Tanzania currently has a Kenyan problem – a sugar shortage. Sugar shortages are what one would call an “old Africa problem.”

There are things that modern governments should not be spending their time on; sugar is one of them.

In African countries where sugar is big politics, either one day it’s the badly run state-owned sugar grower that is not delivering; or there are police arrests of sugar smugglers who are undercutting protected importers, or some related commotion.

It’s a bad investment of government resources. In Kenya, the smuggling of sugar from Somalia is an emotive issue. Sad really. Sugar actually needs smugglers to drive prices down and break the stranglehold of cartels.

Given the health risks of sugar, it is a disgrace that people should have to pay a high price for it.

The other commodity whose control belongs to old Africa is fuel. Nigeria is Africa’s biggest exporter of oil, but endures some of the continent’s worst fuel shortages because it imports most of its refined fuel.

And it has a subsidy, and all those market-distorting things that create rent-seeking opportunities for crooks and the corrupt in politics.

A modern government has no business selling fuel.

In Kenya, there are from time to time squabbles over the price of maize. Maize, of all things! In a couple of Southern African countries, governments decide the price of what Ugandans, to the great perplexity of Kenyans and Tanzanians, call posho in all its forms.

These are things they should let shopkeepers and market traders do.

Although increasingly rare, there are still countries in Africa where a minister is the one who sets matatu prices! Some have not let go of milk. Cooking oil is still a target for some bureaucrats and politicians.

In North Africa, the price of bread is a matter that often lands on presidents’ tables.

Governments and bureaucrats are incompetent business people, and shouldn’t muscle into the local matatu, bread, flour, sugar and cooking oil markets.

There are good social and egalitarian reasons why responsible government should try and ensure that people can afford food or to pay rent, but they deny society a greater good by monopolising those functions.

The allocative role governments play in the marketplace gets in the way of national cohesion and nation building.

If western Uganda depended on potatoes grown by farmers in the northeast, and the farmers or traders from the area, say, Soroti, were the ones who delivered it to Mbarara, a direct connection would form between their stomachs and the gardens of Soroti. They would see the Soroti people as the folks that feed them. That is how popular and shared citizenship and nationhood develops.

If, however, a government agency bought the potatoes from Soroti and sold it in Mbarara, then the mindset of the people in Mbarara would be that it is the government that is responsible for their potatoes.

The marketplace is an arena where the disparate peoples of a country can discover, and learn to trust and distrust, each other.

So not only is it a more efficient distributor of goods and services, the market is a better builder of nations. It’s not just for commercial reasons that governments should not be in the business of selling maize; it is for political ones too.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3