Marc Wuyts

Money, Planning and Rural Transformation in Mozambique

This article argues that the transformation of the rural economy should proceed on a broad front which links the development of the state sector with the need to transform family agriculture through co‐operatisation. In actual fact, planning became concentrated on the state sector which received the bulk of the investible resources. Disequilibria between the planned needs of resources and their real availability destabilised the exchange between the state sector and peasant production and consequently blocked the possibilities of transforming family agriculture. This contradition expresses itself in the form of monetary disequilibrium, but it cannot be solved by monetary policy only. Rather it requires rethinking the nature of planning itself.

The Invisibility of Wage Employment in Statistics on the Informal Economy in Africa: Causes and Consequences

Abstract This article challenges the claim, along with the statistics that support it, that self-employment is by far the dominant employment status in the informal economy. The article begins by reviewing key insights from relevant literature on the informal economy to argue that conventional notions of ‘wage employment’ and ‘self-employment’, while unfit for capturing the nature and variety of employment relations in developing countries, remain central to the design of surveys on the workforce therein. After putting statistics on Tanzania’s informal economy and labour force into context, the analysis reviews the type of wage employment relationships that can be found in one instance of the informal economy in urban Tanzania. The categories and terms used by workers to describe their employment situation are then contrasted with those used by the latest labour force survey in Tanzania. The article scrutinises how key employment categories have been translated from English into Swahili, how the translation biases respondents’ answers towards the term ‘self-employment’, and how this, in turn, leads to the statistical invisibility of wage labour in the informal economy. The article also looks at the consequences of this ‘statistical tragedy’ and at the dangers of conflating varied forms of employment, including wage labour, that differ markedly in their modes of operation and growth potential. Attention is also paid to the trade-offs faced by policy-makers in designing better labour force surveys.

Accumulation, social services and socialist transition in the third world: Reflections on decentralised planning based on the Mozambican experience

The purpose of this article is to argue for the viability, and the logic, of a distinctive approach to planning economic development and socialist transition in poor economies. The components of this distinctive approach are: more decentralised, and popularly‐based, planning and control of accumulation; the close interlinking of investment in social services and in rural production; and an emphasis on intervention in the market as a tool of socialist planning. The article therefore presents an argument about economic planning intended to be relevant to a range of countries with similar general aims and problems. However, the ideas are developed here, as they were in practice, through a reflection on our own understanding of planning andits problems in Mozambique during the first ten years of that countrys independence.1

Ruth First and the Mozambican miner

Ruth First came to Mozambique twice to work at the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA): first, in 1977, to lead a research project on the export of Mozambican migrant labour to the South African mines, and, second, from 1979 until her death in 1982, as research director of the CEA in charge of setting up and running its research-based development course. Before this, she spent a term in 1975 as visiting lecturer in development studies at the University of Dar es Salaam (where I was then working in the economics department). During her stay in Dar, Ruth went on a short visit to Maputo where she met Aquino de Bragança, director of the CEA, and Fernando Ganhão, Rector of the Eduardo Mondlane University. Aquino de Bragança was a long-standing confidant of the Frelimo leadership and, like Ruth, had been a journalist for many years, writing mainly for the Revue Tiers Monde. Fernando Ganhão, a historian, had joined Frelimo during the 1960s, was a teacher at the Frelimo school in Dar es Salaam and was appointed Rector of the University after independence. They agreed that Ruth would come to work during 1977 to teach a course on the history of southern Africa and to undertake a research project on migrant labour. At its inception in early 1976, the CEA was meant to be a research centre on history and anthropology, divided up into sections representing different pre-colonial and colonial periods. Its Mozambican researchers were mainly BA graduates from the history department working on their individual research projects. There was a vibrant series of seminar presentations given by these young graduates and by various visiting scholars (historians/archaeologists/anthropologists), among whom were a number of famous French scholars who worked on Africa. Little work was done, however, on contemporary issues and none on the challenges of transition after independence. Although Ruth was not in Mozambique during 1976 she was nevertheless intensively involved with the CEA since she was busy preparing her teaching and research for 1977. This preparation did not go without some hiccups, not the least because of the confusing messages Ruth kept receiving from Maputo about the work she was supposed to do in 1977. At the time, the CEA was deeply involved in plans to set up a new faculty of social sciences. This engendered much talk but little action apart from the endless submission of drafts of course curricula, all of which were rejected by the Rector. At that time, this faculty never materialised. Conflicting messages about her teaching for 1977, however, led to concerns. The main problem was the lack of a clear development perspective – or, more accurately, a political economy of development perspective – in the various drafts of the course curriculum. In a letter to Dave Wield (21 September 1976), for example,