CROSS ROADS :To achieve economic growth, we must run!

The other day one @Benji_Fernandes tweeted that it takes him 20-35 minutes to register a sim card in Tanzania. The same amount of time he would spend to register a business in the United States of America.

Maybe, he was expressing frustrations we all feel when we want essential services and quick. We all have been there. You go to a bank expecting to spend half an hour or less, but you end up wasting 3 to 4 hours! You end up wondering what the fuss is all about, mobile and internet banking were supposed make those long queues history.

At the end of the day, after getting your services, you talk to yourself that, the machine/technology cannot replace the human at the workplace and that the human touch counts. There are some people who will not agree to use technology availed in banks.

Back to the twitterati, His sentiment received some comments with one @MikieMushi replying that Tanzania is doing great. “We’re moving forward comparing how the situation was few years back. We should applaud ourselves for that.” I second him, because there are some tangible reforms.

In the past, it took several weeks or months to register a business. Today, it takes a day, and you can do it at the comfort of your home or office (online business registration at Business Registrations and Licensing Agency (Brela).

He noted that, we don’t have a central database system that connects different government agencies. This implies that to get government services, each agency or organization, have to do its due diligence.

In essence, a national Identity card, if made mandatory for all citizens aged 18 and above, and the data centralized, it would go a long way to help in easing business processes.

Due to the lack of national IDs, After every five years, the government spends colossal amount of money printing voters cards, which became obsolete after 5 years. In the past, I had written in this column that if the money used to register voters and print their cards, would be used to register citizens, and then the Citizenship IDs used as voters’ card, we could have saved a lot as a nation. Imagine the billions used to print voters’ cards, only for the cards to be discarded!

If citizens IDs were to be made accessible to all citizens when they are young, when they reach 18 years, it would be one giant step towards creating an enabling environment for business.

We want a Tanzania that is moving forward economically in huge strides. For that to happen, as Mr Tao Zhang, the IMF Deputy Managing Director mentioned last June, Tanzania need reforms that will create “a better and more predictable business environment.”

Investments and trade in agriculture, energy, pharmaceuticals, mineral wealth or whichever sector you look at, needs a very stable business environment.

Dear reader, it’s important we know that adverse business environments only lead to corruption and underdevelopment. For big businesses, it leads into increase in loan delinquencies and nonperforming asset. For the common man, there are less job opportunities since starting or running a business becomes so difficult.

As a nation, we need more entrepreneurship and it’s good for regulators in particular and the government in general, to ponder on what to do, to improve business environment, which in turn will translate into more business, and more tax for government coffers.

Since we are talking about accelerating industrialization, innovation and investment, we therefore need to have predictable business environment.

Saumu Jumanne is an Assistant Lecturer, Dar es Salaam University College of Education (DUCE)