Msimbazi River opportunity and the remaking of Dar

Msimbazi River cuts across the very heart of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s biggest city and its commercial capital. While in the past the river was a continuous source of water, today its riverbed is generally dry, coming alive only when it rains. The river’s catchment area covers a huge area from Pugu to Jangwani. This is an area that hosts about a quarter of the city’s seven million inhabitants.

Two years ago I published an article where I referred to the Msimbazi River Basin as “the key to unlocking Dar es Salaam’s potential”. As I reflect on the idea, it may as well unlock Tanzania’s potential too. So, I would like to revisit the idea to expound on the opportunities cited.

Dar es Salaam faces gigantic developmental challenges as a result of decades of rapid urbanisation. Seventy percent of the population lives in unplanned settlements with limited access to public services. The city is barely liveable – three out of ten working days are wasted on the road, 80 percent of households share toilets, and 51 percent share water sources. Yet the city continues to grow unabatedly – a bad omen for the future.

How do you transform such a godforsaken Third World city into a functional metropolis? That’s the challenge the current Tanzanian leadership under Her Excellency President Samia Suluhu Hassan faces.

In 2019 the World Bank published a report that proposed a plan for the transformation of the Msimbazi River Basin. The report was aptly named The Msimbazi Opportunity, and followed a participatory process that involved government officials from all levels. The report is an excellent place to start for those who wish to review this issue in depth.

The plan highlighted solutions for managing floods, people, assets, and surrounding settlements to control the quality of water that enters the basin. The analysts proposed to turn the Lower Basin – the 1,000 acres area between Selander Bridge and Kawawa Road – into a multi-functional city park with a real estate development area.

The promise of providing the city with a much-needed iconic garden was a breath of fresh air. Nonetheless, it is in the measures for addressing issues such as sedimentation and solid waste in the upper and middle basins where the transformative power of the proposals become truly visible. One needs to engage and transform the very fabric that makes the city to make the project work. Unless the people of Dar es Salaam wish to live in slums where anyone can on any day do anything, these are the kind of transformative projects they must learn to embrace. These are ideas that can change how the whole nation is governed.

That said, I feel that the World Bank’s plan was not visionary enough. While the Msimbazi River Basin provides us with the opportunity to reimagine the whole city – liveability, transport, livelihoods, culture, aesthetics, sanitation, leisure, etc – that wasn’t captured well enough in the proposed solutions.

For example, Dar es Salaam is a monocentric behemoth where millions are funnelled into its central business district every day. The CBD is generally a work-only, and income segregated area with neither green nor public places. It is basically a concrete jungle, thanks to the extremely unfortunate conceptualisation of modern urban space.

But Msimbazi presents an opportunity to correct all that primarily by creating a modern city centre that works for everyone. Towards that goal, I proposed two improvements to the World Bank’s idea.

One, to turn the lower basin from Selander Bridge to Kawawa Road and beyond into an artificial Indian Ocean lagoon. Depending on elevation – dozens of kilometres of artificial shoreline can be added to the city’s landscape. This is akin to the work done at Sabah Al Ahmad Sea City in Kuwait, which created 200 kilometres of shoreline, and currently houses 250,000 people. Alternatively, it is conceptually a converse of Dubai’s Jumeirah Islands.

Two, by erecting a smart city along the shorelines housing hundreds of thousands of households and businesses. This is the place that will be created for people to live, work, and play. It will be a mixed-use, mixed-income, and, hopefully, racially integrated living space.

While the plan conceived a 100-acre real estate development – there are differences in purposes and scale. The purpose here is to add another focal point – that is, to make Dar polycentric. Thus the focus moves from dealing with the Msimbazi River Basin challenge to the remaking of the whole city – from its core outward.

While I understand that the Msimbazi Opportunity plan was the result of the then Vice President’s directives, I think President Samia Suluhu Hassan will now see many advantages for looking at Dar es Salaam in this configuration.

There are many costs that are associated with managing a poorly planned and expansive city. It becomes impossible for the government to do anything with distinction. However, when the perspective is changed, everything changes.

For example, the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in modernising infrastructure so as to get one million people to the city every day. But what happens when those people are already in the city?

Again, that changes everything.

There is a tendency in Tanzania to confuse projects with development. Unfortunately, alas, it is possible to make lots of movements without achieving any progress. Development is a function of smart deployment of both mental and material resources.

In Dar es Salaam’s urban space today, nothing is smarter than capitalising on the Msimbazi Opportunity. One can only hope that it won’t be missed.