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?
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.
The Citizen.
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