced nets will be of better quality or for affordable prices but only if they are distributed completely for free, too.

NOTES

¹ Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is the name the United Nations gives since 1971 to the states that, according to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, meet three criteria: low income, human resource weakness, and economic vulnerability. As of 2012, the list of LDCs includes 48 countries: 33 African, 14 Asian and Pacific, and 1 Caribbean (UN-OHRLLS 2012).

2 The Tanganyika African National Union, the only party in the country in those days, a predecessor, together with the Zanzibari Afro-Shirazi Party, of the still irremovably ruling Party of the Revolution.

3 Besides references to a part of the more recent titles above, see a review essay covering literature on the case of Tanzania up to 1995: Nyagetera n.d.

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