SPECIAL REPORT : What makes shift of govt seat relevant 43yrs on?

A panoramic view of Dodoma. The de facto Tanzanian capital remains largely undeveloped despite decades of planning. PHOTOIFILE

What you need to know:

  • Some of his critics have called on him to put his words into action — immediately.
  • The private sector has applauded Dr Magufuli’s announcement, but foreign diplomatic missions are silent.

Dar es Salaam. President John Magufuli has announced that the government seat would move to Dodoma before 2020.

Some of his critics have called on him to put his words into action — immediately.

The private sector has applauded Dr Magufuli’s announcement, but foreign diplomatic missions are silent.

ACT-Wazalendo party leader Zitto Kabwe has also commended President Magufuli.

The mood among the people, however, is of cautious optimism, with many believing that he will succeed to move the government seat to Dodoma, 43 years after the plan was announced.

Their optimism was partly justified. Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa announced that he would move his office to Dodoma by next month and that he expects other ministries that are under him to follow suit.

A great number of government ministries, departments and agencies are likely to shift soon, raising concerns among some analysts on the cost implications and budget execution.

Mr Kabwe, who is currently in the US attending the Democratic Convention, reminded Tanzanians that moving the government seat to Dodoma was one of his party’s items in the election manifesto.

He said in his campaigns for the 2015 General Election he had promised that had the ACT-Wazalendo candidate been elected she would have taken the oath of office in Dodoma.

“The government has been lying to Tanzanians about its intention to shift to Dodoma… As a result the region that is supposed to host the capital city remains among the poorest,” Mr Kabwe said in a post in his Facebook page last week.

This overwhelming support for “the move to Dodoma,” however, stifles the space for meaningful debate and relook of Tanzania’s need to shift its seat from Dar es Salaam.

Attributing the failure to move to Dodoma to lack of political will denies stakeholders an opportunity to question whether for a country like Tanzania, which depends on donors to fund its budget, building another capital city is one of its top development projects.

It is obvious that there might be little or no space for debate on whether the government really needs to shift to Dodoma, whether it has the financial might to transform Dodoma into a well-planned, well-built and livable capital city as the decision, made 43 years ago seems final.

But it is time stakeholders start sounding the alarm about the start of another gigantic urban nightmare characterised by mushrooming of unplanned settlements, poor water supply and sewage systems, traffic jams, air pollution, inadequate infrastructure and social services, unemployment, problems which have for decades characterised Dar es Salaam.

Could it be that the move to Dodoma is intended to “relieve” Dar es Salaam of its problems? Or is it time for Dodoma now to share Dar es Salaam problems?

The fact that Dodoma is at the centre of the country seems to override all other factors that might go against shifting the capital city from Dar es Salaam. The argument is that it would be easier for Tanzanians from all four corners of the country to reach Dodoma when seeking government services.

Here the debate on the advantages of e-government which would become cheaper and more efficient in future owing for massive investments the government has done on the countrywide broadband network is lost in translation.

Or that improved and cheap telecommunications and transport infrastructure have made Dar es Salaam easily accessible and rendering its periphery location less of an issue as it was the case in 1973 when the decision to move to Dodoma was taken.

Some analysts argue that moving to Dodoma was part of the socialist vision that first President Julius Nyerere experimented and which failed.

The assumption in international circles has been that as Ujamaa failed and abandoned, the move to Dodoma would be abandoned.

One of reasons being that lack of domestic financial wherewithal to implement such huge projects as building a capital city could have prompted the government to re-think the decision to move to Dodoma.

Dodoma, as Sophie van Ginneken put its, was to be an embodiement of Nyerere’s Ujamaa.

Van Ginneken continues to write her work Rethinking Tanzania’s capital: The new town of Dodoma as a product of global politics and conflicting ideologies; “One of the ideas was that a city in the countryside would benefit mostly peasants, who were living in the least developed part of the country.

Peasants who, according to Nyerere were the ‘true’ builders of a new society, as opposed to urbanites who he saw as their exploiters...A planned pattern of thousands of newly established villages, evenly scattered throughout the country, was the physical expression of the socialist reform agenda.

“Dodoma was planned as the centrepiece of this huge Ujamaa Villagization programme: a model African city, without skyscrapers or superhighways but instead a rural city, produced and lived in by peasants. As the geographer Garth Myers puts it, Ujamaa was ‘one of the most significant alternative visions of urbanism and human settlement that has emerged from postcolonial Africa’. With the idea of an autarkic city, reconciling agriculture and urbanism into a self-reliant rural economy, Nyerere took a unique standpoint.”

But Dodoma’s problems as the capital started right from the beginning, according to van Ginneken.

Despite the fact that the idea of Ujamaa villages was inspired by Maoist ideologies the city masterplans and designs did not reflected any of these.

“Given the socialist aims of the new city and Nyerere’s heavy reliance on local traditions and rural habits, it is fairly ironic that a Canadian office was asked to design the master plan. Landscape architect Macklin Hancock (1925-2010) from Toronto designed the new capital for which he, in turn, borrowed the American suburban planning model.

The outcome of the rather strange partnership between the Tanzanian government and the Canadian consultants was a very western, typical New Town plan, while simultaneously conveying Nyerere’s message of a rural self-reliant city. In reality, the plan had nothing to do with Ujamaa or even ‘just’ socialism. In fact the scheme holds striking parallels with Don Mills, a 1950s suburb of Toronto, also built by Hancock.

This famous Canadian experiment, a physical example of Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit, shows typical New Town characteristics such as the hierarchical setup into neighbourhood units, the separation of vehicular roads from pedestrian paths and spaciously designed cul-de-sacs”.

After Hancock, many other foreigners, mainly from US and Canada came to assist in the planning process of Dodoma as the new capital city, according to van Ginneken.

“… the involvement of so many foreign parties and institutions resulted in a situation where urban development became a matter of public interest; a process almost entirely owned by non-local players who were all very far removed from reality in this part of Tanzania, of the lifestyles of (existing and future) inhabitants, of the socio-cultural and economic capital - in short, the fundamentals of the city’s reason to exist,” writes van Ginneken.

Despite being “trapped in a planning cycle” as van Ginneken puts it, and in spite of being a design project that remains largely unexecuted Dodoma started picking up by itself through years growing slowly but steadily in the haphazard and arbitrary manner typical of many African cities.

The concern that analyst raises is the impact of the forced migration of government ministries, departments and agencies will do to the growth of the city and its implication on its weak infrastructure and inadequate social services.

Van Ginneken offers lessons that the move to Dodoma imparts on similar envisaged plans elsewhere; “The history of Dodoma teaches us some important lessons. First, it shows how seemingly unnoticed planners (remarkably all foreign) can turn ideologies into plans with completely different (even opposite) aims to their original intentions.

Secondly, it shows how the focus on ‘prestige’ (in this case: a capital city) favours costly projects over urgent urban tasks.

For many cities on the African continent these urgent tasks are first and foremost: running water, toilets, roads and electricity.”

“Apart from the artificial Bunge (the National Parliament building), left unused for most of the time, Dodoma has in recent years welcomed several newly built communities to be used as pieds-a-terre for a government elite.

Furthermore, the National Capital Centre plan has apparently been dusted off, as now it is finally being built by Chinese constructors. Remarkably, these ambitious projects are often built on isolated building sites far from the beating heart of town.

As a result, they are disconnected and hence seem to lack reason.. At the same time, inhabitants of successful developments are sometimes evicted in favour of planned urban panoramas.”

In fact the CDA has been accused of leading a massive land grab project in the country, leading to mushrooming of informal settlements in Dodoma town.

In fact land conflicts pitching indigenous Dodoma residents against CDA are perennial. Like Dodoma, Abuja was chosen for Nigeria’s new capital because of its central location, easy accessibility, salubrious climate, low population density and the availability of land for future expansion.

During the 1980s the new capital city, having been designed by the Department of Architecture of a Nigerian university, was built and developed.

The move from Lagos to Abuja was finalised in 1991 the year the latter became the capital city. The beautiful city was the first planned city to be built in Nigeria.