Tanzania
Country snapshot
Authors: Ajoy Datta and Fletcher Tembo. More on scope, methodology and sources.
Economic, social and governance indicators
Tanzania is relatively stable politically and socially compared with some of its neighbours.
It has one of Africa’s fastest growing economies, growing on average 7% annually since 2000. In 2020, the World Bank upgraded the Tanzanian economy from a low-income to a lower-middle-income country, with an estimated per capita gross national income of $1,080 in 2019. However, economic transformation has been elusive.
Poverty decreased by 8% over ten years according to the 2019 Tanzania Mainland Poverty Assessment, down from 34% in 2007 to 26% in 2018. Most of this reduction in poverty was seen in rural areas (where most poverty is concentrated), followed by urban areas outside Dar es Salaam (World Bank).
Tanzania is in the low human development category, scoring 0.538 on the Human Development Index in 2017, putting 154th out of 189 countries and territories. This was a 45% increase from its score in 1990 (UNDP, 2018). Tanzanian society is also increasingly becoming equal in both education and wealth (Maliti, 2019).
Reductions in poverty and improvement in human development outcomes have come about due to a sustained increase in access to basic services, suggests the World Bank. Surveys conducted by Afrobarometer verify this. They suggest that, since 2014, service delivery appears to have improved in sectors prioritised by the public — health, water, education and electricity — with fewer Tanzanians reporting difficulties, delays and demands for bribes. However, poorer citizens were more likely to report difficulties and delays than their wealthier counterparts (Msafiri, 2018).
Governance indicators scores have fallen somewhat in recent years. On transparency and accountability, Tanzania scores 42 out of 100. On the 2020 Ibrahim Index of African Governance, an improvement over the past five years. On voice and accountability, the country scores 32 out of 100 on the Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2019 — a reduction of 7 points over the past five years. And in the Global Corruption Barometer 2019, 50% of citizens agreed that “Ordinary people can make a difference in the fight against corruption” — a reduction of 5 percentage points in the past five years.
Political context
Historical and political factors
Note: President Magufuli passed away on 17 March 2021, after this report was written. He was replaced by his deputy Samia Suluhu Hassan.
In 1992 multiparty politics was introduced. But the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party has continued to dominate since Tanzania’s independence in 1961. A strong base of the ruling party was in part to achieve national stability, helped by co-opting security forces and preventing organised opposition from emerging.
In the 2015 election, Party for Democracy and Progress (‘Chadema’) emerged as a formidable opposition, winning 40% of the vote. But they were defeated by John Pombe Magufuli, who set about centralising power.
In the run up to the 2020 elections, Magufuli systematically repressed the opposition and the media. He subsequently won the presidential election by a large margin, amid opposition allegations of fraud (Andreoni, 2017; Eriksen, 2018; Freedom House, 2020). #
Horizontal accountability mechanisms are weak. While the National Assembly is more than a rubber-stamping institution, it has weak deliberation and oversight as the dominant political party holds the most seats.
Tanzania’s judiciary is both formally and politically weak. There is security of tenure, but high court judges are appointed by the president. The quality of the justice sector is compromised by lack of resources, poor wages, inefficiency and limited access to lower courts for most citizens (Gloppen 2003).
Historically, the public service has been used to reward members of the ruling coalition through appointments and ensuring election success. (initially politicians, the army, party administrators, civil servants and parastatal organisations and later private entrepreneurs)
This has weakened political accountability by creating an overlap between the party and state structures, from national to district and village levels (Harris et al., 2011). Appointments at district, regional and ministerial level have increasingly come from outside the public service and lack administrative experience and political savvy, reducing administrative efficiency (Eriksen, 2018).
In 2015, President Magufuli made fighting corruption a key theme of his administration. This was in order to find resources to fund an ambitious industrialisation agenda and address shortages in party financing. The government removed 16,000 ghost workers from its payroll in 2016. 10,000 public employees were removed for not being able to present their educational qualifications. Magufuli also fired several key civil servants, thereby dismantling the existing clientelist network and replacing it with a new one.
The president has enjoyed huge popularity among the public for taking these actions (helped also by increasing the government budget allocation for free education).
However, it has also created a culture of fear and uncertainty within the civil service and political establishment, which may hinder reform of public services (UNICEF, 2017).
Despite some results, Magufuli’s vertical approach to anti-corruption has limitations. It has not had any impact on lower levels of the ruling coalition’s pyramidal structure. Centres of corruption have retained their power and resisted change (Andreoni, 2017).
The security services, who have been implicated in corruption cases, are shielded from prosecution. Meanwhile, key investment vehicles like public pension and social security funds are often diverted to politicians and speculative property projects, making root and branch reform unlikely (Eriksen, 2018).
Decentralisation-by-devolution was initiated in 1972 and strengthened significantly in the 1990s. While policy guidance and resource allocation remain strongly centralised, local governments control significant budgets.
However, decentralisation has not improved transparency, answerability or law enforcement. Instead, market reforms such as land reform have made local government important for businesses of all sizes and a valuable source of rents for officials, local politicians and the business community.
The distinction between central and local government is blurred by the presidentially appointed District Commissioners, who wield substantial — if often informal — power (Harris et al., 2011).
Industry
Tanzania has East Africa’s most developed extractive industries sector. Petroleum production and gold mining are critical to the government’s industrialisation ambitions and have the potential to boost national revenues and provide considerable rents to both the state and political and bureaucratic elites.
These industries have been the site of repeated legislative reform and target setting. For example, the power system master plan, which envisaged the share of coal in electricity generation moving from 0% to 35% and natural gas capacity to increase by more than 490% in the next 40 years.
However, the extractives industry faces various challenges. Mistrust has dominated the relationship between the public and private sector (Andreoni, 2017). During the country’s early history, the state intentionally hindered the development of private business in adopting characteristics of a development state and then adopted Ujamaa, a socialist ideology that seeks to strengthen the state and forge a national identity (Therkildsen & Bourgoin, 2012).
Despite economic reforms in the 1980s and the emergence of business interests and their incorporation into the ruling coalition, mutual suspicion persists (Eriksen, 2018).
Nevertheless, Magufuli signalled to the private sector that he is willing to engage in deal-making involving the allocation of rents for productive investments in industrial sectors but that he is willing to discipline those rents (Andreoni, 2017).
The technical integrity of bureaucracy in the mining sector was considered weak, with senior bureaucrats carrying out politician’s rent-seeking orders or being side lined over major policy, procurement and regulatory issues (Kelsall & Cooksey, 2011; Eriksen, 2018).
The petroleum sector’s development was hindered by a combination of questionable rent management and poorly coordinated policy and decision-making processes, which have prevented the sector from benefiting from positive market conditions.
Crucially, Eriksen (2018) suggests that the Ministry of Energy and Minerals is uninterested in joint planning or coordination with other ministries, which has enabled it to identify, isolate and capture potential rents. The mining sector is also grappling with its role in human rights violations, land grabs and environmental damage (BTI, 2020).
The current administration’s budget targets (based on the government’s industrialisation agenda) are ambitious and have required new sources of financing. Pederson and Kweka (2017) suggest that investments from the Global South (namely China, India and Mauritius) can more readily accommodate the ambiguities in the legal frameworks that govern investments such as land acquisition in Tanzania. Eriksen (2018) states that an increase in such investments may serve to underpin state–business relations that are not conducive to inclusive growth.
International engagement
Aid flows to Tanzania have been in decline for years. Aid as a percentage of the government budget reduced from 44% in 2004/5 to 7% in 2015/16.
Donor engagement has tended to be technical support in areas of strategic importance to the government. Examples include Norwegian support to the petroleum sector, Japanese support to the natural gas sector and UK support to education (Eriksen, 2018).
Tanzania’s commitment to international norms of governance and accountability has tailed off. This together with the decline in aid has left less room for donors to seek improvements in accountability and corruption (ibid).
Tanzania joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in 2009 and the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in 2011 — perhaps due to perceived improvements in international reputation (David-Barrett and Okamura, 2015). However, Eriksen (2018) suggests that Former President Kikwete’s personal commitment to these were not matched by transformational achievements, with Tanzania withdrawing from the OGP under Magufuli’s presidency in 2017.
Tanzania’s attitude towards the East African Community of which it is a member, is a cautious one. The government prefers to deal with its interests through bilateral relationships, as illustrated by its 2016 agreement with Uganda on routing Uganda’s pipeline for crude oil export through Tanzania (Africa Confidential, 2016).
Tanzania is regarded as being at risk from violent extremism that emanates from the regional epicentre of Somalia. It is less affected than countries like Kenya, though recent years have seen several terrorist incidents believed to be undertaken by groups either sympathetic to or directly affiliated with al-Shabaab.
Civil society and citizen engagement
Space for expressing dissenting views has become even more restrained over the last decade, whether these come from the opposition, the media or civil society (Freedom House, 2020; BTI, 2020).
Civil society now generally fears overstepping boundaries. CSOs and activists are faced with a choice between pursuing important but potentially controversial issues, such as extractives, or taking a more technocratic approach in support of public services.
Protests and demonstrations such as those against the Mtwara-Dar es Salaam pipeline in 2013 have been met by severe state reactions. In 2019, six NGOs were deregistered for “operating contrary to its objectives” (Freedom House, 2020). Eriksen (2018) suggests that the Tanzanian NGO sector tends to engage in low-level advocacy work dominated by activists close to the regime who choose to work on non-controversial topics.
Improving the business environment appears to be one of these non-controversial topics. For instance, through the donor-funded BEST-Dialogue programme, sectoral and national representative bodies have received support to lobbying for an improved business environment — helping to advance the government’s own economic interests.
This is in a context where modern professional CSOs are a relatively new phenomenon. Between 1993 and 2000 Tanzania experienced a 38-fold increase in the number of registered NGOs (from 224 to 8,499). Most of these were engaged in service delivery, but some NGOs sought to engage politically — influenced somewhat by the international community on which many were reliant for funding.
CSOs were initially concentrated in major cities. But a combination of decentralisation and the availability of donor funding has led to the growth of CSOs at the district level (Eriksen, 2018; Harrison, 2018).
The obligatory consultations with civil society and communities in drawing up Tanzania’s first Poverty Reduction Support Paper normalised the involvement of civil society in policy development. Changes such as reform to oversight institutions between 2005 and 2010 further opened up spaces for civil society.
However, the impact of these changes has been limited. Reforms have been reversed in response to the exposure of grand corruption, which underpinned the political settlement. This weakened the CCM — shown in the 2015 election where Magufuli’s share of the vote fell to 58%, the lowest ever for the ruling party.
For many organisations shrinking civic space is something of a background issue alongside other priorities and longer-term challenges (Harrison 2018). This is particularly true at the subnational level, where there is more routine interaction between CSOs and government and where this is more focused on service delivery than advocacy.
Certain forms of advocacy work appear to be less sensitive. For instance, paralegal organisations do not seem to be adversely affected. And some organisations have found ways to frame advocacy in less adversarial terms, wherein CSOs mediate dialogue rather than communicating messages themselves. For instance, civil society informant indicated:
‘It is possible to achieve a lot as a CSO in Tanzania as long as you are using a lot of evidence to challenge the status quo. In this case, your actions are perceived by the government as apolitical and the government can then consult you effectively. If you raise your head to then comment on issues that are associated with political party positioning, you are silenced…so donors must support evidence-generation by CSOs so that they can, through evidence, get a seat on the table with the government. This is how CSOs are seen as complementing government efforts.’ (Key informant interview, November 2020)
The relationship between CSOs and government in Tanzania is influenced by who has the funds, capacity and legitimacy to implement a project including those aimed at improving services. And given that it is rare either side has a monopoly on these resources, CSOs and government need each other (Harrison, 2018).
