TANESCO to blame for anticipated hunger

Farming was suspended for a year on the background of a notice by the Tanzania Electric Supply Co. (TANESCO) because of a project (putting up high voltage power lines) that would affect most of the district, apparently rending the farming unfeasible.

The trouble started with accounts shenanigans in the power company, putting the compensation claims in parallel with other sorts of complaints, and not their proper food substitute for the next season, and even portions of this season for quick harvest crops.

So for no good reason alarm bells are ringing all over the place whereas quick payments would have enabled some of them to actually leave, as no order to properly abandon the land had been given. But still, an area straddled with pylons is a reserved area, not anyone's farm.

In that case, TANESCO are more or less guilty of purchasing the farms of Kibaha residents for peanuts (the crops on the land) and then failing to pay up while the peasants face starvation.

It is a pity that the matter is a miscellany in TANESCO bureaucratic rounds of meeting, processing the claims of some orphanages where no one is directly responsible, just trying to be kind. Therefore, TANESCO managing director Felichemi Mramba replied curtly that the claims were being processed.

To start with, the peasants ought to have been compensated at the market value of their land, but due to fictitious belief that land is public property, they are entitled only to crop value equivalent instead of actual payment.

Delaying the little the government is supposed to pay is reminiscent to adding salt to injury. Isn't compensation delayed compensation denied?

Looking at the situation at bit close range, it would appear as if a distinct intention curve emerges, patterned on the war against ghost salaries that President John Magufuli has been combating for a while now.

The point is that it is easy noting that would take nearly a year for peasants to get paid for areas they would no longer be able to use as farms.

Does the sense of urgency in paying the farmers not rain on TANESCO management? The result looks somewhat serene, rendering hundreds of peasants into leaving their localities for other coastal areas where they may have ancestral attachments.

Once they quit there will be no more recipients of the money worth compensation in Kibaha. Is it some kind of Tanesco authored strategy.