Letter from Mwanza - No 13

I seem to be getting a little like Jonathan Ross on Saturday morning when he takes his inspiration from a paper. In his case it’s The Week, in mine it’s The Daily News. Two features drew my attention this week as I tried in vain to find football and rugby news. Firstly, a ‘sponsored message’ which takes up half of the page of the broadsheet, by a Mr M R J Sabodo of Dar es Salaam. He titles it STOP, it has a picture of a rather aggressive buffalo on one side and three lions on the other. Sort of cuddly looking, but we all know what they can do! It is addressed to ‘the Minister for Finance and Economy’ – The Hon Mkulo. He starts by saying “There is no doubt that you shocked by how much money has been taken from the External Payments Arrears Account”, whatever that is, and then goes on “I am sure you are shocked by the Richmond scandal (no relation Mark!), to which I wrote about in my early blog. He continues, “You are shocked too by the pittance we get from our mining operations – a mere 3% royalty!” He saves his biggest rant for the Mobile phones companies who after a detailed analysis claims collect a revenue of ‘exactly one third of our budget’, which sounds horrendous if not taxed appropriately. In true English Tanzanian style he finishes the article with a lovely sounding phrase somewhat difficult to translate – “Talk about this country being poor? I don’t know how God could have blessed us less more!” My suggestion would be for him to get in touch with the British Prime Minister, who I presume is still Gordon Brown, and ask advice how to quietly to extract substantial revenues from mobile phones companies and mining companies.

The other article is in some ways even more disturbing. It is written by Mike Sikawa, who could be a South African. At least he says he has spent quite ‘number of years in Johannesburg Central Business District’. In essence he is reflecting on his walk down Double Road in Moshi (the place of some future important event) how he was surprised that “there was not a single Tanzanian of Asian origin in the shops”. He was referring to the ownership. He does say in the article that he is not a racist as he knows what it is like to be “humiliated because one belongs to this or that colour”. He claims that now some 70% of the shops in Moshi are owned and run by who describes as ‘locals’, and on the entire 2 kilometres of Double Road there are about two or three Asian owned shops. He describes why this could be so with the economic liberalization of importing and exporting after the end of ‘Centralization’ (the “ruksa” policy of the Ali Hassan Mwinyi government), which gave more people the ability to compete successfully. Also the rather sad demise of the coffee industry in the 1980s and 1990s meant that many Asian people left the country to find better prospects overseas. All that is fine, but then he goes on to say about the problem of capital, which I referred to in my last blog. Although he says, …………“since banks have started opening up offices in Moshi, the locals will start getting loans. At the moment, however, it seems the loan system seems to be tilted in favour of the Indians”. I sense something rather sad and possibly unsavoury with this comment.
Kwa heri for now
Donald
March 20th 2008.