Tuesday, February 26, 2008



ANALYSIS: Tanzania:

The open society and its

enemies, after Richmond



THISDAY CORRESPONDENT
Dar es Salaam

A SPECTRE is haunting Tanzania, the spectre of a leadership code; from the head of state to village leaders, varsity dons to street hawkers, parliamentarians and born again priests - all cry for the setting up of a code of conduct for anyone wishing for leadership, those running for elective office or serving in the public sector. All are basically agreed that it is this code which will guarantee the good leadership that the country requires for development; it is the missing link in the country’s battle against poverty. Donors are startled; many are inclined to agree.

If a leadership code is what the country needs for development, one may ask, precisely what brought it into devastating poverty in the first place, if not that same ’leadership code’? How could Tanzania develop when its head of state banned enterprise for anyone who wasn’t Arab or Indian - thus not looking for any sort of public office or employment in the public sector - for all but five years of his 24 years in office? Is there anything as surprising as the fact that learned people don’t realize that a leadership code is the last thing that development needs?

Listening to breakdown elements of how such a code would be conducted or what it entails, there is just shock and amazement at how careless so many Tanzanian intellectuals seem to be about enterprise, jobs, economic growth and incomes. A don says there is little chance that most bars operating in residential areas would be licensed, but they are properties of leaders so they are licensed; that it is leaders who build kiosks all over the place - they weren’t demolished because they belong to leaders, etc. All the old operations will now start again, as the more are caught the better.

The picture one gets is one of total paralysis and mental dependence on government or public sector activity, which ignores the fact that it is only when everyone tries to uplift their own lot, that the net effect of this is that economies generally get uplifted. The dons and ’members of civil society’ are crying out that all but Arabs and Indians should have no role in conducting trade, or a few Africans now operating as traders. The others should work in public offices, or serving as political leaders.

Checking figures of where Tanzania stands in development as a whole, despite efforts to give the most glowing picture possible, the real image is astonishing. Tanzania compares with Afghanistan in the level of girls in secondary school as all eligible girls, at five per cent, and quite simply the lowest in the world. There is no doubt that traditions of strict licensing of schools, stopping hiring of teachers from across the border, tied to lack of ownership of land privately or ability to purchase land (rather than obtain right of occupancy), constant intervention in relation to use of plots of land by public authorities and third parties without the least commercial interest in a plot of land, etc have all done their bit to take us there. And with a leadership code it gets even worse.

Instead of pursuing a policy where all possible enterprise is nurtured, the way President Benjamin Mkapa sought to foster, and remove crying anomalies like protecting sugar factories and selling sugar at 1,000/- while it still was available at half that price if the doors were open, we do the opposite. And while we are yet to realize the benefits of opening the doors and obtain cheap commodities from outside, commodities are beginning to become more expensive, shutting out this door of lessening the cost of living. Now we shall have to get investments to be located right here so as to cheapen commodities; that means plenty of trouble.

The noise made about the Richmond affair was for instance not worth all this outpouring of sentiment and ink, for it easily was consequential upon a faulty policy line upon the start of the fourth phase government. The report read out by Dr Harrison Mwakyembe seemed to suggest that rising costs of electricity arise from faulty contracts - which seems to include all there is in the Tanesco investment line up, namely Richmond, IPTL, Songas, Kiwira etc. The wisdom in the legislature is to investigate these deals and hold all those responsible - but how many ministers are there to dismiss? Was it not more intelligent to say Tanesco ought to have been privatized so as to eliminate the temptation to act as middleman?

And the benefits of Tanesco privatization aren’t just in eliminating the ’Richard of Monduli’ phenomenon from appearing, albeit with an email address labelled Houston, Texas but obtaining the necessary capital to revamp infrastructure without excessive rise in costs, or relying on loans. This sort of wisdom is elementary all over the world, and the plentiful availability of capital constitutes globalization - such that the United States enters into problems for making plentiful use of the capital that flows there - and we could have taken a portion of that, as a supposedly communist China does, so massively. But our less clever communists here hate capital like the plague, and we equal Afghanistan in girls’ education.

Were it that the University of Dar es Salaam taught something serious about capital and not the parroting on ’people, land, good policies and good leadership’ it is likely someone would have understood why we need major investors to purchase Tanesco, the railway corporation, the airline etc. But we hate capital and our mental outlook on globalization, as the late Seithy Chachage used to emphasize, should never betray the hero, Kinjeketile Ngware and his closest medicinemen associates. With that kind of outlook it is hard to see how Tanzania breaks into modernization.

Close to 14 years after the death of ex-premier Edward Moringe Sokoine a sort of spirit of the ’poor people’s hero’ is taking over the reins of state, as current rulers know the popularity one gets when he descends heavily on the rich and powerful. But the fact that Mwalimu Nyerere intervened and stopped the ’anti-sabotage campaign’ is more or less lost - or that from that time Mwalimu allowed economic reform to start, and with his vacating the presidency in 1985, it was intensified. Meanwhile the University of Dar es Salaam, stuck with Kinjeketile Ngware, the need to use Kiswahili and other backward outlooks, has never understood that a policy combating trade and investment is sure recipe for disaster.

Thus, with the establishment’s incapacity to explain the BoT saga, and especially given the juicy precedent of Richmond probe and results, so many appetites have been whetted to take ’the revolution’ farther into everyday life. Suddenly a million sources of enterprising activities, that is, those serving in the public sector or involved in politics, should be closed out. The state, via taxes and foreign aid, shall make up for this loss in individual effort, risk taking, loan cultivation and management...!

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