We are probably all too used to the Latin expression, Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

The other day I got interested in knowing how we would say, I make, therefore I am. I googled it, and what I found was, Conficio ergo sum, or Fabrico ergo sum.

Although neither of these two seem to be official translations, still they convey the sense that our very being as humans is closely linked to our ability to make, to create, to fabricate, to manufacture.

What triggered my sudden interest in this whole thing was a remark that a colleague made recently in a Dar restaurant.

“Oh, great, these were made here!” the man exclaimed, and when I looked up to see the cause of his excitement, I saw he was holding a small cylindrical container of toothpicks. Toothpicks!

Sadly, that is the Tanzania of today, where tiny bids of timber used to widen the gap between your teeth can be celebrated.

A far cry from when the country had so many basic factories making clothes, shoes, hoes, ploughs, machetes, even machine tools.

Yes, the ego of one Julius Nyerere was not above setting up an automotive factory in Kibaha to manufacture military trucks called “Nyumbu,” as ugly as the wildebeest it was named after — no doubt meant to frighten the enemy.

That from that high, we’ve come to this low, is testimony to the unthinking of our rulers who, in order to please their masters in London and Washington, gave away value they could never dream of creating, in the name of neo-liberal ideologies they hardly understood but slavishly served.

They set up what they called the Public Sector Reform Commission, ostensibly to look into the management, financial and economic viability of these industries with a view to rationalising what could be rationalised and getting rid of what had to be got rid of.

Due to some inexplicable linguistic twist, those entrusted with this task took “reform” to mean “sell or trash,” and within a short period, even the most lucrative factories were given away for a song. They threw away the baby, and kept its bathwater to drink.

That is how Tanzania came to be without a single hoe-making factory — 80 per cent of the people are agriculturalists — and that’s how we came to be importers of everything, from bulldozers to needles. Ours has become a nothing-making society.

So when, recently, two academics from two friendly countries took turns to lambast Tanzania’s leadership for being irresponsible, everyone took note.

Speaking at a seminar on poverty reduction, the Chinese and Vietnamese delegates asked some serious questions, basically wondering how Tanzania expected to end poverty without the most basic industrial production.

The Vietnamese expert queried the wisdom of exporting raw cashew, for instance, when Tanzania had in the past a few cashew-decorticating factories.

To rub it in, he said that his country, which produced no cashew, had to import the nuts from other countries — he did not use the word “stupid” — such as Tanzania, so why had Tanzania allowed its factories to die?

For his part, the Chinese wondered how people could afford rising food prices, pointing out that in the two years since his last visit to the country, the price of rice had increased twofold.

These two spoke with refreshing sincerity, and the beauty of it all was that they delivered their stinging indictments in the presence of the head of state himself, speaking into the horse’s ear, as it were.

Whether their views will be heeded is another matter, of course.

The irony won’t be missed, of course, that apart from Vietnam, whose industries feed on our cashew nuts, China also reaps rich dividends from our stupid mistakes, and both are telling us that without necessarily thanking us for our favours.

Jenerali Ulimwengu, chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper, is a political commentator and civil society activist based in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]