Tanzania's policy of Ujamaa Vijijini aimed at bringing peasant producers together in villages for co‐operative production. At first the policy was voluntaristic, stressing that the peasants themselves should initiate, control and run their villages. More recently the ‘frontal’ approach has resulted in administrative coercion and compulsory villagization. Some of the problems of rural planning and ujamaa implementation are closely connected with the absence of a concerted strategy for the transformation of the economy. Without such a strategy even the most democratically‐run villages of full producer co‐operation will maintain dependence if they continue to be deployed for export crop production. As serious: the increasingly bureaucratic implementation of the policy has acted as a barrier to political mobilisation and to the release of productive forces. Ujamaa was intended to be pursued politically, through the education and mobilisation of peasants; instead it conforms with the interests and methods of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie.