International Journal of Educational Development 66 (2019) 96–104

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International Journal of Educational Development

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedudev

The politics of the education budget: Financing mass secondary education in T

Tanzania (2004–2012)
Sonia Languille1
School of Oriental and African Studies, 10 Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London, WC1H 0XG, United Kingdom

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This article examines the budget dimension of the rapid expansion of secondary education in Tanzania since
Secondary education 2004. It aims to illuminate important challenges associated with the current international call for universal
Political economy secondary education and for domestic revenue mobilization to fill the significant financial gap to achieve SDG 4
Financing by 2030. The article sheds light on critical political factors that shaped Tanzania’s education budget allocation, a
Budget
topic scarcely scholarly investigated. In light of the analysis, the article concludes that tax justice, at global and
Tanzania
national level, needs to guide any ambitious agenda for action to finance quality education for all.

1. Introduction expansion of lower secondary education between 2004 and 2012,

The 2015 Sustainable Development Goal framework calls for uni-
versal primary and secondary education that leads to relevant and ef-
fective learning outcomes (SDG 4). After two decades of international
focus on access to primary education, this attention to secondary edu-
cation has marked a significant change in the global education agenda.
Another important shift has occurred: a growing focus on domestic fi-
nancing to fill the substantial financial gap to achieve SDG 4 by 2030
(ICFGEO, 2016). In practice, national governments in developing
countries have always borne a large share of the financial burden in
education. Nevertheless, in face of the damaging social effects of
structural adjustment programs, the Millennium Development Goals
framework was primarily designed to galvanize the international aid
community to finance the expansion of social services in developing
countries through aid, trade preferences and debt relief. To the con-
trary, the current global education agenda emphasises national gov-
ernments’ funding responsibility and posit external assistance as sub-
sidiary (ICFGEO, 2016, 21; UNESCO, 2016, 66).
However, this rising interest for domestic financing, revenue mo-
bilization and allocation in education is met with limited knowledge of
education budget making in developing countries. Mustapha and
Krause (2016, 1) warn against the potential ‘disconnect between the
global framework for financing development which places great em-
phasis on mobilizing and allocating domestic resources to finance the
Sustainable Development Goals, and how government budgetary deci-
sions are made in the real world’.
The present article examines the budgetary dimension of Tanzania’s
which was driven by a new policy launched by Prime Minister Edward
Lowassa in 2006: the construction of one secondary school in each
ward. Since the end of the researched period, Tanzania has experienced
important changes. Foreign aid has significantly declined and dis-
regarded budget support in favour of traditional projects (URT, 2016).
In education, Tanzania became a member of the Global Partnership for
Education in 2013 and, in 2016, President Magufuli decided to expand
free basic education to cover lower secondary education, while at the
same time exercising an increasingly authoritarian rule over the
country. Nevertheless, the analysis exposed here is rich of lessons for
the present time and the current global education agenda. The primary
objective of the article is indeed to address Mustapha and Krause (2016,
2) call for ‘a deeper understanding of political calculations and moti-
vation surrounding budget allocation process’. Education budget ana-
lyses often remain ‘data crunching’ exercises that determine country
spending trends in education. They constitute the necessary starting
point of any attempt to understand education budgets. Nevertheless,
they confine the budget to a technical realm and fail to account for
underpinning power relations. Assuming that the budget is the ex-
pression of a political system and reflects elites’ choices, the article
sheds light on critical political factors that shaped Tanzania’s education
budget allocation. In doing so, the article enhances the existing scho-
larship on budget politics in Africa, which predominantly focuses on
questions of corruption and elite rent-seeking behaviours.
The article is mainly concerned with budget allocation in education
at central level. This analytical choice eclipses three other important
budget dimensions: aid dynamics, budget execution, and local budgets,

E-mail address: sonia.languille@opensocietyfoundations.org.

1
Present address: Open Society Foundations, Millbank Tower, Millbank 21-24, SW1P 4QP, London, United Kingdom.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2019.02.003
Received 28 September 2018; Received in revised form 27 January 2019; Accepted 12 February 2019
0738-0593/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
S. Languille
which I extensively studied elsewhere. Donor practices influenced the
secondary education budget through various channels (Languille,
2014a), including IMF’s prescriptions for tight fiscal discipline that
structurally constrained the fiscal space for education, especially the
teachers’ wage bill (IMF, 2011). In addition, there might be wide var-
iation between a budget and its actual execution, especially at district
level where local elites renegotiate central level distributional choices
(Languille, 2015a). Nevertheless, the budget allocation lens has a
heuristic function and aims to illuminate domestic power dynamics that
underlie the budget, a topic scarcely scholarly investigated. Moreover,
between 2006/07 and 2011/12, while external aid represented a re-
duced share of the education budget (between 16 and 20 per cent,
against 57 per cent in 2004/05), budget support represented between
70 and 98 per cent of the total development assistance to Tanzania’s
education sector.2 National budget negotiation processes chiefly de-
termine the patterns of budget support allocation. As such, they
therefore reflect domestic elites’ budget preferences.
The paper is organized as follows. First, the article examines the
literature on the politics of the budget in sub-Saharan Africa, which
appears markedly influenced by donors’ normative perspective on
public finance management. Then, after some methodological con-
siderations, the article describes secondary education budgetary trends
in Tanzania since independence. It shows that the ward secondary
school policy did not break with the historical budget pattern: a low
secondary education budget. The following section highlights four cri-
tical factors that explain elite low budget prioritization for secondary
education, despite a high policy priority. Nevertheless, the budget for
ward secondary schools does not derive from a simple elite consensus; it
is the outcome of conflict-ridden processes, as shown in section 5. Fi-
nally, the article argues that the policy was largely funded off budget
through a vast movement of revenue mobilization borne by the com-
munities. In conclusion, the article draws lessons for the current global
education agenda.
2. The politics of budgeting in Sub-Saharan Africa: a literature
review
‘The crucial aspect of budgeting is whose preferences are to prevail
in disputes about which activities are to be carried on and to what
degree, in the light of limited resources’ (Wildavsky, 1992, 595). Unlike
the field of revenue mobilisation (Moore, 2013; Di John, 2011), the
political economy of budget allocation in sub-Saharan Africa has re-
mained largely unexplored outside a flourishing technocratic literature.
In particular, donor-led Public Expenditure and Financial Account-
ability (PEFA) assessments regularly document the robustness of public
finance management systems, including the budgeting function, ac-
cording to a set of international standards (on Tanzania, see ADE 2013).
Public expenditure reviews also provide detailed statistical analysis of
public finance trends at macro and sector levels (on Tanzania’s edu-
cation sector see OPM, 2001; World Bank, 2011). Technical by nature,
these reports do not provide any insights into the power mechanisms
that shape the patterns of resource allocation.
This is equally true of benefit incidence analyses that study the
distributional impact of education public spending. With the rise of
Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategies in the early 2000s, concerns
over inequity in government allocation of resources for social services
gained traction in development economics (Bourguignon et al., 2002).
In Tanzania, the most recent fiscal incidence analysis concluded that
secondary schooling is less progressive than primary schooling, and
both vocational training and public university education are regressive
(Younger et al., 2016), in line with previous analyses (UNESCO, 2012a,
231-2; Castro-Leal et al., 1999). However, these studies do not say
much about the politics underlying these distributional patterns, or
2
Author’s own calculation based on URT (2013) and ADE et al. (2012, 5).
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International Journal of Educational Development 66 (2019) 96–104
about the magnitude of disputes attached to them, including within the
dominant class.
A few authors have set out to illuminate political factors that in-
fluence public spending in African countries within a theoretical fra-
mework that borrows from new political economy and neo-patrimonial
views of the African state. This (limited) literature has explored two
main themes: the relation between electoral competition and pro-poor
public spending (for an application to education, see Stasavage, 2005)
and the politics of inter-governmental fiscal relations (on Tanzania
Weinstein, 2011; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, 2010; Boex, 2003).
This body of literature is problematic from several points of view.
Within their accounts, budget allocation is overdetermined by the logics
of rent-seeking and electoral politics, the main causal mechanisms that
are envisaged. This approach draws on the public choice school, ac-
cording to which decisions over public revenues and expenditures are
primarily determined by voters and lobby groups who seek to maximise
their individual interests (Buchan and Tullock, 1962). The formal
budget process and the various actors involved in it are not part of the
analysis. Their findings are premised on a rudimentary and normative
conceptualisation of budget politics, so that they can be amenable to
econometric specifications. For instance, Weinstein (2011) assumes that
Tanzanian decision makers adjust the patterns of central state transfers
to districts to ‘punish’ those that decrease their electoral support to the
ruling party. However, such a degree of coordination within the state is
very unlikely, and would need to be empirically documented (for a
similar critique of Weinstein’s analysis see also Therkildsen and
Bourgouin, 2012, 41–42). Another important limit of these works lies in
their data, which are hardly specified, while Tanzania’s inter-govern-
mental fiscal system is made up of a complex web of flows of funds,
which are allocated under multiple budget votes (for a mapping of
education transfers in Tanzania see Languille, 2014a, 151).
In contrast with this body of work, the present article sets out to
enrich another strand of political economy analyses of public ex-
penditures in Africa, which are based on detailed case studies. Gray
(2018, 2015) draws on a political settlement framework to shed light on
the role of institutions and distribution of powers in the implementation
of public finance management reforms in Tanzania. However, her
analysis chiefly centres on issues of grand corruption, a result – she
argues – of fierce internal competition within the ruling party. Various
other works (Killick, 2004 on Ghana; Rakner et al., 2004 on Malawi;
Hodges and Tibana, 2004 on Mozambique) provide insightful analyses
of the interplay between dominant actors involved in budgeting. In
their conclusion, most of these analyses tend to underplay significantly
the political economy meaning of the budget, which is described as a
‘theatre that masks the real distribution and spending’ (Rakner et al.,
2004: 4). Similarly, Killick (2004) underlines the ritualistic dimension
entailed in the budget process. Commissioned by donors, these studies
also tend to reflect two important features of donors’ good governance
epistemic frame: the analytical lens is primarily focused on concerns
over transparency and accountability and budget decision-makers’ in-
centives are considered the result of a rational calculation of their in-
dividual interests. As an exception, Mmari et al. (2005) unravel the
complex power structure that underpins elite budgetary choices.
Hoffman (2013) study of Tanzania’s budget politics is similarly an-
chored to a historical analysis of power relations within the ruling
coalition. In line with these two studies, the present article adopts a
non-normative approach of elites’ education budget preferences.
3. Methodology and data
The article is based on a mixed methodology, which combines a
budget analysis with qualitative interviews that were conducted in
Tanzania in 2011–2012 with aid managers and officials in the Ministry
of Education and Vocational Training (hereafter Ministry of Education,
which integrates higher education and research), the Prime Minister’s
Office for Regional Administration and Local Governments (PMO-
S. Languille
RALG), the Ministry of Finance and Members of Parliament. The article
also draws on data collected during a six-week fieldwork in Lushoto
district (North East Tanzania), which included the visit of 28 secondary
schools and interviews with district officials, entrepreneurs, politicians,
headmasters, teachers and parents.
Budget power holders in education are multiple but the four in-
stitutions mentioned above are the main actors involved in the educa-
tion budget making process. Delimitating the boundaries of education
expenses remains a matter of conventional choice, which makes diffi-
cult the integration of budgetary data from different second-hand
sources to construct a consistent time-series. Since a seminal education
Public Expenditures Review in 1994, Tanzanian education finances
have been subject to continuous scrutiny. Over the research period, this
close examination entailed several public expenditures reviews (for
instance OPM, 2001; World Bank, 2011b); two public expenditures
tracking surveys in 2002 (REPOA, 2004) and 2008–2009 (Claussen and
Assad, 2010), a Rapid Budget Analysis (GBS DPG 2007), and most re-
cently an Education Brief (UNICEF, 2016). UNESCO (2012a) provides
the most comprehensive analysis of education finances to date. How-
ever, it only partially covers the period of this research. One key lim-
itation of these different studies for the purpose of the present research
project lies in their various definitions of the scope of the education
sector.
The education statistical yearbooks produced by the Ministry of
Education - based on data from the Ministry of Finance - provide the
only time-series of the education budget that covers the entire research
period (URT, 2011). These data have three main limitations: they
provide budgeted amount rather than executed amounts; aggregated
allocations by education sub-sector but not the details by spending
categories; the total government budget amount does not discount for
the debt service. Nevertheless, in trading off between time-consistency
in intra-sector allocation and disaggregation of data, the first parameter
appeared more important to the argument developed in the present
article. However, given ‘the variety of compromises with accuracy’
(Samoff, 1991, 675) that the government production of education fi-
nance statistics entails, readers should not be misled by the ‘façade of
precision’ (Samoff, 1991) of the budget figures provided here; they are
invited to rather focus on the general trends in public spending that
they sketch out.
4. A long-lasting budgetary neglect: secondary education budget
as product of history
During the socialist period (Ujamaa, 1967–1985), Tanzania gave
priority to primary education and literacy programmes. Secondary
education was deliberately construed as education for a few but mer-
itocratic, free and of quality. This choice was reflected in budgetary
terms: between 1966/67 and 1980/81, the share of secondary educa-
tion in recurrent expenditures fell by 20 percentage points and in de-
velopment expenditures, by 19 percentage points in favour of primary
and adult education (Buchert, 1994, 106). The post-independence
budgetary trade-off between primary/literacy and secondary education
had a second facet: a high unit cost for secondary education. For
Nyerere, this was the price of ‘quality education’. Even after the in-
troduction of cost-sharing measures in 1985, secondary education unit
costs remained relatively high. In 1990, Tanzania had the second
highest (after Uganda) ratio of secondary to primary unit costs, of 62
countries with GNP per capita below USD 5000 (Lewin, 1996, 370).
Despite international criticism (Knight and Sabot, 1990) and in-
ternal contestation (Mbilinyi, 1979), President Julius Nyerere con-
sistently justified the deliberate choice of the country’s specific educa-
tional pyramid on the grounds that Tanzania, as a poor country, could
not afford to expand secondary education (Nyerere, 1971, 1984). This
post-independence educational settlement was, in practice, not funda-
mentally altered until the beginning of the 2000s when ‘Tanzanian
children (had) among the lowest probability of attending secondary
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International Journal of Educational Development 66 (2019) 96–104
school of all children in the developing world’ (Lassibille et al., 2000,
4).
Over recent years, Tanzania has experienced a rapid expansion of
lower secondary education within the Secondary Education
Development Plan (SEDP). Its implementation started in 2004 but the
expansion accelerated in 2006 when Prime Minister Lowassa decided to
act on an electoral promise inscribed in the ruling party Manifesto for
2005 Presidential elections: to build one secondary school in each ward
(the administrative level between district and villages). This ward
secondary schools policy called for a partnership between the state and
communities: the latter would build school infrastructures; the state
would provide for the roofing, teachers and schools’ running expenses.
This decision triggered a movement of expansion of an extraordinary
magnitude, throughout the country. Between 2004 and 2012, the total
number of secondary schools grew fourfold and the number of students
enrolled at O level increased by 348 per cent. However, between 2007
and 2013 the failure rate in the Certificate of Secondary Education
Examination rocketed from 9.7 to 57.1 per cent (URT, 2013a).
This rapid expansion of secondary education enrolment and school
infrastructure occurred without budget expansion. In constant prices,
between 2002/03 and 2011/12 the total volume of public spending on
education increased by 186 per cent. In this context of growing edu-
cation budget, secondary education financing underwent a steady de-
cline, from a peak of 18.2 per cent of the education budget in 2004/05
to its lowest level of 6.2 per cent in 2009/10 (Fig. 1).
The evolution of ‘unit costs’ illustrates, even more forcefully, the
low budgetary priority given to secondary education during the ex-
pansion phase. Between 2002 and 2009, this unit cost recorded a dra-
matic decline: it decreased by about 70 per cent while enrolment in
public secondary schools increased by 590 per cent. Tanzania’s public
spending on this level was among the lowest in relation to similarly
situated sub-Saharan African countries (Fig. 2) (for comparative data
see World Bank, 2010).
However, at the end of the research period, the share of secondary
education in the education budget recorded a sharp increase from 9.4
per cent in 2010/11 to 20.4 per cent in 2011/12. In parallel, the bud-
getary envelope for primary education, which had displayed a rela-
tively steady growth between 2003/04 and 2009/10, sharply declined
by approximately 20 per cent. In contrast, higher education recorded a
steady resource increase between 2005/06 and 2011/12, both in ab-
solute terms and as a share of the education budget (27.2 per cent of the
education budget in 2011/12 against 16.7 per cent in 2004/05).
Fig. 1. Tanzania’s education budget per sub-sector, 2002-2012. Source: the
author, based on URT (2011; 2012a).
S. Languille
Fig. 2. Spending per student in primary and secondary education, 2002-2012. Source: the author, based on URT (2011; 2012a).
5. Secondary education neglected budget: between elite budget
preferences and budget incrementalism
5.1. Elite budget preferences for productive sectors
Four main factors can be highlighted to explain the low secondary
education budget in a time of extraordinary enrolment and school in-
frastructure expansion. The first factor is linked to the actual budgetary
effort towards education as a whole. From the beginning of the 2000s,
Tanzania’s education sector benefited from the increase in government
expenditures fuelled by good macroeconomic performance, improved
revenue collection and sustained external aid revenues (UNESCO,
2012). Yet, between 2002/03 and 2010/11, education expenditure
grew at a much slower pace than the total government budget and in
2011/12, the education share of the total budget was lower than in
2002/03.3 This relative under-prioritisation of education can be ex-
plained in part by the development model that prevails among Tanza-
nian decision makers. Education is widely viewed as ‘consumption’, a
by-product of rural and infrastructure development that generates the
resources necessary to finance investments in social services. A senior
official in the Ministry of Finance exposed the rationale of the relative
under-prioritisation of education:
“Education is consumption. (…) If you don’t have infrastructure, the
agricultural sector is not ticking, you cannot get resources we require to
make education tick also. (…) Health, also, is consumption. You have,
as a nation, to have the quick ways in some sectors, which will be the
backbone of providing the services (interview, Dar es Salaam, 14/12/
2011).
In interviews, senior officials in the education administration
(Ministry of Education and PMO-RALG) expressed similar views. Away
from the human capital paradigm, education is considered the outcome
of economic transformation, not one of its core engines.
These tensions over the budgetary balance between education (or,
more broadly, social sectors) and productive sectors are not new.
Between 1999 and 2003, in the context of implementing the Poverty
Reduction Strategy, the government managed to assert its overriding
budget preference for ‘economic services’ and ‘production’ while ful-
filling donors’ conditionality requesting an increase in per capita allo-
cations to education and health (Mmari et al., 2005: 41–45). More
3
The author based on URT (2011b and 2012a).
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International Journal of Educational Development 66 (2019) 96–104
recently, the 2011 Five-Year Development Plan 2010–2015 represented
an attempt by a ruling power faction to regain control over national
development. It emphasised an infrastructure-led development agenda
rather than the social services/good governance priorities that shaped
the country’s Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategies (2005–2010 and
2010–2015) under donor influence (Languille and Dolan, 2012). In the
same period, neighbouring countries experienced a similar disen-
chantment with a poverty-focused economic strategy and converging
initiatives to craft alternative developmental models and budgets
geared towards structural transformation (for Uganda, see Hickey,
2013; for Mozambique, see De Renzio and Hanlon, 2007).
5.2. Elite budget preference for higher education and social order
The second factor behind the low budget for secondary education
lies in domestic elites’ choice to favour higher education in their budget
decision. Understanding the social, political and economic meaning of
higher education today in Tanzania would require an in-depth analysis.
Suffice it to mention that the rising trend in the higher education
budget coincided with the setting up of the Higher Education Students
Loans Board. Established in 2005 under a World Bank project, it issues
loans to students pursuing studies at accredited higher education in-
stitutions. Because of the very low recovery rate, the system has almost
been turned into a grant system, which has crowded out primary and
secondary education expenses. In November 2011, the recovery rate
since the inception of the scheme was 13 per cent.4 The government
took some measures to try to increase the recovery rate (World Bank,
2012) but most research informants in the Ministry of Education, the
Ministry of Finance and Parliament considered the scheme as finan-
cially not sustainable. Nevertheless, students’ loans remained a top
budget priority throughout the research period.
The budgetary shift at the end of the research period in favour of
secondary education reflected the social commotion caused by the
massive failures in the Certificate of Secondary Education Examination
(Languille, 2014b). However, decision makers rearticulated their
budget priorities at the expense of primary education: after a relatively
steady growth in the primary education budget envelope between
2003/04 and 2009/10, this sub-sector recorded a sharp decline of ap-
proximately 20 per cent over the last two fiscal years covered by this
article. Domestic elites’ overarching budget preference for higher
4
Deputy Minister of Education and Vocational Training in The Daily News 09/
11/2011 ‘From the Parliament - Loans board yet to recover 695bn/’.
S. Languille
education consolidated throughout the period.
The political economy of the Students’ Loans Board is, as yet, un-
researched. Several factors may explain Tanzanian elites’ prioritization
of higher education: to secure access to a very scarce resource for an
elite segment who cannot afford the cost of Western universities; elite
fragmentation that prevents a consensus around alternative funding
options; an efficient lobbying of ‘edu-entrepreneurs’ who set up lucra-
tive private universities; and the converging ideological adherence to
the ‘financialisation’ of higher education among donors and elite seg-
ments. However, discussion of the education budget at the National
Assembly help reveal out a major reason behind elite budget pre-
ferences for student loans. Indeed, the 2011 Report of the Social
Welfare Committee implicitly highlighted one key driver of MPs’
budget preferences for higher education. Under the sub-title ‘Peace and
Harmony in Colleges Country-wide’ MPs expressed their deep concerns
over universities nurturing the political contestation of the social and
political order (URT, 2011, 7–8):
Honourable Speaker, the committee is not happy with the situation pre-
vailing in some of the Higher Learning Institutions. The government
should conduct a research to find the sources of riots and conflicts in
government higher learning institutions…there is a feeling that conflict
and riots of government Higher Learning Institutions are caused by po-
litical fanatics and the convincing powers of political party leaders.
MPs see higher education institutions as sites of potential destabi-
lisation of the social and political order.
In contrast to the steady growth of the higher education budget,
resources transferred to ward secondary schools have remained a
second-order budget priority. In theory, each year, secondary schools
should receive Tsh 25,000 per enrolled student to purchase textbooks
and cover expenses such as infrastructure maintenance and school ad-
ministration. Since the inception of this capitation grant in 2004, the
starting point for computing the envelope has never been the theore-
tical ‘unit cost’. The process leading to the determination of the en-
velope available for education grants remains the outcome of informal
negotiations between the Ministry of Finance and the Cabinet, through
an ad hoc prioritisation process, in the absence of any formal guidance
criteria (Boex, 2009; interviews, senior officials, Dar es Salaam, Min-
istry of Finance, 2011–2012).
Two specific categories of education expenditures are however al-
ways considered absolutely crucial due to their political sensitivity:
examination expenses and school meals in boarding schools. Failure to
organise national examinations, highly symbolic moments in the na-
tion’s yearly calendar, carries a political risk that national leaders are
not ready to take. An official in the Ministry of Finance highlighted this
priority of examination expenses (in the case of budget execution not
budget preparation): ‘During the 1st quarter we only released funds for
examination. (…) If during 3rd quarter you receive funds you’ll allocate for
other activities’ (Interview, Dar es Salaam, 1 March 2012). National
leaders also fear the destabilising effect of secondary student riots
triggered by their food diet, events that regularly occur and receive
wide media coverage. For a senior official in the Ministry of Finance:
‘Meals are very crucial. So if you don’t take care of that it will be terrible’
(Interview, Dar es Salaam, 14 December 2011). Concerns over social
order supersede government stated commitments to quality education.
And in the case of boarding school meals, the price is high in terms of
breaching egalitarian goals: food in boarding schools only affects a
handful of students (about 800 in 2012), against about 1.5 million in
ward secondary schools.
The politics of education budgeting confirm the prevailing under-
standing among elites of education as a device for youth management
(Languille, 2015b). But they appear to assess differently the political
risk embodied by various segments of the youth. The ward secondary
schools policy to contain the poor youth in rural areas has received very
little support from the national budget; on the other hand, higher
education students are perceived as posing a greater threat to the
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International Journal of Educational Development 66 (2019) 96–104
political status quo that deserves massive and continued budgetary
injections.
5.3. The limits of strategic budgeting
Finally, the low budgetary effort for secondary education illustrates
the limits of strategic budgeting in Tanzania. In theory, the country has
abandoned incremental budgeting: performance-based budgeting was
introduced in 1998 and in the early 2000s the Medium Term
Expenditure Framework (MTEF) began to be used (Naschold and
Fozzard, 2002; Wynne, 2005). Today, the allocation of resources to
ministries is supposed to be closely tied to their three-year strategic
plan and annual action plans. Each ministry’s objectives result from the
ministry’s ‘vision’, which is itself the translation of various national
development frameworks (Vision 2025, Mkukuta and the Five-Year
Development Plan). This strategic planning and budgeting framework is
replicated at all administrative levels, from districts to schools (Inter-
views, headmasters and district officials, Lushoto, March-April 2012).
This pyramidal structure could, in theory, offer an effective framework
to realise a strategic priority shift (for instance towards secondary
education) in budgetary terms.
However, budget-making realities in Tanzania largely diverge from
this textbook objectives-based approach. Indeed, the national MTEF is
not an instrument that allocates financial envelopes to different sectors
based on a costed development scenario. Similarly, the education sector
budget is not the result of a multi-year costed plan computed from
macro-economic and demographic assumptions, enrolment projections
by sub-sector and targets for teacher-pupil ratio or book-pupil ratio. The
Ministry of Education and the PMO-RALG prepare, in isolation, their
own budget estimates, which are simply the incremental projection of
the current fiscal year ceiling over the two outer years. They are the
results of the compilation of costed activity plans developed by each
unit or department. The starting point of the budget preparation is not a
strategic allocation among key priorities or key departments but the
amount of fuel spent on different field visits or the amount of allow-
ances induced by planned workshops (interviews, officials, Dar es
Salaam and Dodoma, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education and
PMO-RALG, 2011–2012). Far from being strategic, the budgeting pro-
cess remains a bottom-up incremental exercise; the ministry’s leader-
ship only gets involved at the very end of the process for final decisions:
‘In March-April, the MTEF is submitted to the Ministerial budget committee
(Permanent Secretary and Directors) to allow management to own the
budget’ (Interview, budget officer, Ministry of Education, 13 October
2011). Within such a framework, it is difficult to envisage a drastic
budgetary reorientation to keep pace with a strategic policy reor-
ientation towards a sub-sector that has been historically financially
neglected.
Budget patterns as highlighted above did not derive from a simple
consensus among elites. They are also the outcomes of conflict-ridden
processes, as described in the next section.
6. The education budget as a site of power struggles
Tanzania’s organization of power has remained relatively stable
since the post-independence period, despite the political and economic
liberalization of the 1990s (Gray, 2018). The ruling coalition is domi-
nated by the Executive, led by the President and a small number of
ministers, and the CCM party.5 Even though most upper-level techno-
crats are CCM cadres, they enjoy a certain autonomy vis-à-vis the party.
The secondary education budget, as a site of intra- elite frictions,
5
The CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Party of Revolution) party was created in
1977 as the merger of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU, the then
ruling party in Tanganyika, in power since the independence in 1961) and the
Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), the then ruling party in Zanzibar.
S. Languille
illustrates limits to the country’s elite homogeneity.
First of all, these budget patterns have been the result of conflicts
between the Executive and Members of Parliament. During the pre-
paration of the 2011/12 budget, the Ministry of Education tried to
contain the budget-busting trend of the student loans scheme. But the
Parliamentary Committee for Social Welfare rejected its attempt. The
Ministry of Education was forced to top up the student loans envelope
projected in its initial budget estimates (URT, 2011, 3–4). This battle
over the budget for student loans provides an example of diverging
interests, within the state, between politicians and technocrats. For
representatives of the Ministry of Education, the inflationary envelope
for student loans put at stake the survival of the ministry. In 2012/13,
the student loans subsidy absorbed about 60 per cent of its non-salary
recurrent budget.6 Also, the success of the Social Welfare Committee in
imposing its budgetary preference on the Ministry of Education ex-
emplifies Parliament’s rising power within the political-administrative
landscape since the 2010 general elections - an analysis that concurs
with Hoffman (2013) - away from its traditional function of ‘rubber
stamping’ government decisions (Mmari et al., 2005; Gray, 2018).
The intra-sector budget allocation in education also constitutes a
site of tensions between the CCM and the government. The ruling party
apparatus appeared more sensitive than the government to the popular
discontent caused by the massive failure in Form Four examinations.
According to the party line, secondary education needed to become the
education budget’s overarching priority as a way to lessen the political
risk fuelled by the popular outcry (Interview, senior official, CCM
Secretary, 22 March 2012). But at the same time, the party’s involve-
ment in the budget formulation process takes a highly mediated form.
We [the CCM] think that the ministry should give first priority to
secondary education. (…) But the budget is the government thing.
The Minister is appointed by the President, all ministers are ap-
pointed by the President and are from CCM: there’s direct engage-
ment of the party through the ministers and deputy-ministers.
Directors are also President’s appointees (Ibid).
The budget remains the technocrats’ property and the party’s ability
to shape patterns of budget allocations appears largely circumscribed.
However, this self-account of CCM’s position as regards government’s
budget choices reveals a dynamic power sharing between the govern-
ment and the party, already pointed out in Mmari et al. (2005). The
party acknowledges the government’s pre-eminence in conducting
public affairs and the budget formulation. Yet, it can also choose to
reassert its primacy in certain circumstances when it considers that
government choices jeopardise the national political stability, and ul-
timately the survival of the party.
The budget formulation is also marked by the Ministry of Finance’s
primacy over other ministries. Education ministries’ budgets are the
outcome of close negotiations with the Ministry of Finance, which is
responsible for the oversight of the budget preparation and execution.
Every year, it issues budget guidelines, provides sector ministries and
district councils with budget ceilings, gives them instructions to ring-
fence some budget items or to exclude some expenditures (for instance,
URT, 2007); it also scrutinises their budget proposals before tabling the
national budget to Parliament for its approval. In the process of re-
configuration of education budget priorities towards secondary educa-
tion at the end of the research period, the Ministry of Finance’s en-
dorsement has been critical. For the researcher, the opacity of the
budget negotiations between the Ministry of Finance and the education
administration proved difficult to see through. However, contradictory
accounts of closed-door processes, provided by informants, converged
to emphasise the preeminent role of the Ministry of Finance and its
internalisation of the secondary education priority. Without the Min-
istry of Finance’s approval, based on a shared understanding of what
6
Author’s own calculation based on URT, 2012b.
101
International Journal of Educational Development 66 (2019) 96–104
the education priorities are, the Ministry of Education would have faced
difficulties in promoting a reorientation of its budget.
A last example illustrates the power dynamics among domestic
elites and testifies to the ambiguity of their commitment to quality post-
primary education. One main source of finance for vocational training
comes from the Skills Development Levy, a 6 per cent tax on payroll, 2
points of which go directly to the Vocational Education and Training
Authority, a parastatal under the Ministry of Education’ s authority. The
remaining share has been subject to competing claims: for instance
from Members of Parliament to increase the funding of vocational
training or from the Ministry of Finance to increase the resources of the
Students’ Loans Board and safeguard the fiscal space for primary and
secondary education. In FY 2012/13, the Ministry of Finance decided to
allocate the 4 per cent levy to the Students’ Loans Board.
However, employers have also long complained about the levy it-
self, considering it a burden that inhibits Tanzania’s economic compe-
titiveness in regional and global markets. In 2013, the Association of
Tanzania Employers drafted a Position Paper in which they ‘urged the
government to reduce the Skills and Development Levy’.7 Their lob-
bying was successful. In FY 2013/14, the Ministry of Finance decided to
decrease the levy from 6 to 5 per cent. In the same budget, the Ministry
of Finance introduced a new 14.5 per cent excise duty on all mobile
phone services (previously applicable to airtime only), 2.5 points of
which to be used to finance education (URT, 2013b, 51). Given the high
penetration rate of mobile phones in Tanzania (depending on the
source, between 47 and 60 per cent in 2011), the simultaneous changes
in the tax regime in relation to the financing of education represented a
shift of burden from a small segment of the ruling class – the business
elite in the formal sector8 – to the mass of the population. This budget
decision, which deepened the regressive nature of public education fi-
nances, also confirmed the analysis by Mmari et al. (2005, 29) that
singled out business associations as ‘the non-state actor with the most
influence on the budget process’. This power contrasts with the mar-
ginal influence of other Tanzanian civil society organisations, which
have invested in the domain of education public spending, such as
HakiElimu and Policy Forum (Mmari et al., 2005; Hoffman, 2013).
Whilst the education budget is the outcome of intra-ruling class
tensions, it is also shaped by struggles between power holders and
workers. This is testified by the contentious politics of the teachers’
wage bill. Most government officials interviewed considered teachers’
low morale a key obstacle to achieving quality education and teachers’
salaries a core ingredient of their motivation. Between 2010 and 2012,
the government recruited new secondary teachers, which drove a
marked increase in secondary level teaching staff between 2010 and
2012 (+ 98.2 per cent) (URT, 2012a, 108) and a 27 per cent increase in
the teaching wage bill between 2008/09 and 2011/12.9 Also, in
2011–2012, when threatened with a teachers’ strike, the government
decided to settle a long standing dispute with the Tanzania Teachers’
Union (TTU) over teachers’ salary and non-salary arrears: a Tsh 44
billion sum was paid to primary and secondary school teachers (inter-
view, senior official, Dar es Salaam, President Office, Public Service
Management, 9 April 2012).
Despite these positive trends, teachers at the beginning of their
career earned about half as much as health workers (Tsh 249,600 for
teachers, Tsh 477,200 for health workers), although differences were
less pronounced at the end of careers.10 Moreover, industrial action has
7
‘Abolish skills development levy, employers urge govt’, The Citizen, 11/04/
2013.
8
In reality, it is difficult to locate the actual incidence of the skills levy: on
employers (lower profits), workers (lower wages) or customers (higher prices).
9
The author’s own calculation based on Ministry of Finance budget books.
10
Source: Civil servants’ salary scales for 2010-2012. Salary scales are re-
negotiated every two to three years between civil servants’ trade unions and the
government.
S. Languille
regularly met with coercive responses from the government. Since the
birth of the TTU in the 1990s, the ruling power has deployed traditional
containment techniques to inhibit its potential destabilising power:
undermining their leaders’ credibility, intimidating teachers or cap-
turing their leaders within the system (invitation to workshops with
allowances or appointment of their President – Margaret Sitta – as
Minister of Education in 2005). In 2010, following a strike notice by the
TTU, President Kikwete delivered a menacing speech to teachers while
high-ranking representatives of the army and the police stood os-
tentatiously behind him. In 2012, in the context of salary negotiations,
the government responded to a teachers’ strike with intimidation,
sending a ‘strong warning to teachers’; the action, overwhelmingly
supported by the teaching force, was challenged in Court and declared
illegal.11 Under externally-imposed macro-economic constraints and in
face of a narrow fiscal space, coercion remained the ruling power’s only
option to contain labour demands.
7. Domestic revenue mobilization via communities’ contributions
According to dominant elite narratives, shaped by the enduring
popularity of the socialist ideology among the country’s ruling class
(Gray, 2018; Languille, 2016), the ward secondary school policy was
the initiative of a benevolent state to respond to a ‘social demand’
(Languille, 2015b). In reality, despite their egalitarian claims, Tanza-
nian elite did not – as the previous sections demonstrated - meet the
fiscal challenge of mass secondary education.
The ward secondary schools policy was in reality largely funded
outside the budget, through financial and in-kind contributions by
‘communities’. Based on all accounts, the financial burden of secondary
education expansion fell disproportionately upon the population.
According to a former District Education Officer in Luhsoto district, ‘it
was a very big project; it needed a lot of money. (…) In Lushoto, commu-
nities provided more than half of the amount. Then the district, and finally
the government’ (Interview, Lushoto, 20 February 2012). The ‘success’ of
the ward secondary schools policy lay partly in the ability of the top
executive to assert its power over the bureaucracy. Prime Minister
Lowassa set targets for the entire state apparatus; state representatives
were tasked to mobilise peasants to achieve them. Every official em-
barked on the mobilisation enterprise, if not by conviction, certainly in
fear of losing his/her post in case of unreached targets. Villagers
avoided the demands put on them by the state and coercion was ne-
cessary to draw reluctant peasants into the state’s realm. ‘Our main
challenge is the participation of the community to the construction (bricks,
labour etc.)… Most of them don’t like it and say “the government should pay
their part”. They can do it but only if they are forced’ (Interview, ward
official, Lushoto, 27 February 2012).Villagers unwilling to pay were
forced to contribute through the requisition of household assets (cattle,
furniture, etc.). Any breach of regulations meant that the offender could
be charged with a criminal offence, fined or even imprisoned
(Languille, 2015a). Ruse supplemented state coercion. One retired
district official explained: ‘In some wards, they were not willing to con-
tribute. So we would send their children very far, allocate them to distant
secondary schools so that it would become very costly for them. The next
year they would tell us “we need to build our own school”’ (Interview,
Lushoto, 20 February 2012). Students’ own labour force has been
exploited to complete the infrastructures: ‘To minimise the cost of
building we asked students to dig the trenches, to carry sand’ (Interview,
headmaster, Lushoto, 03 March 2012). Given the degree of coercion
involved in their collection, communities’ contributions to building and
running the ward secondary schools may be reckoned a regressive tax
on the poor. This specific form of domestic revenue mobilization ac-
tually bore a marked resemblance to historical centrally driven policies
that were implemented in a heavy-handed fashion by Tanzania’s central
11
‘Tanzania: Teachers’ Strike De-stabilizes the Nation’ 01/08/2012.
102
International Journal of Educational Development 66 (2019) 96–104
state.
Villagers have not only financed a big share of capital costs, they
have also contributed to running costs. In all schools visited in Lushoto
district, parental fees and other contributions were the school budget’s
main source of revenue. Parents also contributed towards paying the
salaries of ‘Form Six Leavers’ teachers, directly recruited by schools to
fill in the gap in their teaching force. Officially, these teachers did not
exist and their cost was silently passed onto parents (for instance, on the
villagisation process in the 1970s, see Hyden, 1980).
In this context of a highly political and coercive process that cir-
cumvented the technocratic apparatus, the budget lost its centrality as
the financial arm of the bureaucracy. ‘The strategic planning process was
turned on its head; it was basically left redundant’ (Interview, economist,
aid agency, Dar es Salaam, 13 October 2011). Therkildsen (2000, 66)
argues that in Tanzania ‘policy decisions are often taken as if no hard
constraints for reform initiatives exist’. The budget inertia in the face of
the ward secondary schools policy shift illustrates the enduring re-
levance of this characterisation.
8. Conclusion
‘The vantage point offered by concentration on budgetary decisions
offers a useful and much neglected perspective from which to analyze
the making of policy’ (Wildavsky, 1992, 598). The present article un-
tangled factors that, beneath the technicalities of the budget, have
moulded a negligible budget for Tanzanian ward secondary schools. By
doing so it demonstrates the value of examining education budgets
through a historically grounded analysis that posits education policies
and budgets as sites of power and conflict.
Tanzanian elites’ egalitarian claims to legitimize the path towards
mass secondary education did not provoke any substantial realignment
of their budget preferences. The budget for quality secondary education
has been a casualty of a conflict-ridden process geared towards the
reconciliation of various over-determining forces: elite attempts to ex-
plore a counter-hegemonic developmental model while responding to
pressing international fiscal prescriptions; the need to create the con-
ditions of the socio-political order or their inability to find an alter-
native model to finance higher education. Specifically, the political
order imperative was exposed as an important parameter in budget
decisions over student loans, teachers’ wage bill and the resources
transferred to schools.
The present article also enriched the existing case-study based lit-
erature on African budget politics. I have analysed elsewhere elite
corrupt practices to capture education resources (Languille, 2016).
Nevertheless, the present article demonstrated that the reductionist
understanding of budget politics – elites’ self-interest maximization as
primary determinant of the budget - fails to account for the entwined
factors – historical, ideological, technical and political - that shape
Tanzania’s budgets. The analysis also showed the importance of not
overstating the homogeneity of the ruling elite. In particular, the article
shed light on the specific position of education bureaucrats within the
state who enjoy degrees of autonomy and battle with other ruling
factions to defend their sector-specific budget interests. In addition, the
article partially concurs with the description of the budget as a ‘façade’
(Killick, 2004) or a ‘theatre’ (Rakner et al., 2004, 4), which indeed
corresponds to a Tanzanian reality. Nevertheless, this characterisation
also obscures the fact that the voted budget embodies some structural
and historical distributional choices that have a bearing on the actual
physiognomy of the public education system. Besides, conflicts that
budget negotiations give rise to cannot easily be dismissed as mere
ludicrous stage performances.
Following Rubin (2014) classical text on public budgeting in the
United States, one may finally argue that Tanzanian educational bud-
gets, while reflecting elite interests as over-determined by the country’s
narrow economic base and externally-imposed macro-economic dis-
cipline, are also the (undetermined) outcome of power struggles
S. Languille
between elite factions, between the ruling coalition and education
workers as well as between various government branches.
In light of the research main findings, two elements of the current
international agenda require particular attention. First, the damaging
effects that student loan schemes exercise in practice on the fiscal space
for primary and secondary education should be explicitly recognised.
As acknowledged by the World Bank itself, one of their most vigorous
advocates: ‘Student loans will always be expensive, and a loan scheme
should not be launched in the mistaken notion that it will become self-
funded’ (World Bank, 2010, 142-3).
Second, the international emphasis on domestic revenue mobiliza-
tion calls for caution. It entails two risks: contributing to regressive
taxation and encouraging aid agencies to curtail their financial con-
tribution. In countries where military and security spending represents
a significant share of the national budget, advocacy towards increasing
domestic resources to education may serve social justice objectives.
However, in other contexts, limited level of economic development and
tax base – more than government putative ‘lack of political will’ –
constitute the first barriers to domestic resource mobilization and si-
milar advocacy campaigns may in practice mean extraction of resources
from the poor. The article confirms the relevance of analyses that put
tax justice, at national and international level, at the forefront of re-
flections over the financing of SDGs (Cobham and Klees, 2016; Balsera
et al., 2018). Calls for domestic resource mobilization should not eclipse
the persistent need for robust international aid to achieve SDG 4.
Declarations of interest
None.
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding
agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Acknowledgement
The author is grateful to Christopher Cramer and Olivier Vallée for
their insightful feedback during the research presented in the article.
The author also thanks two anonymous reviewers for their useful
comments on an earlier version of the text.
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