Questioning the rationality of making Dodoma the capital

One of the main justifications for moving the capital to Dodoma is to bring about balance and inclusivity in the country. If that is the case, then spending trillions of shillings in constructing a new city is a very funny way of going about that.

Earlier this month, the government announced that it would spend Sh759 billion to build Msalato International Airport in Dodoma and Sh137 billion to construct and expand other airports in Kigoma, Tabora, Rukwa, and Shinyanga.

It is curious that this old, small marketplace town previously called Idodomya, in a region with 2.6 million people and a GDP of Sh3.9 trillion – ranking 15 out of 23 regions – should be allocated a budget that is almost six times that of four other regions combined, while they have many more people and are much more productive, but the argument makes perfect sense to our political masters because – wait for it – they are building a capital city.

Speaking in Parliament earlier this month, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa said: “This (the move) will make Dodoma busy, hence the need to have an international airport remains important since it will stimulate socioeconomic development in the central regions in Tanzania.”

While it is good to see the government explaining its decisions, certain questions remain. For example, must the government spend trillions on Dodoma to stimulate socio-economic development in the central regions?

Tanzania is huge, and that’s a fact one can appreciate only when one makes a tour of it. I had the first opportunity to do that in 2006. In a few months I visited 16 regions, and with tarmacked roads being non-existent, driving between some of them wasn’t fun. And if one were to go westward, one had to traverse the then treacherous Sekenke hills to reach Nzega. God help you if it was during masika rains.

In these journeys, one question kept nagging me: how could it take over 45 years of independence to connect Tanzania’s most populous area, the Lake Zone, with the rest of the country with tarmacked roads? I still don’t have a good answer, but if one were to put himself in the shoes of Tanu members back in 1973, looking at the wilderness that Tanzania was and the challenges that had to be surmounted to develop it, one can see why they thought that relocating the capital to a more central location was a good idea.

In a paper entitled Fulfilling Elite Interests at the Expense of the People?, Dastan Kweka, a social scientist, wrote: “Dodoma is located near the geographical center of the country and thus makes it easy to access other parts of the country from there… As such, communications was seen as Dodoma’s great attraction.” Indeed, communication was key for this decision.

However, by 2016 when the shift to Dodoma was announced, the situation was remarkably different. Tarmacked roads connecting regions; mobile telecoms connecting people; railway lines – Tazara and SGR (in the pipeline); power line carriers traversing the land; and fast – well, relatively fast – broadband in all regions. So, it beggars belief why anyone would apply 1970s reasoning to a 2010s world.

That said, why do we think that a journey from, say, Singida to Dodoma (238km), rather than Dar (686km) to register a business, is okay? Shouldn’t we think that those are 238km too many rather than 450km saved? In other words, one should not have to leave his or her region to go to the capital for government services.

What was wrong with Dar is the fact that the central government and its agencies were all concentrated here, and that everybody else had to travel to Dar for government services. That was simply bad governance. That said, the solution is not to decamp and go and repeat the same thing in Dodoma – that’s crazy.

The solution is to decentralise the government – relocate its agencies, apply technology to deliver services, empower regional, district, and local government offices to do more, right where people are. This way, one would have decongested Dar, increased access to government services, and distributed the concentrated wealth without wasting money. How much has been spent on the Dodoma project so far? That, unfortunately, appears to be a secret. I understand that the initial budget estimates were in the range of Sh20 trillion, but given significant cost reductions (kudos), probably the project will finally cost Sh10 trillion at its completion. But that is still Sh10 trillion too much.

It is impossible to account for all the waste that has occurred: newly built skyscrapers which were abandoned in haste, embassies to be relocated (but they are having none of that!), lives lost on the road, families broken, useless flights, etc. How about denied services? For example, out of Sh32.5 billion approved for MSD, the government issued only 1.5 percent of it! Very brave.

The biggest waste is the missed opportunity – if the government had all that money to spend, why didn’t it invest it in productive areas with a higher rate of return for this nation?

The more you think about the Dodoma Project, the more suspicious you get. My judgment, again, is that this experiment should be gracefully ended, permanently. Next time I will review an alternative direction for Dodoma and the central regions if the government were to take this direction.