TANESCO must compensate Kibaha farmers immediately

This time around TANESCO has made hundreds of people in Kibaha fail to engage in farming this season ostensibly for paving way for TANESCO to install a high tension transmission line extending from Dar es Salaam to Arusha.

This paper has learnt that towards the end of last year TANESCO officials and Kibaha land officials demarcated a passage where a transmission line from Dar es Salaam and would pass.

This demarcation exercise in Kibaha was witnessed by village leadership. It was aimed at making people believe that the exercise was genuine and that promises of compensation by TANESCO were forthcoming.

Huge chunks of land were therefore allocated for TANESCO’s ambitious project. Some farmers gave to the company all the land they were using for farming for the project to be implemented.

TANESCO officials in the survey team were promising the concerned Kibaha villagers that the company would give them their dues within a short time.

This gave the farmers faith of not engaging in farming in anticipating that TANESCO would soon give them their rightful dues.

It never was. It is nearly a year now since the promise was made.
Bungo villagers are particularly bitter. Many of them have built houses in the areas earmarked for the electricity transmission line.

The most serious thing is that the even when their structures like houses and huts are falling, they cannot repair them for fear that any time TANESCO would come and demolish them.

A farmer told this paper that some of the farmers had bought cement hoping that the compensation would soon come, only to find out that months were passing without the compensation being done and the cement expiring.

This is to say the least very bad and TANESCO must feel ashamed for lying to the down trodden citizens who eke out a living from tilling the land.

It is common knowledge that when a project passes through people’s rightful land, the latter has to be compensated.
From mid-last year, the villagers have been waiting for their promised money but are yet to have received any.
We suggest two ways of eliminating the tension.

The first solution is to allow farmers to continue with their daily activities. They should continue constructing their houses and farming. TANESCO on the hand should be willing to determine the additional costs the villagers have incurred when it is good and ready to implement the project.

While Coast Region authorities have confirmed that the compensation papers have been duly signed and sent to TANESCO for payment, TANESCO officials seem to be unaware of the arrival of the papers from Kibaha.

What we are saying is that whoever has the papers, these poor peasants must be compensated soonest. To tell them not to cultivate in plots they have farmed over the years is to deny them a livelihood. Under any other circumstance, that would have been a serious crime against humanity.