Tanesco as a revolving door and why it can’t succeed

Tanzania is so diverse and there are so many stories that even a thousand storytellers with their pens ablaze cannot do justice to them. But amongst the different threads, the tragedy of Tanzania’s electricity supply keeps drawing me back again and again. It’s one story I cannot tell often enough.

In the mid-1990s, we went through what I consider to be the worst power outages in Tanzania. I remember spending many nights in Arusha reading using a karabai. Later I started to realise that my eyesight wasn’t as good as it was before. It may have been just nature, but I can’t but subconsciously blame the outages for damaging my eyesight.

While blackouts have always been a part of our lives, during Magufuli’s time, things got better. A month could pass without a power outage. Can you imagine going a whole month without a power outage? But, alas, after Magufuli passed away power, blackouts returned with a vengeance. And 2023 was one of the worst years in memory. Just before Christmas, Tanesco announced that there would be no power rationing during the holiday season. You know you have hit rock-bottom when electricity becomes a Christmas gift!

In response, Tanesco’s leadership carousel spun faster. Maharage Chande went out, and Gissima Nyamo-Hanga came in. Issa Omar is gone as a board chair, Major General Paul Kisesa, then Rhimo Nyansaho came in. The message? We’re taking action! But after four board restructurings and countless individual changes in a decade, that message rings hollow now.

It is not difficult to follow: since 2015, when General Robert Mboma left as Tanesco’s board chair, we have had Dr Mighanda Manyahi, Omar Issa, Maj Gen Kisesa, and now Dr Nyansaho. And since Felchesmi Mramba was ignominiously shown the door by Magufuli in January 2017, Tanesco’s management has been led by Dr. Tito Mwinuka, Maharage Chande, and now Nyamo-Hanga. It is clear that Tanesco’s leadership merry-go-round has been spinning at a dizzying pace, with directors averaging barely two years.

Surely, all these diverse professionals couldn’t be the sole reason for Tanesco’s failures. On the contrary, the high frequency of board members and management turnover highlights a deeper issue. Most of Tanesco’s projects take years to implement, and whatever leaders conceive, they know they won’t have time to implement it. Thus, forever in limbo, they are rendered incapable of meaningful action. The perpetual state of transition breeds impotence.

Mramba’s 2017 sacking exemplifies this. For over a decade, politicians had been pushing for increasingly bizarre power deals that weighed Tanesco down with inevitable losses. Mramba decided to raise tariffs to keep Tanesco afloat, the decision which was approved by the board and the industry regulator Ewura. Yet, Magufuli feigned ignorance, firing Mramba for “sabotaging” his half-baked national industrialisation agenda. I couldn’t help but sympathise with Mramba then. In his shoes, I’d have done the same. But the message from the President to Tanesco’s executives was clear: don’t lead, just be scapegoats.

Also read: What is behind the dramatic return of power blackouts?

And they are good at that. When you look at some of the sackings, you cannot but wonder whether they weren’t mere pawns in a political game. Hired to be fired? A not-so-an-uncommon practice.

I think the politicians have given the game away by their overuse of this charade. As I have argued many times in this column, Tanzania’s power woes stem not from the empty skies or coffers, but from the poor decisions that our politicians make. They cannot hide behind firing Tanesco’s management anymore. Giving us new faces while maintaining the same practices is akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. This is a country with 65 million people but with 1.7 gigawatts of installed electricity capacity – if that isn’t a national emergency scenario, I don’t know what is. Ultimately, we close businesses, we lose FDIs, our competitiveness is decreased, and our lives are disrupted. What kind of nation are we building?

We need national institutions which we cannot allow to fail. The South Koreans have their chaebols, the Chinese have the jituans, and the Saudis have Aramco. The likes of Tanesco, the Dar Port, NHC, NSSF and the like need to be Tanzanian chaebols. These institutions must be sacred – people should play with them at the risk of their very lives.

Tanesco can easily be turned around when we remove politicians from the picture. Tens of millions of potential subscribers with no competition? Surely, making Tanesco outrageously successful won’t be a miracle. But politicians must be kept at arm’s length from Tanesco’s operations. Get the most competitive leaders for Tanesco, give them sensible tenures and clear goals, and then let them take the lead.

The comedic farce of punishing executives for mistakes which politicians have never stopped making is what has turned Tanesco into the joke that it is today. That needs to end if Tanzania is to witness meaningful economic transformation.