Govt must evaluate reform options on district councils

She gave the keynote speech at the opening of an election conference for the Association of Local Government Authorities of Tanzania (ALAT) urging its members to ensure they fully supervise allocations of funds in districts, both for development projects and for special groups like women and the disabled. They may have expected her remarks but perhaps crossing their trained habits.

The area of her most pointed remarks, the obvious and often flagrant misuse of funds for development projects, is not one for issuing reminders of that sort and expecting that everything shall work out fine. This is an area where problems have prevailed since independence, taking different facets with each phase of government, for instance during the first phase party supremacy and its control of decentralised structures  of government meant that nothing would be said publicly of such misuse, but it was also somewhat controlled. During the second phase, the ruling party forged new alliances with authorities at the district level chosen by the World Bank to spearhead projects: they eat and they also gather the votes.

The third and fourth phases had a penchant for trusting professionals in parastatals and regional or district administration that they should not be interfered with, but then professionals work with interest groups in the councils, etc. The result was inflated estimates of costs where the district executive director is blamed by auditors from outside, but no one sees any problem locally, but the services are wanting – often the water doesn’t flow, power connection has no transformers, etc. This was visibly addressed during the fifth phase government; the president’s intervention in the mineral sands export saga chastised professionals.

At present there is a mixture of two regimes, where bureaucrats are keenly aware of the standards set by the fifth phase, but are also aware that President Samia doesn’t wish to exercise the kind of populist rule characterising the governance style of her predecessor. That means she has to rely on professionals like she was vehemently urging them to act professionally but they are ‘studying’ her as she said; if they know she won’t wield the whip, they go back to bad ways. There is virtually no option in that regard, a middle road of letting professionals do their work, limit intervention or hide the whip and they act professionally!

As a matter of fact the president has herself given the solution to that situation but she will have lots of problems translating that into policy, as at most it can be done by a series of piecemeal orders until the whole list of reforms is concluded. Asking for a mandate for reform would open a can of worms, with various interest groups appealing to sentiments of all sorts that have in the part been the focus of our affinities and how we drove the economy to the ground, people walking in rags in the early 1980s. The president has declared that she wants an economy based on individuals; if that is implemented it will be easy for district councils to supervise value for money; if they do it themselves, little will be done there. When the economy is opened up and councils deal with traders, accountability will be heightened fast.