TANZANIA HAS WHAT IT TAKES TO BE ‘AFRICAN ECONOMIC GIANT’

Tanzanian President John Magufuli waves as he attends a ceremony marking the country’s 58th independence anniversary in 2019.

East Africa’s sleeping giant is finally awakening. Right in the middle of the global Coronavirus pandemic, Tanzania has provided a rare piece of good news — on 1 July 2020, the country achieved its middle-income vision five years ahead of schedule.

As a coastal economy bordering eight countries, six of which are nearly or completely land-locked, Tanzania is well-situated to become a regional economic and transit hub. The country is endowed with rich renewable and non-renewable resources that can power not only its own economic transformation but that of its neighbours as well.

Reporting on Africa tends to swing between two extremes: Africa is either a hopeless basket case or a rising continent. What is often conspicuously lacking is a more nuanced analysis of the unspectacular progress that is being made. Tanzania’s case shows that no country is pre-ordained to remain underdeveloped.

Tanzania is potentially an African economic giant due to what I call its unique characteristics — strategic location, diverse resources, and political stability. Perhaps most crucially, the country has enjoyed decades of political stability, with hardly any of the conflicts that have affected almost all its neighbours since independence in the 1960s.

During the presidency of Benjamin Mkapa, Tanzanian stakeholders began the exercise of formulating the country’s development vision. In 1995, a team of experts was the focal point of this exercise under the auspices of the Planning Commission. Participation took different forms, including symposiums, interviews, dialogues, and meetings that brought together different social groups.

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