WITH AN EAGLE'S EYE : The state of Dar is more than pathetic

There are two things that are likely to strike a new visitor to the city of Dar es Salaam: mushrooming new buildings, some of which are still under construction, and the filthiness.

The disappointment starts right at the airport where extremely slow Immigration staff receive visitors in conditions that befit a country that is just out of a civil war bigger than the one that engulfed Somalia.

Every corner stinks, is dirty, dilapidated and no one seems to notice that something is seriously wrong.

The moment you gets out of the small, poorly-designed airport building, assuming the corrupt customs officials didn’t harass you, you are met by an army of taxi drivers who appear more or less like robbers, unkempt from their toes to the top of their heads.

The surroundings outside the airport are dusty, disorganised, congested, and to be honest, worse than any arriving guest could imagine. It is unthinkable to imagine that Julius Nyerere International Airport is the major airport a 51-year old country depends on.

Once the guest gets to the supposed highway, unfortunately bearing the name Nyerere Road, they will be shocked to see how crazy Tanzanian drivers are, but this is not before witnessing the friendship that Tanzanians have with dust and sand, and sporadic crowds crossing the highway unpredictably.

Up until this point the visitor is overtaken by the thought that the airport was built outside the city, in one extremely poor area, the same way Great Britain did when building the 2012 Olympic Stadium in London. But soon the visitor will realise that the whole city is worse than the airport.

Compared with other cities around the world, such as Sao Paolo, whose airport is 120 km away, in Dar es Salaam there is a very short distance between the airport and the city centre which is very disappointing and confusing. The whole city is filthy.

What is the problem with Dar es Salaam? One thing that comes out clearly is the poor planning which makes it hard to clean streets.

While in other cities sand is totally absent, in Dar es Salaam it is the opposite; it looks like Tanzanians have a special affinity for it. Dust is everywhere you step on, which turns into mud when it rains, not to mention the ever-present potholes.

Here is what other cities have done: they have built well-designed pavements between buildings and the road to completely deny sand the opportunity to mess up the city, and this discipline is maintained throughout.

Any place that has neither a building nor a paved road has pavements, or well-maintained lawns with properly tended flowers, and everything is done so neatly and kept that way all year long.

Since the streets in Dar es Salaam are so dusty, automatically buildings are filthy, and so are vehicles, pedestrians, and simply everything else. Cleaning such a city can be a nightmare.

I didn’t mention the conditions of the roads, the absence of working street lights at night, deficit of traffic lights, insecurity of personal property, and the entire organisation of the city.

I don’t know how visitors perceive us upon landing in Dar es Salaam, a city that is currently attracting international events and guests including leaders of the world’s biggest powers.

Hawkers present another constant eyesore. In spite of existing laws and regulations, the game of hide-and-seek between city officials and petty traders appears to have no end. The sight of women selling breakfast snacks along the streets in the city centre every morning, and throngs of loitering hawkers at road junctions is appalling.

A new kind of thinking and approach is needed to uplift the condition of this city, and I do not believe that the people currently vested with its oversight can do anything. We need a new level of thinking armed with exposure, the likes of foreign experts and members of the Tanzanian diaspora. Let us be humble!

We need people who have seen how others around the world design and maintain their cities if we are to get rid of this humiliation which, in fact, is denying us plenty of growth opportunities.

We cannot live like this unless something is seriously wrong with our thinking, and I think there is!

It is high time we came up with a strategy to reorganise the city of Dar es Salaam at least in the downtown, to start with. The current condition is unbearable and serves only to embarrass the nation.

A city of this nature cannot be home to rational people. Something very fundamental is missing in our thinking and we cannot afford to keep it that way forever. Dar es Salaam is more than humiliation, to say the least!