Dar es Salaam key African regional platform centre for communication.

Editorial Cartoon.

Africa has 52 cities with populations of  one million or higher – the same number as for Europe.

 

Dar es Salaam which is the largest city in Tanzania and the country’s trading hub has a population of five million people.

 

This is just one of the facts revealed in a new African Development Bank (AfDB) report, titled Tracking Africa’s Progress in Figures.

 

The report describes urbanisation as “a pan-African phenomenon”. It is estimated that between 1960 and 2011, Africa’s urban population rose from 19 per cent to 39 per cent. By 2040 it is expected that 50 per cent of Africans will live in urban areas.

 

In the same vein, Dar es  Salaam is listed as the African city that will experience the most growth between 2010 and 2025, followed by Nairobi (Kenya), Kinshasa (DRC), Luanda (Angola) and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).

 

PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a world leading blue chip, says Tanzania’s commercial capital of Dar es Salaam and Cameroonian capital city of Douala are key African regional platform centres for communication, while Ghana’s Accra and Nigeria’s Lagos leaders in culture, and Nairobi is the continental hub for financial services.

 

Indeed this is big news to all those who have our country at heart. The high rise building in Dar es Salaam add to the country’s  splenduor.

 

Bank of Tanzania (BoT) twins' towers building is a tall story depicting the beauty of Dar es Salaam.

 

The  PwC new report ‘Into Africa – the Continent’s Cities of Opportunity’ highlights the potential for the continent’ launched at the African CEO Forum in Geneva 2015 recently, saying Dar es Salaam is also the continent’s leading city in terms of GDP growth, while Kenya’s capital, Nairobi outsmarts all African cities in FDI attraction.

 

The report also says that outside the top five cities, Rwanda’s Kigali finishes at the very top for both ease of doing business and health spending, while the Ivorian capital; of Abidjan ranks number one in both middle-class growth and diversity.

 

In another development, the Global Economic Prospects (GEP) report released recently by the World Bank has showed that economies in developing countries including Tanzania is expected to grow by 4.8 per cent this year and edge up to 5.4 per cent in between 2016/17. 

 

All said Tanzania  should  now strive  for economic recovery and  a key focus area must be a transformation of the manufacturing sector. Innumerable and diverse measures and actions are a prerequisite for any substantive economic recovery, policies in respect of the agricultural, mining, commercial, tourism, financial and services sectors. 

 

However, one of the key areas that require major positive actions and reforms is the manufacturing sector.

 

Tanzania's manufacturing sector was, and can once again be, a major contributor to the economic wellbeing of the nation. At one time, Tanzania had the second largest and developed industrial infrastructure in all of Southern Africa states.

 

It was Tanzania's second largest employer of labour after agriculture which generated considerable foreign exchange through substantial exports to all countries in the region and further afield, had a major beneficial impact upon the downstream economy, and was a significant contributor to the fiscus.

 

Tragically, that is no longer the case. The sector has contracted markedly, with great reductions in numbers employed, and massive decreases in volumes of production. Many in the industry have wholly discontinued operations, and most of those still in operation have no alternative but to downsize to a major extent in a desperate struggle to survive.

 

Radical, dynamic and innovative actions are necessary if the manufacturing sector is to be set on a path to recovery and growth. 

 

To some extent, those actions must be pursued by the sector itself, aided therein by other economic sectors, but the overriding need is for government to pursue, urgently and vigorously, measures that are facilitative of that recovery.