The latest workers' upheavals befalling the concessioned Tanzania Railways, who are demanding for their unpaid monthly salaries and to terminate the Indian railways company (RITES) management contract, is an eye opener that our governments need to look inward for certain business solutions.

Tanzania has a wide, but sad experience, with solutions that originated from the Bretton Woods institutions - to 'privatize and sell out unprofitable firms' to foreign firms, as though they were the panacea of our ailing economies and firms.

From the early 1990s, Tanzania, for one, bought the idea that unprofitable state-owned firms that survived on state subsidies, had to be privatized to foreign firms to salvage the situation.

Often the local firms were sold at a token amount believing that was necessary incentive to revive them.Tanzania has gone through the experience of privatizing the state bank, the state-owned telephone company, hired a foreign management company for a power utility, the national air carrier, and even closed the only petroleum oil refinery on same considerations. The ideas of local experts were ignored in favour of foreign views. The outcomes have been sad, not worth writing home about.

What has been bedeviling the country's mindset is that indigenous experts, however trained and highly educated, were not a match to young foreigners, has been devastating.

Many a country's leaders forgot that most of the foreigners have been to same overseas higher institutions of learning, and better still they know the local environment far better that the young foreigners that are far trusted at the expense of local expertise.

Tanzania for one, sold shares in the Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) to foreign consortium, that ended up failing to meet the targets. They hired yet another consortium, that too failed. Eventually the Government has resorted to running the firm reasonably well by indigenous people.

The railway company is yet another example because the locals have repaired locomotives and wagons at local workshops while the foreign firm wanted to 'export' locos to be repaired in India even when facilities for such work are available locally.

What needs to be realized is that our countries have since independence in the 1960s trained thousands of indigenous personnel in many fields of expertise, and have even built training institutions within East Africa that are turning out some of the best brains. One would think that the best solution lies within our region for the human resources capacities. We need to use local capacity. Like Obama said, Yes We Can!