By Nyasigo Kornel
This is a mistake our scholars do, billions of dollars of public funds continue to be stashed away by some leaders, even while roads are crumbling, health systems have failed, schoolchildren have neither books nor desks nor teachers, and electricity do not work, while the money is spent in the booty on mistresses, luxurious automobiles, fabulous mansions on consumption, not productive ventures.
The worst part of corruption in Tanzania is that the thieving elites do not invest the booty in their own country as did America’s ‘robber barons’ in the nineteenth century.
Rather, as a case in point, walk around Oysterbay, Mbezi Beach, Mikocheni, Bahari Beach and the some of rich Dar es Salaam streets, they lavishly spend the booty on mistresses, luxurious automobiles, fabulous mansions on consumption, not productive ventures.
Productive ventures are left to few Indians, who in optimism live in congested Upanga national houses.
The rest of the loot is spirited out of the country into foreign bank accounts to develop the already advanced countries.
Corruption breeds inefficiency and waste. Contractors and suppliers fail to deliver because they have bribed some official. Who you are and how big a kickback you offer matters more than how well or efficiently you perform a job!
As a result, contracts are inflated and some kick backs paid to some conniving official. Work done is shoddy: Roads are poorly constructed and washed away at the first drop of rain. Electric poles and telephones refuse to work, postal service is non-existent and the entire communication system is in shambles, costing the country billions in lost output.
Infrastructure has crumbled in Tanzania because contractors failed to perform. The educational system has sharply deteriorated. Roads are pot-holed. Hospitals lack basic supplies because they have been stolen or diverted, and patients are often asked to bring their own bandages and maternity toolkits. State institutions decay and break-down.
Nobody cares because tenure of office and promotions are based not on competence and merit but on personal loyalty to the president, ethnicity, group who supported President ‘wanamtandao’ on the outdone elections, and sycophancy.
Institutions such as the civil service, the judiciary, parliament, and the police disintegrate and fail to function since they have all been perverted.
Parliament becomes a joke and rather like a rubberstamp. The police, the military and the civil service, all are hopeless. Even though our country soaks up scarce resources (through heavy taxation), it fails to fulfill its role in facilitating economic growth or deliver essential services.
Tanzania has many fine lawyers, but the judiciary is tainted by trials settled with bribes. It has fine academics, but universities are tarnished by the trade in diplomas, degrees and PhDs. It has respected leaders, but the nobility has been mocked by the sale of leadership titles.
Institutional break-down and the failure to provide the most basic essential services create an environment inimical to development. The cost of doing business in such an environment increases enormously. Simple, routine applications take weeks to be approved. Security of persons and property can seldom be guaranteed. Increasing production becomes chancy, given intermittent disruptions in the supply of electricity and water.
Corruption aggravates the budget deficit problem. Expenditure figures are padded. Ghost workers proliferate on government payrolls. An audit Government department discovered thousands of ‘ghost workers’ on the state payroll. The ‘ghost workers’ are fake, retired or dead persons whose names remain on the payroll for fraudulent officials to claim their wages. Revenue collectors are notoriously corrupt, pocketing part of tax proceeds, waiving taxes if they receive large enough bribes.
Corruption drives away foreign investors: Government officials’ contracts in Tanzania, say international businessmen, are among the most expensive in Africa mainly because of excessive margins built into such contracts for personal interests.
The country has remained a wilderness to foreign investors for a variety of reasons: weak currencies (except notably in extractive industries, where output is priced in dollars), exchange controls, a feeble local private sector, poor infrastructure, small domestic markets, stifling bureaucracy, uncertain legal system, and corruption.
Despite fanciful ads, elaborate investment codes, and guarantees of profit repatriation, Tanzania attracts very little of the direct investment going to the developing countries.
For example Herman Cohen, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in 1991 question to why should foreign investors be excoriated when Africa's plutocrats do not invest their own wealth in their own countries?
Africa is marked that over the last 10 years, Africans themselves have exported Usd 20 billion a year into bank accounts in Europe and the U.S. buying real estate. So if Africans don’t have confidence in their own continent, why should the rest of the world?
We have heard of our top leader who have built big hotel in South Africa while pretending in hypocrisy to attract investors in Tanzania, why shouldn’t he invest in his own country? And that why former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela refused official inauguration of the luxurious hotel alleged to be a bribe by one of mining company favored to suck our own blood.
Corruption leads to economic contraction and collapse. Corruption and capital flight, which flourish under non-democratic systems, seriously stunt economic development.
At an April 2000 press conference in London, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan lamented that: “Billions of dollars of public funds continue to be stashed away by some African leaders, even while roads are crumbling, health systems have failed, schoolchildren have neither books nor desks nor teachers, and electricity do not work.”
While corruption and capital flight exist under all political systems, their incidence tends to be more pervasive when rulers are not held democratically accountable.
Tanzania's experience shows that a corrupt government is incapable of efficient economic management and eliciting the sacrifices necessary for the development effort. A corrupt Tanzanian government cannot attract foreign investment or spur domestic investment. Like the colonial state, the predatory African state is also extractive.
Under colonialism, Africa’s resources and wealth were plundered for the development of metropolitan European countries. Today the tiny, parasitic ruling elites use their governing authority to exploit and extract resources from the productive members of the society.
These resources are then spent lavishly by the elites on themselves or siphoned out of Tanzania. As Robinson (1971) asked plaintively: “What incentive does the peasant have to produce more when through taxation the surplus is siphoned off to be spent in conspicuous consumption?”
Who among Tanzania’s will ever trust those who played deal in buying an expensive used radar leaving the country in total darkness without electricity? Then came that of buying Presidential Jet, not enough we have that irrelevant contract of the department of Wildlife which was made with glutton few Tanzanians, then came of mineral contracts and fun enough is that of Richmond, who queries anyway in this sleeping country!
Bunge keeps on passing new bills while the old ones are shelved, to this point there is need for Messianic descend or pray for the birth of another Mwl. Julius Nyerere who will deliver this country from this adoptive trend that will run Tanzania into total mess.
ENDS
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