Tanzania can well do with Gulf Zone trade outlets, investments

There are also initiatives to boost and diversify trade between the two parties, one sphere being meat exports which has been the subject of substantive accords in the past few months.

The recent Dubai Exhibition, where a special day was set aside for Tanzania and elicited the presence of President Samia Suluhu Hassan, was a milestone.

There are follow-up events taking place, a notably significant one being a visit by Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa to Qatar, where he held talks with his counterpart, Sheikh Khalid bin Khalifa bin Abdulaziz Al Thani, in which trade opportunities and finalising the required protocols were high on the agenda.

There is a joint commission for cooperation that is working to expand areas of cooperation between the two parties, according to the premier’s preliminary remarks.

Contacts were encouraged in the form of enhanced consultations between the Tanzania Private Sector Foundation (TPSF) and the Tanzania Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (TCCIA) on the one hand and Qatari trade organisations on the other.

A number of Qatari firms showed interest in exploring areas of investments in Tanzania, with the premier saying the government would coordinate their coming over for consultations with the relevant local stakeholders, via TPSF.

There was also an educational aspect meant to get students from Tanzania to study in Qatar and those from Qatar to study in Tanzania, a cooperation format that helps to boost tourism and investments.

Some remarks were made regarding livestock processing interest.

It can be said that what else can be done is ordinarily left to individuals to map out what to do. In this regard, reference can be made with respect of the scores of Chinese engineers, supervisors and other staff of construction firms putting up their savings to seek to purchase property once their working period is over.

Such investments boost the amount of capital circulating in the country, enabling the beneficiaries from property transactions to initiate bigger activities than the ones they were doing earlier before vacating their premises, urban houses or farmlands.

The only issue is to get the regulatory atmosphere right, so that Gulf investors start thinking of actual industry so as to use the wider regional market, even the much larger Continental African Free Trade Area (CAfFTA).

Accordingly, Tanzania ought to use its gateway position to a vast hinterland by localised investments.

All too often those moving investment promotions highlight the country’s vast resources and stability status, at best thinking of every investor as someone who wants a piece of land to set up an industry.

These might indeed be the most important investors, but their influence in formal economy could be limited. They just would not employ large numbers these days, owing to artificial intelligence, so purchasing urban property or entering into joint ownership with locals as land prices go up would likely prove the real game changer. This is too often ignored.