Editorial
Analysis
Websites for name sake
Last year, Minister for Finance Basil Mramba, launched his Ministry’s website,
boasting that the era of visiting the Treasury physically has arrived.
Mramba said technology had turned the world in a global village and that life is
now difficult without surfing the Internet.
The aim of this website is to make the Ministry of Finance (MoF) more
accountable to citizens, to motivate and facilitate public participation in
policy processes, and to provide useful information for people in areas related
to Ministry’s work.
This website provides Tanzanians and others with electronic access to a wide
range of MoF publications and material, including key budget documents. Indeed
in today’s world, as the minister said, super information highway is the key to
the development.
Experience shows that in Tanzania designing a website is one thing and updating
it is another thing. Actual regular updating of websites does not correspond
with the former activity.
Most websites are designed and launched at colourful ceremonies. But within
days, uploading is forgotten. In some sites, opening of web pages is
problematic.
The Tanzania national website www.tanzania.go.tz leads in the having the oldest
and shallow information. The website aside from regularly posting the
presidential and budget speeches, has very little on government departments and
ministries’ activities.
The officer, who was given the task to update the website, has since left
because of red tape and lack of cooperation from the government and Ministry
officials when seeking material for the website.
The government is not in this alone. Newspapers are not far behind either. The
Daily News, the government newspaper, recently launched its website, but already
the website has not been updated since Tuesday July 27, 2004.
The most updated websites in Tanzania are those of banks— though not all are
that efficient.
Turning to sports, the Simba Sport Club failed to update its website and it is
now closed.
Website updating needs a special team or a department given the task of ensuring
that the website is up to date. As Mramba said life is difficult without surfing
–well, finding outdated information is equally unbearable!
Deforestation a threat to
economic growth
A few weeks ago, there was an illegal logging scam which caught the attention of
the majority of Tanzanians. But apart from illegal exports of the logs, which
causes the government to lose a lot of revenue, women are the ones more affected
by deforestation.
The ongoing deforestation, which is in most cases aims at building our economy
through the export of forest products, may soar out of control if left
unchecked. This and the falling availability of water, fuel wood and
desertification are inseparable.
Increasing deforestation contributes to soil erosion, deterioration of water
catchments areas, harsh weather conditions, unfertile soil and hence food
insecurity. This becomes very crucial taking into consideration that 80 percent
the of Tanzanian population depends on agriculture for its livelihood.
As fuel wood becomes scarce due to deforestation, women spend less time doing
productive work, instead they spend more time looking for firewood, fetching
water and other chores.
The main objective of the Tanzanian Forestry policy is the development of
sustainable regimes for soil conservation and forestry protection, taking into
account the close links pertaining to issues of desertification, deforestation,
fresh water availability, climatic change and biological diversity.
Are these really adhered to when the harvesting and exploitation of forest and
forest products is undertaken? The recent example is a good one, wherein illegal
logging took place.
This again prompts for immediate action otherwise women, instead of doing
productive work to build the economy, will just continue walking miles in search
of water and fuel wood. Worse still, agricultural activities would be totally
crippled.
Analysis
Transparency vital in election
funding
By Abduel Kenge
Tanzania is approaching its third multiparty general elections that are to be
held in October 2005. Most politicians, one way or the other, are trying to
figure out what gimmicks to adopt at that particular time.
There are those who are busy listing names of their colleagues who are not
likely to retain their seat in the Bunge — dozens in fact have told the House
candidly so; others who swear they will not vote. Another group is of those
people, who have already started to plan how many cars and houses will be
possessed at the end of massive fund-raising campaigns.
It bothers me not, if people can capitalise on such moments, which are always
accompanied by a boom in various businesses. However, we cannot rule out the
tremendous increase in dirty games during the same period, which will definitely
result in misuse of funds, both public and private.
Is there anything that will cause anyone to be concerned? The answer is no. We
all know that the government sets aside funds for elections, well wishers donate
to their parties as well as private candidates, and of course, political parties
have their investments which generate funds. What will be looked at here is the
ethics governing provision of such funds by the government.
Political funding has become quite a controversial issue in both developed and
underdeveloped countries. Experience has shown that, for many years, political
funding has been part and parcel of corruption and various political mischief’s
worldwide.
In this case, even the most developed countries have laid down very strict rules
governing political funding. State organs have been rested with authority to
scrutinise every single cent getting in the coffers of political parties and, on
the other hand, political parties are required by law to announce their
financial gains resulting from contribution by members, moreover, a limit is set
as to the amount, which each category is required to contribute, fund raising
and the like.
During his monthly radio address for June this year, President Mkapa talked
about parties’ election contributions. And he gave the example of the US. But he
forgot to mention the mechanism the Americans have put in place to scrutinise
these funds, a mechanism Tanzania lacks.
In Tanzania, political funding is done secretly. There has been a lot of
suspicion about this; some believe the contributions have come from illegal
sources, some think the taxpayers’ money has been used for funding the ruling
party, and others believe legal funds have been used to protect the interests of
various economically well-to-do groups.
Public views have always been negative in this regard and the public has never
been made to believe otherwise. Why? The government’s tendency to remain
unnecessarily secretive is quite baffling. To them knowing more than the public
is a matter of prestige.
The Ruling Party’s wing, known as Jumuiya ya Wazazi, held it is national
election in Dodoma this year. The former chairman who lost the contest, Iddi
Simba, levelled very serious allegations in respect of funds that passed through
that event.
An unmentioned high-ranking government official was said to have been involved
in the irregularity. That was enough for the government to start an enquiry on
that issue, and tell the people of all the funding which was allocated to that
meeting, its sources and how it was spent.
The problem is that they believe that even when they do not tell the people what
they need to know, nothing will happen to them. Are we made to believe that it
is their donors rather than their voters that drive them?
There have been allegations from various Members of Parliament as well that
their constituencies have already been invaded by their comrades who are
aspiring to contest in the coming general elections. Such allegations have gone
hand in hand with accusations that a lot of money is being spent on such
unscrupulous campaigns.
There are much more benefits in disclosing sources of funds to the public,
outweighing by far the individual benefits of contestants or their political
parties. It is the duty of our government to provide essential education in this
respect so as to ensure those candidates/parties trapped in dirty finances
during elections are thrown out forthwith.
Armed with knowledge about the source of funds that run the campaigns of our
political representatives, the public will be in a better position to make
educated choices during elections.
What’s good for the poor is
good for America
ALTHOUGH its prosperity depends on a worldwide network of trade, finance and
technology, the United States currently treats the rest of the world, and
especially the developing world, as if it barely exists. Much of the poorer
world is in turmoil, caught in a vicious circle of disease, poverty and
political instability.
Large-scale financial and scientific help from the rich nations is an investment
worth making, not only for humanitarian reasons, but also because even remote
countries in turmoil become outposts of disorder for the rest of the world. The
biggest priority of next week’s Genoa Summit should be for the rich countries,
above all the United States, to get serious about contributing to global
economic development.
During the cold war, the United States and its allies provided the global public
good of containment, investing trillions of dollars to stop the spread of
communism. The task now is vastly more complicated. The principal goal of
foreign policy is now almost containment’s opposite: helping to ensure that all
parts of the world, including the poorest, are integrated into global economic
and ecological networks in mutually beneficial ways.
Unfortunately, American presidents in recent times have not acknowledged that
this goal requires massive foreign-policy investments. America’s foreign aid is
0.1 per cent of GDP, a derisory shadow of what it used to be, and roughly
one-third of the European level. Following America’s lead, most of the large
economies have allowed their own foreign-assistance programmes to shrink since
the end of the cold war. Even when the United States reaped a peace dividend of
more than 2 per cent of GDP in reduced defence spending after 1990, it cut,
rather than increased, foreign-assistance spending as a share of national
income.
Traditional diplomacy deals with risks of conflict between nation-states. These
risks are of course still present, but a more pervasive danger is that states
will simply collapse. Of the dozen or so conflicts in Africa in recent years,
few, if any, have involved cross-border aggression. Instead, bankrupt and
impoverished states have imploded, the vacuum filled not by regimes with newly
consolidated power but by brutal violence engulfing civilians. The disaster then
fans out to neighbouring countries, and eventually much farther afield.
A special “task-force on state failure” set up by America’s CIA has found that
three variables are most predictive of state stability or instability: the
openness of the economy (closed economies carried an increased risk of state
collapse); democracy (authoritarian regimes were less stable); and infant
mortality (a high incidence of disease raised the risk of collapse).
In sub-Saharan Africa, where much of the population lives on the edge of
subsistence, poverty and slow economic growth, or outright decline, increased
the likelihood of future state collapse, thereby trapping the countries in a
vicious circle of poverty and political instability. Rich countries, on the
other hand, tend to maintain political stability which, in turn, promotes
further economic development.
When countries were classified in 1990 by their status in the United Nations
Human Development Index (an index of income, literacy and health),
high-development countries achieved robust and stable economic growth during
1990-98, with average growth rates of around 2.3 per cent a year and with 35 out
of 36 countries enjoying rising living standards. Middle-development countries
achieved a slightly lower growth rate, 1.9 per cent a year, but seven out of 34
countries experienced outright declines in living standards. The poorest
countries averaged no economic growth at all, with 15 out of 39 experiencing
falling living standards. The flip-side to the poverty trap, however, is that
the gains of development tend to be sustained, once countries break through to
sufficient levels of income, health and literacy.
Conservatives in America often ask why it matters if an impoverished country
collapses. The answer is that, aside from humanitarian concerns, crises in such
far away places often suck the United States into crisis as well. Since 1960,
America has been dragged into military conflicts in Cuba, Thailand, Laos, Congo,
Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Cyprus, Lebanon, Zaire, El Salvador,
Libya, Lebanon, Honduras, Nicaragua, Chad, Liberia, Bosnia, Somalia and, more
recently, Kosovo and Colombia.
State failures, or even milder state instability, have also undermined American
and global interests through globally transmitted financial crises,
drug-trafficking, money-laundering, terrorism, the spread of diseases such as
AIDS and mass refugee flows. On the positive side, sustained economic
development would create new and potentially large gains from trade, as well as
much-needed co-operation in science and culture.
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