In recent weeks, Tanzania has (again) featured prominently in the international business press, and not in the most flattering light.

The Financial Times, Bloomberg and others reported the move by President John Magufuli’s government to block the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from releasing a report critical of government’s economic management. The report took aim at “unpredictable and interventionist policies that worsen the investment climate and could lead to meagre growth.” Now leaked online, the report projects 4-5 percent growth should the government stay its current course. That is down from a decade-long trend of over 6 percent growth and well under the government’s projected 7 percent. Critical observers in Tanzania were quick to lament that the lower growth rate, amidst an ongoing population boom, “is tragic for a very poor country like ours!”

This furore came hard on the heels of another controversy: Parliament’s decision—at the behest of the Speaker—to suspend work with Tanzania’s Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). The CAG had just released a report of his own raising serious questions about both government economic management and accountability.

Certainly, much has changed since President Magufuli took office in 2015.

The “Bulldozer,” as he is known, came in promising an industrialized “Tanzania of factories,” declared a war on corruption and exploitation by investors, launched a host of new infrastructure projects, and adopted a generally more statist policy orientation.

This change was initially celebrated. It marked an apparent break with the status quo under Magufuli’s predecessor, Jakaya Kikwete, whose administration was criticized for its corruption and seeming lack of policy direction. Magufuli’s ambition also appeared in line with a general shift in ideas about development, both in Tanzania and further afield. For at least a decade, the neoliberal economic consensus of the 1980s and 1990s had been eroding, giving way to a renewed appreciation for the role of state intervention and particularly of active industrial policy in driving economic transformation.

The now waning enthusiasm for Magufuli’s approach is doubtlessly well justified. Tanzania’s economy is suffering, and the country has also taken a sharp authoritarian turn under his watch.

There is, however, a danger that we draw the wrong lessons from the Magufuli experience. The government’s particular brand of heavy-handed state intervention risks fueling a general skepticism about the role of the state in development. As noted, the space to reconsider the value of statist policies reopened only recently. It would be hugely counterproductive to see it close back down, returning us to what Malawian economist Thandika Mkandawire has denounced as the “Manichean discourse” of state versus market.

What we need instead is to analyze what ideas are driving the Magufuli government’s economic approach, the criticisms, and what an alternative might look like. Is that alternative a return to straightforward “market principles,” as the IMF report suggests? Or is it about taking a cue from Mkandawire and imagining something different? That something could involve continued experimentation with industrial policy. It could also go further, though, and embed what has proved a highly unequal, inefficient and often exploitative market economy in more democratic forms of ownership and control.

As Tanzania’s founding President Julius Nyerere once said, we need to keep searching, to keep “groping forward” until we find a “new synthesis,” one that is more democratic and redistributive.