The Invisible Infrastructure Crisis
Tanzania has spent the past decade transforming the Port of Dar es Salaam from a bottleneck into a gateway. Deepened berths, a revamped terminal operated by DP World, and digital systems like TANCIS and TeSWS now promise smoother cargo flows. But traders still complain of delays. Containers still sit idle. Despite millions being poured into hard and soft infrastructure, the user experience hasn’t caught up. What explains the gap?
The answer lies in governance, the invisible infrastructure of institutions, accountability mechanisms, and data-sharing protocols. While cranes and berths can be bought, actual efficiency is earned through how well these moving parts coordinate. And right now, Dar port’s governance remains a patchwork of overlapping mandates, under-defined rules, and under-represented users.
Understanding Port Governance: Institutions, Not Individuals
Unlike what most reform narratives imply, port inefficiency isn’t just about corrupt officers or slow clerks. It’s about how power, data, and decision-making are structured across actors, TPA, TRA, terminal operators, regulators, shipping agents, and private developers like DP World. At Dar, this structure is unusually tangled.
TPA operates as both landlord and regulator, overseeing private operators like TEAGTL and managing key berths. The Tanzania Revenue Authority plays a dominant role in customs clearance, while systems like TANCIS and PCS attempt to digitalize these interactions, but remain governed by siloed mandates. Add a 30-year concession with DP World covering Berths 4–7, and you get a complex hybrid with unclear lines of responsibility. The result is predictability without accountability: even when a container is delayed, no single actor is liable.
In short, the problem is not the absence of systems, but the lack of governance clarity over those systems.
Key Governance Bottlenecks at Dar Port
Several critical gaps define the governance challenge:
- Regulatory conflict: TPA both operates and regulates certain terminal activities. This dual role dilutes accountability and often delays decisions, especially in disputes involving private operators.
- Siloed digital infrastructure: Platforms like PCS (Port Community System), TANCIS (Customs), and TeSWS (Single Window) were designed to streamline clearance, but they do not talk to each other effectively. Agencies continue to print documents that are already uploaded elsewhere, and tracking container status across platforms remains inconsistent.
- Limited user inclusion: Reforms and digital systems are often rolled out without meaningful input from actual users, clearing agents, importers, and SMEs. This leads to systems that are technically functional but practically frustrating. There is no formal mechanism for port users to participate in governance decisions or policy reviews.
These governance issues are now under active scrutiny. Parliament has recently called for legal reforms to separate regulatory and operational roles at the port. TradeMark Africa and business associations are also pressing for integrated reforms beyond physical upgrades. The real challenge? Making governance visible, and functional.
Lessons from Elsewhere: Why Good Governance Outperforms Big Budgets
Tanzania is not alone in discovering that infrastructure does not automatically yield efficiency. Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) offers a cautionary tale: despite billions invested, Mombasa’s port-SGR link faced resistance from transporters due to poor stakeholder engagement, inflexible policies, and opaque governance frameworks. Ethiopia’s dry port in Modjo similarly struggled due to weak coordination between customs, logistics providers, and port operators, undermining its throughput potential.
On the other hand, countries like Namibia and Singapore show what’s possible when governance is prioritized. Namibia’s Walvis Bay operates under a landlord model where the port authority governs, but private players operate terminals under strict service-level agreements (SLAs) and user-informed performance metrics. Singapore’s maritime cluster is fully digital, but more importantly, governed through participatory planning councils involving freight users, regulators, and trade unions alike.
The lesson is clear: infrastructure gives you capacity. Governance gives you results.
Toward a Fit-for-Purpose Governance Model for Dar
The future of Dar port depends less on physical expansion and more on governance architecture that aligns performance with accountability. Three bold reforms can unlock this:
- Establish an Independent Port Oversight Council
A multi-stakeholder body involving government, private sector, terminal operators, and freight forwarders, tasked with overseeing service quality, coordinating inter-agency reforms, and resolving complaints. This council should be legally backed, not consultative. - Separate Digital Governance from Operational Mandates
Transfer the PCS governance and data stewardship to a neutral agency or digital authority. This ensures no single actor dominates the data flow or has exclusive access to port intelligence, creating a level playing field for all users. - Enforce Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) with Performance Dashboards
Introduce real-time digital dashboards showing vessel turnaround time, customs clearance duration, and container dwell times by terminal. Make these public. Tie DP World’s and TPA’s revenue shares to these KPIs. Reward performance, not presence.
These reforms require not just policy shifts but cultural ones, where data transparency, inclusivity, and shared accountability replace discretion and institutional turf wars.
Political Will and Institutional Incentives
There are early signals of reform. In 2025, Tanzanian Members of Parliament called for a legal overhaul of port governance, targeting overlapping mandates and urging the separation of TPA’s regulatory and operational roles. President Samia Suluhu’s administration has signaled support for these shifts but emphasized coordination over confrontation.
Yet structural change demands more than political will. It demands realignment of institutional incentives. Currently, agencies like TPA and TRA benefit from opacity, they collect rents from delay, extract power from discretion, and face no real-time consequence for underperformance. Without restructuring these incentives through legislation, public dashboards, and oversight councils, any reform risks being merely cosmetic.
What Dar port needs now is not a new master plan. It requires a fundamental reform of its governance model, one that prioritizes users and makes data-driven accountability the standard, not the exception.
The Governance Test Dar Can’t Afford to Fail
Cranes or customs codes won’t determine Tanzania’s logistics future, but by the governance compact that binds its institutions, systems, and users together. We have built the port. We have linked it to a state-of-the-art railway. We have installed digital systems. Yet without clarity on who is responsible, who is accountable, and how users are empowered, the promise of Dar es Salaam as a regional trade powerhouse will remain unfulfilled.
The real challenge is not technical, it is institutional. Until we govern our ports with the same discipline we build them, our reforms will stall on the dock. The test for Tanzania now is whether we can shift from managing cargo to managing coordination; from boasting about systems to delivering for users.
This is a governance test we can’t afford to fail, because no amount of steel can carry a system weighed down by silence, opacity, and exclusion.
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