For 11 years, Tanzania's government has quietly built an argument it has never had to defend in public: that it no longer needs the private bar. Since the 2018 restructuring of the Attorney General's Chambers, every ministry has had its own state attorneys, reporting through a newly created Solicitor General.
The logic was sound on paper: reduce reliance on external counsel, retain institutional knowledge, save money.
In the last financial year reviewed in Parliament, the Solicitor General's office reported savings of over Sh643 billion in cases the government did not lose, a genuine achievement.
But achievements built on one side of a ledger eventually meet the other side.
Tanzania has roughly 8,802 registered advocates on the mainland roll, and a large share, by every account within the profession, are not thriving.
The state, historically the largest buyer of legal services, has spent over a decade shifting demand in house. State attorneys, however capable, are stretched across dockets from land disputes to sovereign negotiations, often without the specialist depth a private market builds through repetition.
The result is not a cheaper legal system, but a government that increasingly reaches outside Tanzania once a matter is complex enough to matter, while the private bar survives on what is left over.
This should concern anyone watching the mega projects moving through the pipeline.
The East African Crude Oil Pipeline has generated 7,500 Tanzanian jobs and channelled over TSh1.325 trillion to more than 200 local firms, strong numbers on local content. But look at where they sit: engineering, logistics, construction, supply.
The law is clear on legal services, clearer than on most sectors. The Petroleum (Local Content) Regulations and The Mining (Local Content) Regulations both require a contractor to retain only a Tanzanian legal practitioner or firm.
On paper, Tanzanian lawyers should already lead this work. In practice, transactions are routinely structured with international counsel in the lead and Tanzanian firms doing the research behind them, while the regulator receiving the legal services sub-plan rarely asks whether the law is being followed.
Contrast this with what government did last July. Faced with complaints that foreigners were crowding Tanzanians out of salons, mobile money kiosks and small trade, the Ministry of Industry and Trade acted decisively: fifteen sectors reserved for citizens, a dedicated task force, licences revoked, work permits rejected.
The rule reserving legal work on oil, gas and mining transactions for Tanzanian practitioners has existed since 2018. No comparable task force or enforcement drive has ever been built around it.
The trader today has a functioning enforcement regime behind the law protecting him. The advocate has a regulation and silence.
Part of the reason is that neither side has fought to make the law work. Departments that assembled a task force for salons and mobile money kiosks have never built an equivalent for the legal services sub-plans filed with the Mining Commission and PURA.
The body meant to hold government to that standard has spent much of the last decade absorbed in a different fight.
Since 2017, bar leadership energy has gone disproportionately into confrontation with government over constitutional and political questions, important, but pursued at real cost to enforcing rules already on the books.
A bar association cannot simultaneously be government's sharpest critic and its most persuasive partner in enforcing space already reserved for its own members. Something must give, and for eleven years, it has been the advocates themselves.
Is this sustainable? I do not believe it is. As Tanzania's investment pipeline scales from hundreds of millions to tens of billions of dollars, the cost of a hollowed out private bar becomes an investment risk in its own right.
Foreign counsel and their clients already cite thin specialist local capacity as a reason to keep decision making offshore, a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.
A jurisdiction that wants to be taken seriously for complex capital cannot afford a legal profession that is poor, sidelined and unrepresented where its own resources are negotiated.
The fix is neither mysterious nor costly, because the law already exists. It requires a government willing to enforce local content rules for legal services as seriously as it enforces them for salons, and a bar leadership willing to spend as much energy demanding that enforcement as it spends contesting the state elsewhere.
Tanzania cannot industrialise while leaving the profession meant to write its contracts unenforced and unprotected. The question is not whether change is needed, but how much longer both institutions can afford to wait.
Amne Suedi is the Managing Director of Shikana Investment and Advisory, Honorary Consul of Switzerland in Zanzibar, and Chair of the Switzerland-Tanzania Chamber of Commerce. Views expressed are strictly Amne Suedi’s only.
