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Makwaia wa Kuhenga
The big news there was in the intervening week has been a regional conference in Dar es Salaam to revitalise the railway network in East Africa.
According to President Jakaya Kikwete as he opened the conference, the East African Railways network is “too old-fashioned and inadequate and needs to be modernised and expanded as a matter of urgency.”
But what the President could not say, and perhaps as a matter of diplomatic nicety is the reality that there was no railway network to speak of in East Africa and his own railway system in the country has but collapsed.
By the time the President had opened the regional conference, he had chaired his own cabinet meeting, which effectively drove the last nail in the coffin of the Tanzania Railway Company (TRL) effectively winding it up.
For the decision to buy off the Indian stake from the company and putting it wholly in government hands effectively meant starting off where the road had ended: a government run railway system. Now it was back to square one!
But now there was even bigger talk: reviving the whole East African railway network under the East African Community, which once upon a time had been the most promising regional economic grouping, even preceding the present day European Union (EU).
For in the in the old good days of the first decade of post independence East Africa, the three East African states of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania enjoyed a common services network unprecedented in East Africa. They had a common airline, a common harbors network, not to speak a common Railways network, known as the East African Railways Corporation.
It was as good as it lasted. The people in the region were able to travel up and about their respective countries using a commonly run railways system at any given spot in East Africa as they were able to fly a common airline, the East African Airways.
Needless to say, the advantage of these common services was that the governments of the three East African states were able to mobilise jointly resources, which could have been otherwise too costly had they been run separately.
As indicated, all was well as long as the three states were able to pull together in one direction. But not too long – soon there were troubles. The three states were now pulling in different directions, directions of which were compounded by divergent ideologies. In less than two decades, the East Common Services collapsed, one after the other.
In their place, ‘national’ services re-emerged – such as the Tanzania Railways Corporation. This service was sustained reasonably well; in the intervening period of Tanzania’s socialist road of development. But come the current era of neo-liberalism driven by “privatisation” as the “new engine of economic growth”, Tanzania moved to privatise this key and strategic sector, railways.
It was to be an expensive mistake, a very expensive one at that. Not even the Indians, onto whose hands the Tanzanians handed their railway network, have ever dared privatise such a strategic economically important lifeline in their own country. To underpin the importance of railways, the Indians run a whole ministry called the ‘Ministry of Railways’.
The same stance is the case with the Chinese. Railways network is a strategic economic lifeline that the Chinese have opted to run under state control. Where did the Tanzanians get their big ideas from, to privatise their railway network?
Certainly this is a huge question. It is an interesting coincidence, isn’t it that, at a time there is talk of the intervention of the East African Community to modernise the region’s railway network that the Tanzanian government has decided to wholly run the Tanzania Railways Company, disinvesting it from Rites of India?
But which way Tanzania? A state-run railway network or a privately run one? But this country has now immense experiences in which to draw its lessons from.
It has the experience of the defunct East African Railways, East African Airlines, Harbors and so forth.
It would appear to me, and perhaps someone else that the catchword here in the revival of East African Railways is funding from the donor community. But there is also the element of combined resources presumably from member countries of the East African Community.
But all said Tanzania needs careful planning. And that planning means taking a careful note that there is substantial difference between “ours” and “mine”!
And if the past is anything to goby, then Tanzania has veritable lessons to fall back to. Which means, Tanzania must move from the premise, like all other countries that a railway network is both strategic and indispensable to economic growth. There must be a strong state ownership and control.
Thus realised, the resources to be realised through a common fund by member countries of the East African Community and donor support will serve only to augment the national effort towards a sustainable railway system.
Mr wa Kuhenga is a senior Tanzanian journalist
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