ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the focus on national reconstruction tends to give planning a holistic character while injecting social content into aspects of projects and programs that might elsewhere appear narrowly economic. It discusses the structures within state and party in Mozambique that seemed, by late 1980, to be accepting responsibility for safeguarding this social content in the face of urgent needs for rapid industrial growth and a reorganization of much of the country’s infrastructure. Project assessment and covers the bankruptcy of planning with a veneer of social legitimacy, the hard gloss of technique, while at its core lies enshrined the calculation of internal rates of return. The interventions suggested by the logic of national reconstruction should be discussed at the various levels of this system of mass democratic communication, and the possible consequences for people at the grass roots should be articulated.
