LET US DO THIS TO ATTAIN NATIONAL VISION 2025 GOAL

In May 2018, the Fifth Phase Government of the late President John Magufuli released the December 2017 Blueprint for Regulatory Reforms to Improve the Business Environment. A little more than three years later, the Sixth Phase Government of President Samia Suluhu Hassan is taking more measures that are designed and intended to further improve in ways more than one the country’s business environment, including the investment climate.

For starters, the Business Blueprint “provides the government’s main framework for enabling a holistic review of the business enabling environment (BEE) in order to improve the business climate in Tanzania”.

In that regard, the Blueprint covers sector-specific regulatory issues in agriculture and agro-processing; construction; mining/minerals processing; transport and logistics; tourism; health; utilities (water and energy); social security; immigration, labour and the creative industry.

Thereafter, some reforms in several of the areas have indeed already been made in recent times.

These included – but are by no means limited to – the reduction in numbers and rates of certain taxes, cesses, levies and other charges that were considered to be nuisance taxes and/or hurdles to functional investments and doing business.

Soon after she was formally sworn into the highest office in the land as President and Head of State of the United Republic of Tanzania on March 19 this year, President Hassan pledged to rigorously pursue the goals of the Blueprint.

This time round – and to that very noble end – the President Hassan regime has come up with a raft of statutory changes in the extant regulatory frameworks on investments and business activities.

Debate in Parliament

The proposed changes are contained in the Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bills Numbers 2 and 4, officially tabled for debate in the National Assembly on Wednesday and Thursday last week by Attorney General Adelardus Kilangi.

Among the proposed changes that are to be processed through the Union Parliament to ease the doing of business procedures are to the Companies Act (Cap 212), and the Non-Citizens (Employment Regulation) Act, 2015 (Cap 436). While the amendments to the former legislation are principally intended to simplify business registration, the amendments to the latter would simplify and otherwise improve the issuance of work permits to non-citizen employees – and extend their validity from the current five to eight years.

All this would also serve as an incentive to foreign and local investors who have to engage non-Tanzanian employees.

These are indeed such mouth-watering amendment proposals to the extant regulatory frameworks governing the ‘doing of business environment’ in Tanzania, as well as the country’s investment climate – hints of which can be gleaned from our Saturday edition of this publication. What remains now is for Parliament to get it all done swiftly and prudently. To that end, we sincerely urge the National Assembly to diligently process the amendments through the august House ready for assent by President Hassan so as to give them the force of law.

Doing this would further cement the reality of achieving the semi-industrialised, upper-middle income economy envisaged in the National Development Vision 2025.