We don’t seem capable of learning from past mistakes but keep repeating them as if we are void of relearning steep curves. Let us muse upon the woes of Dar Transport and ask ourselves whether the solutions aren’t really within our reach.
Since gaining independence, we have grudgingly tolerated our own local solutions but our hearts have always been foreign infused. UDA was a case in hand: the bigger the better but we have fared miserably. But our own local solutions without government help or despite government meddling have survived the ups and downs of the industry.
So the question we ought to ask ourselves is why are we still distrustful of our own local initiatives? Why don’t we invest in our own people and forego alien solutions which tend to be expansive, demanding huge swathes of land, extorting unbearable overheads, and prone to massive leaking of revenues collected?
UDA and DART faced similar structural and institutional failures even before their operations began, and we don’t seem to grasp even the basics of urban transportation systems which quest flexibility, nimbler operations and sustainable technologies.
For starters, public transport must be powered by solar energy (EV), and not natural gas or gasoline. The technologies are there but we keep migrating to natural gas which demands logistics only suitable to a bigger operator whom we hardly need. A bigger operator kills competition, over time hikes fares to offload inefficiencies of just being bigger and rarely amount to an efficient transport system. He has no motivation to serve the public but to coin ingenious ways of milking the customers dry.
Employees of the “bigger the better” tend to ask huge salaries incomparable to similar workers in other places. Of more concern, the same workers tend to pilfer revenue collected, and denting the company capability to run operations smoothly. Even maintenance or other operational costs tend to be overinvoiced keeping the company perpetually under the red line! Such harsh realities render a big operator a “wreck train” by design. It is designed to fail while enriching the managers of a failed entity!
Over time, the company can’t deliver corporate objectives, and since it is under the waters hiking fares is agitated or else the operator blackmails a nation. Cough up the cash or the business is gone fold for good leaving the urban transport sector in shambles attracting passengers’ wrath and discontent.
Thinking out of the box calls for appraisal of how our private transportation works, and drawing up a map forward from the lessons recorded. One thing notable in our private transportation industry is its resilience to sticking to a simple operation plan despite the government intrusive weight on its shoulders.
We need at least 5000 buses in Dar which are solar driven (EV Buses). That will reduce significantly upon running costs and contain pressures for fare hikes. That means the bodywork of those buses ought to be designed to act as solar panels necessary for charging the batteries. During incompatible weather times, empowered battery charging stations should sprawl all over convenient locales.
Management of those buses should be in the hands of the individuals. This way will begin to phase out a “big operator” mentality, and support a smaller guy. In order to achieve this, prospective operators must prove some relevant skills like competence in driving buses. Five to ten individuals will be issued a bus in the form of a loan conditional on remitting Tshs 50, 000/= every day to clear the debt. Arrears of more than 90 days will lead to automatic disqualification and the bus will be reallocated to another group or a person after proper re-evaluation of the bus worthiness.
This approach will create a minimum of 100, 000 new direct jobs and about a half of those as indirect ones. Fare collection will be efficient, there will be no top management to baby breast and running costs will be very minimal cushioning off pressures to hike fares.
Who will be the Ultimate losers?
Politicians who love to make long speeches about fixing Dar Transportation woes will have no role there where they have become notorious at putting up incompetent management to run down the urban transport business. Politicisation of Dar transport will be a thing of the past. Not anymore, will urban transport be a den of thieving managers and their supporting cast.
A decentralised urban transport system will be resilient since competition will be its mantra. There will be no need to expropriate huge swathes of land and hand it over to aliens. We ought to feel ashamed that we are willing to disown land ownership from our people in order not only to enrich foreigners with land but kill jobs and experience avenues for our own people to develop sustainable systems in urban transport.
No country in the world has developed without proper management of its own vital human resources, and Tanzanian politicians unwittingly are ignoring this fact. After the second World War, Japan embarked on ship building and kept picking up the tab for at least forty years before making profits. True, Japan after the second World War wasn’t a banana republic like Tanzania but China was. China’s industrial revolution has been successful entirely because it is home grown. So the question of level of development is immaterial to choose an appropriate development paradigm.
Tanzania’s path to industrial development is foreign dependent, and has no chance of success but will generate social upheavals, and civil unrest since domestic human resources have been excluded. Any development strategy must at all times have Tanzanians as its core engine of prosperity, while overlooking this is a recipe for disaster.
All arguments empowering aliens to manage our major means of the economy are archaic, outdated and have failed to incorporate Tanzania’s constitutional aspirations of African socialism and self-reliance. Arguing about disempowering our own people economically is a sacrifice to mint cash for the government is risible since it fails to comprehend a true definition of the government.
The government is for the people not for the bureaucracy that runs it. That is a proper definition of the government.
