RECORD COTTON PRODUCTION
Cotton production has reached a record level of 450,000 bales this year. But this substantial production is exacerbating certain related problems. ;he ginneries cannot cope and transport remains a bottleneck. The Government has been considering arranging for ginning to be done in neighbouring countries and. plans have also been made for two new ginneries (for 50,000 bales) in Shinyanga and Mara regions, Other ginneries are to be rehabilitated – Daily News

PRESIDENT MWINYI TO VISIT BRITAIN
The Tanzanian High Commission in London has announced that President Ali Hassan Mwinyi will be paying an official visit to Britain from June 6th to 10th 1988. He will be lunching with the Queen and having extensive discussions with Mrs. Thatcher. It is also expected that, amongst his many other engagements, he will be meeting members of the Britain-Tanzania Society.

WORLD BANK HAPPY WITH TANZANIA
According to SHIHATA the World Bank is so pleased with Tanzania’s economic recovery that it is now working on new programmes to stimulate production in the country’s priority areas. “The results of the Economic Recovery Programme have been encouraging and we would like to further assist the Government to get the economy growing at a sustainable pace” said Enrique J Rueda-Sabata, the Bank’s Deputy Representative in Tanzania. “The Government has to be congratulated” he said.

Furthermore, the journal ‘World Bank News’ reported that in a recent speech, Edward Jaycox, the Bank’s Vice-President for Africa, had said that “Many African Governments have recognised the nature of the crisis that confronts them ….. and we are beginning to see some positive economic results. He gave two examples: “Since Ghana launched its reform programme in 1983 its GDP growth has averaged 5% a year. Tanzania achieved positive per capita growth in 1986 for the first time in a decade.”

7,000 TRADITIONAL GUARDS – AND A NEW STATUE – IN TABORA
The eleventh anniversary of the CCM was celebrated on February 5th this year in Tabora. There were two new features to the celebrations. Some 7,000 Sungusungu (Traditional guards) clad in rugs and hats made from feathers paraded past Party Chairman Nyerere. They danced, flexed their muscles and stamped the ground and displayed their weapons – bows and arrows and pangas. These traditional groups had been formed five years ago and have had much success in stamping out cattle rustling and tracking down criminals.

Also, to mark the occasion thirty years ago (January 26th 1958) when Mwalimu Nyerere had addressed a historic TANU pre-independence rally, a light iron and aluminium statue of Mwalimu was unveiled by President Mwinyi. The statue depicts Mwalimu standing with a walking stick. A picture of the rally is painted below the statue. – Daily News

THE WORD ‘NATIVE’ WELL USED
In a recent letter to the Daily News a reader in Dodoma defended the use of the word ‘Native’ in the ‘Kilimanjaro Native Co-operative Union’, He was responding to earlier questioning of the word because it had been “used by colonialists in contemptuous reference to Africans, He explained that “the Chambers Dictionary defined the word as follows: ‘Born in; being; having to do with place of birth or origin’,

“It is quite clear” he went on, “that the word has a broad meaning quite apart from its colonial connotations, KNCU (1939) and KNCU (1984) to me are nostalgic. They remind me about the period up to the year 1976 when the co-operative movement of Tanzania was leading in Africa, Why did the founding fathers opt for ‘Native’ or ‘African’ Co-op Union? For the under thirty years age group let me explain that the ‘Natives’ had little choice in the matter because of the segregative racial policies of the colonial authorities”,. and it was therefore a fitting symbol of protest for Africans to start and run their own cooperative union so successfully right under the nose of the colonial master”.