ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the state’s stances towards and connections with private business, exploring how and why the state and its officialdom moved from a place where they were building expectations of backing off to instead becoming actors in a drama of re-entry and resurrected dominance. District and subdistrict levels of government, suffering from funding shortage, were desperate for any revenue that could be found beyond their budgets and so created new nonstate business entities, with the express goal of gaining income. In many ways, decollectivisation turned family farms into tiny-scale private businesses, despite the fact that farmers lacked final rights to their output. The hesitancy accompanying the privatisation process has meant that for decades the landscape of ownership witnessed the appearance of numerous efforts at – and myriad shapes of – turning state-owned property into what has, after all, been just partially private ownership.
