Opinion
Analysis
If we investigate them, many of the world’s great events and particularly the disasters have begun in big cities. In London, the bubonic plague (Black Death) and the great fire, in Paris the French Revolution, in St. Petersburg the Russian Revolution, and so on. This is not surprising when one realizes what a feverish environment exists in a really big city. It is a fact that struck your correspondent last week, because of a sudden welcome break in Mafia island. One minute, in Dar es Salaam, I was wondering whether it would be possible to escape alive from the traffic along the airport road, and I was such a bag of nerves that someone scraping a chair would make me jump out of my skin; an hour later there was nothing to see but sand and palm trees, and little children waving at the unusual sight of a vehicle going by. This sudden peace left one shell-shocked for a few minutes, like the kids evacuated from London during the blitz who said they couldn’t sleep because it was “too quiet”.
Mafia island was absolute bliss, even for just 24 hours, because of the beautiful hotel I was staying in and because of wonderful Nature round about, sea and tranquility, leisurely meals, good companionship and a peaceful night. The opportunity to walk without worrying about having to cross a busy road….or any road, the opportunity of sitting on the verandah to read or meditate, to do some work writing in agreeable surroundings, so why on earth (or why the hell) do we live in big cities?
Of course, for most people it’s because their work is there, because everything they might need to buy is there, good education is there, entertainment is there even if you have problems getting to it through all the traffic jams, and everything they need to arrange, from paying government bills to journeys abroad, is normally done in the city. Yet, in these days of the Internet, could we not arrange to live otherwise? On Mafia the Internet is available, and in theory you could do everything except, perhaps, receive rockets from your boss, right there. Honestly I can’t imagine missing Dar es Salaam except for just that feeling in the air, in Dar, that something extraordinary is about to happen and that life is buzzing all about you; whatever it is you can’t afford not to be around. It’s possibly an illusion….
This road also needs expansion
Many people especially those residing along Kilwa road have hailed the government for the expansion of the road, but there are still doubts if the expansion of the road will solve the problem of traffic jams.
After completion of the road, it is apparent that a person can drive from Mbagala Rangi Tatu to the junction of Kilwa and Bandari roads in less than ten minutes, but from there to Kariakoo or CBD it will take more than 30 minutes.
This is the case even now, that the stretch of the road from the junction of Kilwa Road and Bandari Road becomes congested with traffic stretching past BP head office to Bendera Tatu.
This road is not wide enough to handle the heavy traffic that flows from Mbagala and other suburbs along Kilwa Road, and urgently needs expansion if Kilwa Road is to be of benefit.
The other fact is that the expansion of the Dar es Salaam port has forced some of the Kurasini residents to demolish their houses and move to areas in the Kilwa Road environs, hence increasing the volume of traffic.
This means that a person traveling from Mbagala to Kariakoo or the Post office will have to spend more than 40 minutes, simply because of the traffic jam at Bandari and Kilwa Roads junction.
It would have been better had the authorities thought of expanding the one-km road stretch up to Bendera Tatu to enable the Kilwa Road expansion to be practicable.
If this stretch of the road is not expanded, the expansion of Kilwa Road is virtually useless. We advise the authorities that before carrying out road expansions, they should make a close examination of adjoining roads and see if they are contributing to any snarl-ups.
Analysis
WE NEED COHERENT POLICIES AND LAWS TO BAR FAKE IMPORTS
By Evarist Kagaruki
When, sometime ago, I made a comment in this column on the problem of counterfeit and substandard imported goods flooding the market in the country as a result of IMF / World Bank-imposed free trade policy, I mentioned that there were two sides of trade liberalisation – one positive and the other negative. The good side, I argued, was that liberalised trade helped local manufacturers to improve the quality of their products through competition, and give consumers (the public) a choice and value for their money.
The bad side of trade liberalisation was that it distorted the market and derailed industrialisation, unless there were government interventions to ensure there was fair competition, accompanied by safeguards against importation of substandard and fake products. Unfortunately, the bad side of the policy of trade liberalisation seems to outweigh the good side, in that it has opened the flood gates to imports of counterfeits from the Far East, notably China. The fake importers of these goods have turned the country literally into a “dumping ground” for all kinds of trash, which threatens the domestic market in its own locally manufactured products, retards the growth of local industries and, in the long run, damages the economy.
Of late, the government, through the Tanzania Bureau of Standards, has been trying to crackdown on imported counterfeits, but the exercise has had little impact. This is basically because the problem was not being tackled from the root. At the root of the problem is not the importers (and sellers) of such goods, but bad policies of the government and the practice of ignoring the laws and regulations due to corruption. These factors formed the basis for wholesale importation of goods and unchecked immigration of foreigners disguised as “investors”.
But, the most fundamental problem is the lack of policy framework that would ensure strict regulation of the country’s liberalised trade. Since the advent of trade liberalisation, government policy has been to allow importation of any kind of goods without regard to the big threat this posed to the infant domestic industries. The government’s standard (and faulty) argument in defence of this kind of policy orientation – which has led to the thriving of the “supermarket economy” in the country – has always been that intervention by way of selective import restrictions or barriers (tariffs) would defeat the whole purpose of free trade!
Whenever the question of fake or substandard, cheap (but meretricious) and market-suffocating imports were raised in the past in Parliament, the successive ministers responsible for trade responded with a stereotyped answer: “Tanzania can not restrict imports because we live in a globalized world, and our policy is to allow free trade”, they told the House. The current Minister of Trade and Industry, Mary Nagu, who, in the short time that she has been stewardess at the ministry, has proved capable of handling the job, said something to that effect when she was winding up the debate on her ministry’s estimates for 2008 / 09, although she was quick to admit that the problem of fake imported products (especially from China) was a serious one. But admitting the gravity of the problem is one thing and doing something concrete about it is quite another!
People want to see action; they want to see the Ministry of Trade and Industry (in collaboration with other relevant ministries like Foreign Affairs and Home Affairs) evolving coherent policies and legislative measures that would protect the public against fake imports, and the local producers from unfair competition posed by importers of such products which hinder the growth of our domestic industries and cause great harm to the economy. Cracking down on (Chinese) fakes in the shops may superficially look fine; but actually it is just a fire-fighting approach which cannot solve the problem, either in the long term or the short term.