Only if this preliminary phase is properly done can it be expected that rapid progress is likely for another ten years to bring the country to an industrial economy proper.
A year into the start of that project, signs that it is making progress are rather pretty scant. In a government that is geared to changing the country towards an industrial economy, its implications would have been clear to all and sundry, or at least being elaborated upon on a day-to-day basis, which has mostly been lacking.
The only step that was tentatively in that direction was a budget measure to hike taxes of used clothing and to phase out imports of such clothing three years from mid 2016.
That now looks stillborn after key trade officials in the United States let it be known that such a step would put the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act at risk.
This information has at least one salutary aspect, in that, despite there being a number of parallels between what US President Donald Trump has been saying about globalization and some reflexes common to policy making in Tanzania, and especially at present, there are limits.
The US avowed principle of America First means that the US government will not go out of its way to support countries which will place trade barriers of any sort to US goods, including second hand clothing.
The idea that shelving them creates room for industry might look plausible to planners but it unnerves consumers and now hurtles against US policy.
There has never been any doubt on anyone’s mind that proscribing second hand cloth imports would lead to a steep rise in the price of clothing, with locally made clothing especially if the factories would be government owned, given their sheer predisposition to huge administrative overheads.
With the thrust towards industries actually targeting revitalization of older state factories which were ruined and went out business in the 1980s, chances of their being lean, efficient or well capitalized are minimal. If it was possible, surely Urafiki would now be up and running again?
Friendship Textile Mill is within the perimeter of the core parts of the city, just adrift of the city centre, and there is no indication that it has received some fresh boost owing to the newly articulated policy, implying that it faces same hurdles as before. When little can be done so close to all facilities, where can it thus be done?
There are reports that the overhead economic growth rate is slated to decline for the current year, despite earlier rosy reports that Tanzania would move from 7.0 per cent to 7.2 per cent growth, as more recent reports put that into question.
For many who have seen a sharp decline in the demand for goods and services, the idea that an economic slowdown is beckoning wasn’t surprising.
And bank credit to most of the private sector as well as business closures and sequestrations, reclamation of collateral for failed loan repayments, all that was on the rise most of the past year.
When note is also taken of disconcerting turns of policy on foreign investment especially in mining, meant to create local industrial capacity and jobs by local concentrate reprocessing, an overall diminution of attractiveness of Tanzania as a foreign investment destination is clear.
Still, there are plenty of countries wishing to break into the world market and think Tanzania can be a point of departure owing to low competitiveness of local industry and an overall low level of wages. This is due to weak currency, and is this weakness which could still attract industries here.
There is a feeling that there will be gradual rise in consumption ability since the pace of economic growth, despite a slowdown, is still high by wider African standards.
While the government has often cited agro-processing as key to an overall thrust to an industrial economy, this looks out of reach.
Pertinent conflicts of land use and the right of occupancy have become intractable all over the country, which means urban space for industries is feasible using peasant-grown products.
Nape’s distaste for impunity hounded him from cabinet
NAPE Nnauye, the former minister for Information, Culture, Arts and Sports, may not have been a top ally of the media in its ins and outs with the government in the one and half years or slightly less that he has been in office, but certainly left as a champion of the media.
Earlier, he was a media stakeholder who many would have run across as he issued this or that statement for the ruling party headquarters where he was Secretary for Ideology and Publicity of the National Executive Committee (NEC). That now looks a bit far off as the party is in other hands while he has government experience a political asset.
For the next few years and until the next general elections, unless perhaps he is recycled in government in one way or another, the erstwhile minister will be remembered for his principled position against administrative impunity.
He stood up to be counted in a way that left no one in a shred of doubt as to which side he stood, such that the other side saw it could no longer feel proud in his company, so he had to be shed off the rankings.
As with a rising number of CCM cadres and parliamentarians, they remain in a loose alliance of ruling party loyalties, but increasingly on the lookout for bearings and directions of change.
CCM analysts ought to be making an effort to figure out how many more of such dramatic episodes that sway sentiments of millions of people the party can still afford.
To an extent the ruling party can’t do otherwise as it has a government to run, loyalties to be cemented and intensified, in which case it can’t afford neutrality or adversarial taking of positions on the part of cabinet ministers.
In other words, there is the question here of what can be called standards on the one hand and collective responsibility on the other. The minister was right about standards of working with the media, and wrong in the latter.
To some extent, the minister was the most realistic person as to what happened, when he more or less admitted that the matter at hand was one of principle, but to the media it must be said, it was a little late in the day.
There were other issues of principle earlier and the former minister wasn’t exactly on the side of principle, for instance when it was decided that the public would no longer view legislators doing their work – checking and advising the government.
The former minister was in the frontline to implement that accord and didn’t say that he had been sent to do it; he represented it as a real conviction.
When the chickens came home to roost about principles and convictions, the minister then found himself on the other side of the fence when he treated invading a newsroom with gun-totting security officers as having crossed the limits of tolerable governance.
Those in a position to remind him about it didn’t agree, figuring out that the prior principle of total government responsibility about each of their actions surpassed norms of free speech and decent interaction with the media, if that is what it can be called.
Thus, Nape paid his price and left the post, having left an indelible mark that there are limits to collective responsibility - and even to affinities in the ruling party - that some civil matters are those of principle while some issues of collective responsibility are discretionary, or disputable.
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