Transforming Tanzania: An open letter to H.E. Dr. Samia Suluhu Hassan, President of the United Republic of Tanzania

Your excellency and my beloved president,

Allow me to first express my deepest admiration at your untiring efforts to leads this nation towards greater heights. I called you beloved, not simply because I am in awe of you or am looking for some accolades or recognition. I call you beloved because I am a beneficiary of your good work in presiding over our beloved country. I call you beloved, because indeed you are loved by many of my fellow country men. It is my prayer that you continue to live up to our expectations and that Almighty God will grant you the courage, fortitude, wisdom and strength to steer us towards our destiny as a united people.

I am well aware that a public forum is not necessarily the best of places to air one's opinions and thoughts especially when they are addressed to the seats of power. Indeed, some things are best communicated in private. So I will be wise enough to reserve some of the thoughts I have to the day we are fortunate enough to meet face to face, but be advised that they are not of a nature that is a national emergency otherwise I would have used the required channels to communicate them. It is just that some concepts are so far outside the box that they will rouse different responses, feelings and emotions and require deep thought and courage to embrace as they run against the grain and the status quo.

With this in mind let me get to the points I would like to address. A number of months ago I met with some people at a public event. We began discussing some of the issues concerning our country, including the vast natural resources we have and our inability to fully exploit them to our advantage. It is obvious that we are a nation that is in a world that is governed by a system that we do not have much control over. The number one driver of the world is of course wealth and finances associated with it. As a nation we inherited a system of governance, a system of financial administration and trade that we did not invent or control. To this very day we see nations beginning to assert a de fact rebellion against the world order. The Middle East has seen a defection from the petrol-dollar. The BRICS nations are looking at intra-trade in their own currencies. Gold has now been restored as the darling of actual value, as opposed to values based on speculation, but with stiff opposition from digital currencies.

As we discussed about issues like our investment in the Julius Nyerere Hydro-power project as well as the ongoing agreements to exploit our natural gas, I put forward an argument that posed a question: What if Tanzania was a corporate entity or large scale business concern and you, your excellency, happened to be it's CEO or Managing Director? How would you approach running the company and assure it's shareholders, the citizens and residents of this country (and God if I might add as the one who bestowed us with this land) that we would be a profitable concern? As a CEO you have been handed assets including roughly $70 billion dollars worth of gold and $140 billion worth of natural gas for starters and that is only two assets out of trillions of dollars more of assets including 60 million people, huge tracts of arable land, forests, game reserves, ocean and coastline and more. Now consider that you have an annual budget of around $20 billion or so to run the company and give annual dividends to the shareholders. In the meantime you also have a debt of around $35 billion to service as well. Notice that I have only included two assets and deliberately so.

Anyone can clearly see the challenge you have. This is why I would propose that you look at the lowest hanging fruits and find a way to rapidly pull us out of debt and make us a net lender, however lofty a goal that might be. That seems far fetched and impossible, but let's give it a shot. If I were the CEO of Tanzania Ltd, or Tanzania Inc., I would immediately look at quickly signing off the pending gas deal and even offer sweeter terms to our Norwegian friends involved. Norway has been a country that has had an exemplary record of supporting our nation and also managing its wealth from natural resources. We also know that we need to implement a transition from wood and charcoal for cooking as rapidly as possible. We also know that the climate summits are looking at a transition from carbon based fuels and natural gas is one of them.

Further delays to the utilization of the gas and hydrocarbons we have will cause us to be penalized not too far in the future when we exploit those resources for production. We either use it now or pay the price for delaying in the hope that we get better terms. Drilling for gas and extracting it is not a cheap endeavor but Equinor has the resources. I would have signed an agreement that provided our nation with a guarantee of funds that would help us run this corporate powerhouse. If the proven reserves of LNG are 57tcf, their approximate value is $150-170 billion. The value of the project is around $43 billion. If we take out an additional $40 billion running costs over the span of the wells we still have $60-80 billion in profits. I would then ask the consortium to get us $10 billion a year for the next three years up front which I would then use in our national budget for those three years the funds become available.

Having acquired those funds I would immediately cut taxes for those three years to stimulate investment and growth. I would reduce VAT to 10% and corporate tax to 15%. I would also remove many of the levies meant to generate revenue shortfalls as our revenues increase and we begin to pay off our external debt and finance our development projects from receipts of the increased revenue from investments and increased production in other sectors. I am sure some simple math will show that the $10billion will cover part of the revenue drop from that adjustment, but that the immediate effect of increased compliance and ease of collection would increase our internal revenue, and the increased production stimulus would also increase our FDI and forex inflows. All this from just one simple decision to make the extraction of our gas profitable for Equinor/Shell as well as for our country. Meanwhile our other sectors would experience a boom if also handled well, like agricultural production, mineral extraction, tourism as well as industrial growth.

This is but one area I would look at as an immediate action. The other would be harnessing the potential of small-holder farmers. There is a lot being done for by your government, and especially our Minister of Agriculture, but I believe more emphasis needs to be laid on empowering these farmers to increase production responsibly so as not to damage our fertile soils with so-called 'modern' agriculture that relies on mono-cropping and the heavy use of artificial fertilizers and chemical pesticides that will destroy the ecology. I also do not believe embracing large scale agriculture and heavy mechanization is the panacea either.

Let us not also get our farmers out of jobs to make way for so-called large investments and farms. A more inclusive approach of enabling these farmers to increase productivity on their small plots (our last census puts the number at around 11 million households) with proven agro-ecological methods that preserve the microbiology of our soils and produce nutritious food in return, as well as mitigating climate change caused by cutting down vegetation and leaving soil bare. Improving the marketing systems so that farmers get better prices for their crops would be a good start, and I see you have demonstrated that with the NFRA warehouse in Katavi just this weekend. With 40% average post harvest losses storage and irrigation should be a major priority of ours, your excellency. Subsidies of inputs can be put aside for the moment because increasing production only to get lower prices is counter productive for farmers.

Your excellency there is an early warning of a pending La Nińa phenomenon. This will most likely result in lowered rainfall to many of our uni modal pattern areas, which are our breadbaskets. While most large scale farms will have irrigation, millions of farmers have yet to access irrigation in their plots, let alone the schemes. Without an emergency effort to address this we will find ourselves with a food deficit very rapidly. There are affordable irrigation solutions that even do not require electricity and are suitable for one or two acre farms as long as there is a water source within 100 to 200 metres. KickStart International provides these pumps at a very low cost and has applied for removal of taxes and possible subsidies so that they can be bought at around 250,000/- from the Shs 420,000/- they cost now. You already provided for borehole drilling machines nationwide. Perhaps now would be a good time to accelerate their use. I would take a serious look at how this can be implemented so that pumps are on the ground by November when La Nińa kicks in.

Even if it does not, we will at the very least have introduced irrigation to millions of farmers and they will also be able to grow vegetables and other high value crops off season and improve their incomes with immediate effect. Farmers are not averse to buying pumps as long as they have the assurance of a market for the increased production. Banks are not unhappy to provide loans to these farmers either. Let us decide to fight for them and make them succeed.

Tanzania can be transformed in 10 years or ten months. The average crop cycle is 3 months. To recap, Mheshima Raisi, it takes 3 to five years to build an LNG facility. It takes one month to set up a 20 acre drip-line irrigation scheme for farmers with a borehole and reservoir and even less time with manual pumps. My humble request is that you consider these two low lying fruit and I believe all Tanzanians will be behind you if you articulate it to us and resolve to carry it out. Mungu ibariki Africa. Mungu ibariki Tanzania.