Aid dividend on painful reforms should encourage more reforms

and substantial amounts in aid funds. 

The latest is a more than one trillion shillings aid pledge from the UK, following in the footsteps of Microsoft founder Bill Gates aid of around 700bn shillings while the United States government indicated it would make a similar effort next year.

Coming from an administration as watchful about aid as the current US government, that is something.

While there is little doubt that reflections by the president are largely in tandem with the thinking of the donor community – and not only them but other regional and developing economies which are taking greater interest in what we are doing – there are precautions to be taken. 

First and foremost is that the donor community usually tells us what they agree with us, the areas we can work together, etc. They don’t go far enough to tell us directly what we aren’t doing, and when they approach what could be called the truth, it is often couched in ways that softens up issues such as to make them imperceptible. 

That is how we have always been praised, and made no headway in ending poverty or putting up an industrial economy, along with the rest of Africa.

It is arguably the case that at present countries are making an effort of ending that situation and to various extents they are making progress, if one takes up the fact that changes happening in Tanzania aren’t atypical of what is happening elsewhere. 

The only difference is that each country has its different starting point, a sort of moment of change politically that ushers in a more serious agenda or governance platform that permits concrete action to be taken in various areas. 

We all learn from one another but finally each country travels on its own pace, by its specific intuitions, as two countries don’t solve the same economic or political problems; they are sets of governance and structural problems that differ from one situation to another, thus the solutions.

What is perceptible from outside is that many countries are happy with the governance reforms that the fifth phase administration has carried out, and find this as  a sufficient platform to engage more with us, hoping that in due course it will be possible to scale the reform process to a higher level. 

But this may not be obtained immediately from what they say, or is encapsulated in small print in studies like the Doing Business Index, where it was being reported in the past decade or half decade how Tanzania was losing places. 

It would be fair to say that at the moment we are likely to have lost more places in that index while resetting our position in some other index, like Transparency International, as the level of corruption or index of perception has changed a lot since late 2015.

We have seen for instance how exports climbed down by 46.5 per cent during the past year, which is neither governance nor corruption issue but GDP and Doing Business Index that would be affected. 

In that context it is hard to take solace at one indication, not even if it was an excellent one for that matter, like feelings of the donor community and a sharp rise in disposition to aid the country tackle its existing problems. It isn’t sufficient; we have to sort out bottlenecks.