Modernization is often sold as a parade of gadgets, faster phones, slicker apps, and brighter screens. But for citizens, technology is not a fashion show; it is civic plumbing. It decides how you register a SIM, open a bank account, file a tax return, apply for a license, bid for a tender, or see where the ward budget went. In Tanzania, an increasing number of citizen–state encounters are mediated through code: mobile money rails, NIDA numbers, TRA portals, and e-procurement dashboards.
That code does not just make lines shorter. It encodes a politics. Digitization can produce digital wananchi, subjects who are logged, billed, and managed efficiently, but who cannot see or contest the system that governs them. Or it can produce digital raia, allowing citizens to trace decisions, appeal denials, download contracts, and use phones not only to pay but also to ask questions. The difference is not the device; it’s design.
The question before us is simple: will Tanzania’s digital transition make the state more visible to citizens, or only make citizens more visible to the state? If every portal that watches us also lets us watch back, budgets, timelines, and complaints, modernization will build citizenship. If it doesn’t, it will merely streamline obedience.
Wananchi huingia kwenye mitandao; raia hujenga mitandao ya uwajibikaji. Subjects enter networks; citizens build networks of accountability.
Everyday Tech as Civic Plumbing
Walk through a typical month and count the codes. Your NIDA number anchors everything: SIM registration, bank KYC, exam registration, and electoral roll. Your phone is your wallet: school fees, medical payments, market purchases, utility bills, and even tax obligations flow through mobile money rails. When TRA needs you, you meet it on a portal, TIN registration, VAT filing, EBM receipts, and customs clearance. If you sell to the government, you meet it again on e-procurement, digital tenders, bids, and invoices. Even a local business license now often begins online.
These are not neutral conveniences. They are the pipes through which the state delivers and demands. Their architecture decides whether the default is service or permission. A portal that shows service standards, queue positions, and appeal buttons encodes rights. A portal that only says “request received” and “pending” encodes patience. A procurement site that publishes tender documents, bid prices, and winning criteria invites scrutiny. One that only announces winners invites suspicions.
Modernization also shifts the costs of citizenship. Data bundles replace travel to district HQs; “come tomorrow” is replaced by “system offline.” Those are gains if systems are reliable and accessible; they are new barriers if bandwidth is expensive, language is technical, or helplines don’t answer. For small traders, digitization of permits can be liberation, or a maze without a map.
Most importantly, digital rails change who learns what. If, at ward noticeboards and on phones, citizens can see transfers received, contracts signed, school capitation spent, and clinic stocks on hand, technology becomes a school of citizenship. If they cannot, technology is just a new counter with a brighter screen.
Modernization is not a “tech sector” hobby. It is the new face of the republic.
The Promise, Efficiency, Reach, Transparency
Used well, digitization is a civic equalizer. It can collapse distance, standardize decisions, and make corruption harder, not by sermon, but by structure.
Efficiency. Licensing, IDs, tax returns, TINs: what took days can take minutes. Standard forms prevent “discretion” from becoming a tariff. Back-office automation reduces human bottlenecks and the incentive to “speed things up” informally. Citizens experience the state as predictable rather than personal.
Reach. Mobile money has already done what decades of branch-building could not: pull rural and informal citizens into a formal financial circuit. When fees and taxes can be paid where people live and work, compliance rises. When services are one USSD away, households spend less time and money navigating bureaucracy.
Transparency. If the government publishes dashboards, procurement lots, contract values, delivery milestones, and ward allocations, citizens can monitor without permission. A head teacher can check capitation transfers; a parent can verify textbook deliveries; a vendor can see who won and at what price. Transparency is not a press release; it is a live ledger.
Trust. Efficiency and transparency, when combined, can rebuild civic trust. When citizens see that what they pay buys something they can verify, such as cleaner water points, faster ID issuance, and stocked clinics, compliance becomes less coerced and more consensual. TRA’s online systems, for example, have reduced some friction for compliant taxpayers and offered clearer channels for queries; when that’s paired with visible local delivery, raia instincts strengthen.
But the promise only holds if design serves the citizen. An app that speeds payment but hides appeal rights is a collections tool. A portal that lists tenders but not evaluation criteria is a heater. To turn tech’s promise into public value, every digital door that asks something of citizens must show, in return, standards, timelines, and proof.
The Peril, Tech Without Accountability
Digitization magnifies whatever politics it finds. If the underlying instinct is control, tech will centralize it. If the instinct is service, tech will scale it.
The dangers are real:
Surveillance drift. When ID, SIM, mobile money, and movement can be linked without robust data protection and independent oversight, citizens become legible in ways the state is not. The chilling effect is subtle: people self-censor, avoid associations, and treat lawful protest as unsafe, not because a law changed, but because a network did.
Exclusion by design. A missing NIDA number, a mismatched date of birth, or a dead SIM suddenly means a citizen cannot register for exams, open an account, or access a service. When redress is slow or opaque, digitization becomes a gate, not a bridge. The people modernization was supposed to help, first, the rural, elderly, and women with lower device access, who are last in line.
Extraction without explanation. Digital rails can become irresistible tax taps. The mobile money levy backlash revealed a harsh truth: when citizens perceive e-taxation as unfair or disconnected from visible services, they push back. Modern rails make it easy to collect data at scale; they also facilitate the organization of objections at scale by citizens.
Showcase politics. Portals launched with ceremony, rarely maintained; apps that crash; “e-government” that moves queues from corridors to call centers. When delivery lags, cynicism grows, and citizens learn that modernization is a new costume for old habits.
The principle is straightforward: Teknolojia bila uwazi ni kamera ya hofu, si dirisha la haki. Technology without transparency is a camera of fear, not a window of rights. Every system that makes citizens visible to the state must, by design and by law, make the state visible to citizens, with precise data, established standards, and effective redress. Otherwise, we are not building a digital republic; we are digitizing subjecthood.
Tanzania’s Digital Crossroads
Tanzania’s digital footprint is already large enough to matter, and uneven enough to be a choice. On the asset side, we are a mobile-money country: millions move value daily with just a few taps; merchants accept phones as payment terminals; and households budget using USSD. E-government is expanding: tax portals are becoming routine, business registration is available online, and some licenses and permits are now fully digital. Vision 2050 codifies ambition: 70% of citizens will be digitally skilled, 80% of services will be online, and a quarter of young people will be in tertiary education.
Yet the frictions are visible. Infrastructure thins as you leave city centers; device and data costs still ration access; local-language interfaces lag sophistication. Policy signals have been mixed: efforts to expand e-services sat alongside periods of tighter online controls; the mobile-money levy demonstrated how quickly citizens react when the digital rail feels like a toll road rather than a public good. Rights architecture is under-built: data protection is incomplete; independent oversight of digital systems is weak; shutdown norms remain ambiguous.
This is the crossroads. Tanzania can leverage its mobile-money advantage and expand portals to standardize services, publish live dashboards down to the ward level, and make redress clickable. Or it can slide into a pattern where technology mainly improves the state’s visibility of citizens while leaving citizens squinting at the state. The first path turns phones into public tools, budget checkers, service meters, and petition channels. The second path turns them into silent counters, fast for paying, slow for questioning.
Modernization is not an inevitable process; it is a deliberate design decision. The rails are laid. What travels on them, service or surveillance, receipts or rhetoric, depends on the rules we write now.
Guardrails for a Digital Republic
To ensure code builds raia, not just digital wananchi, anchor five guardrails in law and practice:
1) Open data by default. Publish budgets, transfers to councils, procurement lots, contract values, delivery milestones, machine-readable, in Kiswahili, by ward. If a figure cannot be shown, it should not be spent.
2) Right to digital redress. Every e-service must display standards (including time, documents, and fees), a real-time queue position, and an appeal button that triggers a clock and a human response. Denials must cite rules; unresolved cases escalate automatically.
3) Inclusion by design. Fund rural broadband; subsidize entry-level smart devices; require Swahili interfaces and USSD parity; roll out community digital literacy via schools, libraries, and faith centers. Accessibility is a right, not an afterthought.
4) Digital rights framework. Pass a strong data-protection law; create an independent regulator; prohibit arbitrary shutdowns; require court orders for data access; publish transparency reports. Systems that involve citizens must be transparent and accessible to them.
5) Citizen dashboards and APIs. Build public portals and open APIs for budgets, contracts, and KPIs; allow media, CSOs, and startups to build scorecard apps. Rules you can screenshot empower citizens; you cannot ignore them.
Bonus guardrail: independent audits of major systems (ID, tax, procurement) with public summaries. Trust grows when systems are checked by someone other than the builder.
When every click that asks something of citizens is paired with a click that shows something to citizens, modernization stops being a slogan. It becomes a civic instrument.
Coding Citizens, Not Subjects
Technology encodes power. The same portal can be a service charter or a gate; the same database can be a registry of rights or a map of fear. Tanzania’s modernization offers a rare chance to build citizenship in code, making budgets legible, timelines enforceable, and redress accessible with just one tap.
If tech opens government and lowers barriers, it will raise raia, informed, insistent, capable of using facts in public. If it hides data and smooths only the path of extraction, it will manufacture digital wananchi, efficiently managed, scarcely empowered.
Wananchi huingia kwenye mitandao; raia huandika kanuni. Subjects log in; citizens write the rules. The test of our digital future is simple: can citizens use their phones to see and shape the state, not just to pay it? If yes, we are building a republic worthy of the name.
