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Tanzania: Endless Meetings As Poverty Intensifies
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The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
OPINION
10 May 2008
Posted to the web 12 May 2008
Alfred Ngotezi
According to recent media reports, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is going through stormy political times. He blames the disastrous local election results two weeks ago on the weakening economy, rising food prices and a housing market credit squeeze.
His Labour Party has governed Britain for 11 years, but crashed in the recent civic election, getting 20 per cent of the votes behind the Conservatives. If this performance is repeated at the General Election in 2010, observers say, Labour will just have to go.
Conventionally, what British voters have done is a deliberate attempt to lock out poverty, which they smell in their backyard. I was particularly moved by the instant justice the voters meted out to a government they judged was underperforming and failing them. They have done this many times and will still do it, regardless of who is running the show.
That is what we need to emulate here in Africa. Our governments should improve people's lives and not destroy them. To maintain non-performing regimes is synonymous with inviting poverty. I, for one, would care less if poverty 'visited' and left peacefully later on. Unfortunately, it brings other costly attachments such as ignorance and disease.
In Tanzania, for example, the escalating poverty has renewed past animist experiences, full of ignorance, and diseases.Three decades ago, the biggest contributor to national wealth in Tanzania was agriculture. In real terms, those were the days when the supply and demand for food crops resulted in good and stable consumer prices.
Likewise, cash crop growers produced enough for local consumption and external markets, spending surplus income on the education of their children. To me, that was growth because it tackled poverty, ignorance and by extension, diseases. But all that is now history. Despite this, our leaders do not seem perturbed. They expect admiration even when things are going incredibly badly.
That is what they anticipate after battering agriculture, bringing its GDP contribution down to the third position after tourism, of all sectors, and manufacturing. I see no problem whatsoever with the development of tourism; only that it is a sector that benefits a tiny segment of our population.
Whatever the amount of money is brought in by tourism, the fact of the matter is that it benefits mainly four out of the country's 23 regions. The beneficiaries are Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, leaving out millions of people in the remaining 19 regions. The same is also true for the growing mining sector.
I have argued repeatedly that inviting more investors into mining is fine, especially if they bring in labour-intensive capital. In the prevailing circumstances, however, the investors use more robots to do their work and employ a few Tanzanians to maximise profits.
Despite an increasing number of mines, for example, the total number of Tanzanians employed and, therefore, benefiting directly from the division is hardly 50,000, which is a tiny 0.16 per cent, or so, out of 30-plus million population.
It is from this gloomy picture that we now see increasing witchcraft-related killings among the people. There are poorer and more ignorant people today who fall easy prey to wicked propositions to kill others to get rich. I stand to be corrected if the albinos, for example, were as hunted 30 years ago as they are today.
They are being brutally murdered, reportedly because their body parts are believed to generate wealth. Each passing day, the public is horrified by news of such grisly murders, especially in areas not covered by the asymmetrical economic boom. While all this is happening, the Government is still in the middle of the road to nowhere.
They are busy organising meetings, seminars, and workshops to discuss the obvious. They are not legislating investor-friendly laws to boost agriculture and other marginalised sectors. I think the authorities are our worst enemies.
They are not doing enough to improve living standards here, probably because they don't care. Instead of doing the needful, they call more and more symposia and other forums, wasting even the little money that we already have.
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That is why we should keep government officials on their toes. I recently met a European gentleman at the Kigali Serena Hotel in Rwanda, who was attending the Africa Region Accra HLF Preparatory Consultation Workshop that was co-sponsored by the African Development Bank, Rwanda and Ghana.
He told me it was a preparatory meeting for the Third High Level Forum on aid effectiveness to be in Accra in September. It was meant to devise ways of making better use of foreign aid; grants, loans and the likes. I said to him that I was not sure it would not be another worthless wining and dining party.
"Africa does not need endless meetings, we need more foreign direct investments, especially in the agro sector," I said to him. He looked interested and promised to pass on the idea. I can only hope he will. For, without a booming farming sector our countries are simply doomed.
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