Dar es Salaam. After five decades of formulating strategies as well as policies,
and following repeated political statements on the importance of industries in
Tanzania’s economic growth, has the time arrived for a take-off?
Is there now conducive environment that addresses the weaknesses which
hindered industrialisation over the last 50 years?
Have national leaders, policy makers, the business community and
academicians come up with a new vision that will help the country to join,
albeit gradually, the league of major exporters of industrial goods?
Has Tanzania now garnered enough political will and determination to break
from past repeated failures and become an industrial producer? Does Tanzania
really have the potential, the competitive and the strategic advantages for an
“industrial revolution”?
Is there any hope the new-found enthusiasm on industrialisation will soon
translate into a new dynamism and a push for an industrial take off?
These are some of the pertinent questions that observers of Tanzania’s current
affairs ask themselves, and which need to be answered as the renewed talk on
industrialisation garner momentum.
This is because unless efforts are made to learn from past mistakes and
objectively assess Tanzania’s chances at industrialisation, the country might
end up repeating the same goofs it made in the past.
Tomes and tomes of research reports have been written by academicians in the
last 50 years or so on why Tanzania’s industrialisation failed to take off. The
main theme coming out of the studies is that the stumbling blocks are not
unknown, for most of them are very obvious.
Lack of the money needed to build the capacity and create conducive
environment for the emergence of a local entrepreneurial base and foreign
investment inflows is one of the major factors that are being mentioned.
Other factors that have traditionally hindered an industrial take off include
inadequate infrastructure, poor technology, and shortage of skilled labour.
Others are an underdeveloped internal market and political ideologies that
made the state the driving force of industrialisation, stifling, in the process, the
entrepreneurial spirit of Tanzanians, which is vital in any industrial project.
Inadequate infrastructure, for example, has been a constant factor in the litany
of woes that bedevil industrial development in Tanzania. From poor roads,
railways to erratic water and electricity supplies as well as underdeveloped
and expensive telecommunications services.
For a long time, especially in the first four decades of independence, the road
and rail network didn’t interconnect the country well enough to facilitate
movement of goods and services within the same regions and countrywide.
In the first three of independence, most of the Tanzanian hinterland was
virtually impassable. Little or no efforts were made to improve the road and
railways network pattern that was left by colonialists and which was directed
to the major seaports to facilitate export of raw materials and import of
finished goods. Poor infrastructure makes establishing industrial centres
upcountry very expensive.
“No industry can run smoothly in an environment where the whole range of
basic infrastructure is pathetic. Fortunately, there are now visible efforts by the
government to address infrastructural constraints, but these need to be
intensified,” says Dennis Rweyemamu, head of Research and Policy at the
Institute of African Leadership for Sustainable Development famously known
as Uongozi Institute.
However, more needs to be done to overhaul the infrastructure. The railway
system, which was in a good, working shape in the past, has crumbled and
needs replacement. The road network is still inadequate. Despite the fact that
the 12,786km national road network (trunk roads) has been largely improved
since 2000 the regional roads, which provide an important link in the logistics
chain between rural centres of production and markets are in a poor shape.
This is a major bottleneck to realising economic potential of the hinterlands. Of
the 21,105km of regional road network, only about four per cent is in bitumen
standard. Of the paved roads, only 45 per cent of them are in a good standard,
according to an African Development Bank report.
“The focus on trunk roads is the correct policy given their strategic nature for
both regional development and the international linkages to neighbouring
countries. Future planning needs to give more attention to the regional road
network to improve connectivity in the logistics chain between areas of
production or development potential and markets,” reads in part the Transport
Review report prepared by the AfDB.
The litany of challenges to the industrialisation path is long. How the
government addresses them will make the whole difference in Tanzania’s
industrial take-off
