On April 17, Finance Minister Khamis Mussa Omar stood before the Business Council for International Understanding in Washington and invited American capital into Tanzania’s mining, agriculture, and technology sectors. Forty-eight hours earlier, in Dodoma, Minister for Minerals Anthony Mavunde had directed the Mining Commission to cancel 40 mineral exploration licences covering roughly 900 square kilometres, with additional licence holders placed on formal default notice.
Both moves are defensible on their own terms. Read together, they raise the question that matters most for sophisticated capital looking at Tanzania this year: does the country want foreign investment, or does it want foreign investment on markedly different terms than before?
The backdrop is Tanzania’s transition from the launch of Dira 2050 in 2025 to its embedding through the Long-Term Perspective Plan and the Fourth Five-Year Development Plan, with private investment positioned at the centre of the country’s growth model.
Tabling the Sh144.9 billion budget for the Office of the President, Planning and Investment on April 16, Minister Kitila Mkumbo pointed to rising foreign direct investment inflows, citing UNCTAD data showing an increase from $1.34 billion in 2023 to $1.72 billion in 2024, a 28.3 percent jump.
A National Investment Policy 2026 and a National Investment Strategy for 2026 to 2031 are being finalised. However, the numbers leave Tanzania behind Ethiopia and Uganda among the wider East African comparators in UNCTAD’s 2024 FDI data. For a country whose Vision 2050 ambitions require capital at a meaningfully higher order of magnitude, this is not yet a position of strength but a signal of momentum that still needs to compound.
The licence revocations are where the strategic question sharpens. The Ministry cites hoarding of exploration blocks, non-payment of statutory fees, non-compliance with local content obligations, and weak corporate social responsibility performance. On the face of it, this is a classic use-it-or-lose-it enforcement approach.
Tanzanian mining law, like most modern mining regimes, conditions the retention of a licence on performance, and the Mineral Policy since the 2017 reforms expressly guards against speculative holding. Redistribution through the Mining for a Brighter Tomorrow programme, targeting small-scale miners, women, youth, and persons with disabilities, is consistent with the broader local content and participation framework the country has been building.
On the public record so far, the enforcement case is legally arguable. What will matter, is whether revocation and reallocation are carried out with procedural consistency, transparency, and administrative discipline.
This is where the analysis shifts from legality to perception, and from perception to capital behaviour.
In both administrative law and international investment practice, legitimate expectations arguments rarely turn on whether a state can enforce its laws against non-performing licence holders; they turn on whether that enforcement is predictable, proportionate, and procedurally clean.
Documented default notices, the use of defined grace periods, and a stated redistribution mechanism all point in the right direction.
What global capital will watch for is the texture beneath those signals: whether enforcement is applied consistently across operators regardless of nationality or political alignment, and whether the evolving digital licensing systems deliver the transparency they promise.
Tanzania is simultaneously signalling openness to sophisticated foreign capital in Washington and lower tolerance for passive or non-performing capital in Dodoma, and both positions are coherent with the underlying logic of Vision 2050, which prioritises productive, value-adding, and locally integrated investment over balance-sheet presence without execution.
The risk is not that the policy direction is wrong, but comparator markets are moving faster on the dimensions that matter most to institutional investors.
Ethiopia and Uganda are not attracting higher inflows because they enforce less; they are being read as more predictable in terms of regulatory timelines, dispute resolution pathways, and the distance between policy announcements and administrative follow-through.
Tanzania’s advantage lies in its resource base, its political stability, and its strategic geography. Those advantages are real and durable. Regulatory execution is what will determine whether they translate into sustained capital inflows.
For investors assessing Tanzania in this window, the correct posture is neither reflexive caution triggered by headlines about revoked licences, nor unexamined optimism driven by improving FDI numbers. It is engagement with eyes open.
Amne Suedi is Managing Director of Shikana Investment and Advisory, Honorary Consul of Switzerland to Zanzibar, and Chair of the Switzerland-Tanzania Chamber of Commerce.
