How Kikwete Can Create Over a Million Jobs

How Kikwete can create over one million jobs

As already known, President Jakaya Kikwete has pledged, more than once, to create one million jobs during his term in office. To some people, the President’s pledge is easier said than done. However, in this article, Staff Writer, ATTILIO TAGALILE, argues that the President’s is not only realisable, but that he could create more than one million jobs if focused on infrastructure and especially, construction of a maze of railway lines throughout the country. Read on.

One of the best ways of realising the more than a million job creation dream would be through the effective use of the Ministry of Infrastructure Development.

The ministry actually holds the key to the President’s dream which is attainable, but the ministry can only do that not through construction of roads, but a maze of railway lines.

Since the country has massive deposits of iron ore, at Liganga, in Iringa region, what the Government could and should in fact do is to embark on railway construction, all over the country.

It is well known that rail construction is a labour intensive work in that it requires hundreds of thousands of workers.

In fact this was best illustrated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during construction by Chinese engineers, of the Tanzania Zambia Railway, TAZARA, which was then also best known as the Uhuru railway.

Many people, literate, semi-literate and illiterates from Iringa, Mbeya and other neighbouring regions were recruited to build Tazara.

The fourth phase government could do it again by extending Tazara (and through the use of the same international rail gauge) throughout the country.

What this means is that it should uproot the central line and build a stronger railway line whose gauge would be similar to that of Tazara.

Through the use of a rail gauge similar to that of Tazara, the new railway line would have the capacity of carrying heavier goods from the Dar es Salaam port to the hinterland and other neighbouring countries of Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC and others.

Yes, the present Government can do that through the use of the same people who built Tazara, the Chinese Government and here is where President Kikwete comes in.

The Ministry of Infrastructure Development on its own cannot talk the Chinese Government into undertaking such a gigantic and ambitious project.

The point is, the President should try to get in touch with his Chinese counterparts. For a start, a trip to China would not be a bad idea.

Besides, the Government does not have to worry where to get money from since it has what is more valuable than money, massive deposits of iron ore that experts say can last over a century!

In other words, the Government does not need to go to the donors in the west or the Bretton Woods institutions, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, IMF, for credit for construction of such a maze of railway lines throughout the country.

Because like what was experienced by Mwalimu Nyerere and the then Zambian President, Dr Kenneth Kaunda, the present Government would face the same problem.

The west would be ready to help Tanzania build roads which at the end of the day would hardly last ten years!

Secondly, construction of a maze of railway lines all over the country would cost billions of dollars and no western country would be ready to part with that and for understandable reasons.

Therefore the only way out is to get in touch with the Chinese Government which is one of the three countries in the world which lead in consumption of steel.

According to one of the issues of an American weekly, ‘Newsweek’ published early last year, the Federal Republic of Germany is the leading consumer of steel in the world followed by China and India.

The magazine wrote that China was so much in need of steel that its imports were such that ships were not enough to carry the load the country wanted!

What this means is that since we have massive deposits of iron ore, the Government could try to talk to their Chinese counterparts on the possibility of asking them to help in building a network of railway lines in Tanzania that would link up with the present Tazara.

And instead of paying cash, the two governments could work out a barter trade that could be in the form of giving the Chinese government part of our iron ore that would be commensurate to the to the cost of building a network of railway lines they would have built in Tanzania.

This suggestion may look weird to some people, yet most of the countries which have made a mark, economically, have had to take routes which were seen as impossible.

The kind of railway network one could look at includes a railway line that could link all towns in the country from the south to the north and from the east to the west.

In short the railway line could be built from the south eastern port of Mtwara to towns like Songea, Mbeya, Iringa, and Sumbawanga to the tip of Lake Tanganyika in the south.

The other rail link could start from Dar es Salaam to Tanga, Musoma, Mwanza, Arusha, Shinyanga, Tabora, and Kigoma to the border with Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.

The other railway line could start from Shinyanga and head down to the south as far as the border with Zambia.

But the maze of railway lines should, as noted earlier, have similar gauge with that of Tazara which is an international gauge that has made it possible trains from South Africa to travel all the way from that country to Dar es Salaam.

There are those in love with both the East African Community, EAC, and the Federation who are likely to question the logic of replacing the central lines with a different rail gauge now that some see Tanzania moving closer to Kenya and Uganda.

It is time we stopped entertaining regional blocks that do not seem to be helping Tanzania in the long run.

We need to start looking inwardly, not negatively, but in a manner that would help to extricate the majority of Tanzanians from abject poverty.

Tanzania Government’s objective should be to build modern railway lines that would make its ports of Dar es Salaam, Mtwara and Tanga relevant to our neighbouring land-locked countries.

For too long we have spent valuable time, financial and human resources servicing regional blocks and liberation movements.

The question we ought to be asking ourselves are what benefits having we reaped from them.