{UAH} Allan/Edmund/Pojim/WBK: Dear Dr John, please send us some urban experts to sort out Kampala - Comment
|
12:37 PM |
No comments |
Dear Dr John, please send us some urban experts to sort out Kampala
On Wednesday last week, the foreign minister in Dar es Salaam was a happy man. The government of Kuwait made a donation of 300 wooden desks to Tanzania in order to help the country's education sector serve as many children as possible.
The Kuwaiti ambassador handed over the desks at an official ceremony covered and broadcast a few hours later across the country on national television.
The happiness of the Tanzanian officials demonstrates the importance of gifts from friends who come to your assistance when you embark on an important project, in this case the provision of universal education.
The lesson East Africans can learn from this event is to assist sister countries using what is within their means, so as to give our societies a big push forward. For a start, Tanzania can donate 300,000 desks to Burundi and South Sudan without even feeling a pinch.
They can just harvest a couple of hectares from the vast forest reserves and task students in technical vocational colleges to make the desks as part of their course exams to ensure quality and voila! 150,000 desks for each of the EAC's most needy member states.
As the richest nation in the Community, Tanzania can follow up with a nice little present to each of the other sister states like giving three million cubic metres of gas to Kenya.
This would be a big boost to Kenya as it could cater for several months' cooking energy requirements for all their middle-class homes and save many trees in this era of climate change.
To Rwanda, Tanzania can give three million kilogrammes of beans. They just need to deploy the national youth service to open up one hundred hectares, plant three seasons in less than a year on it and deal a major blow to food inflation in Kigali. And as for Uganda, Tanzania should donate us some urban organisational capability.
If you haven't been to Dar es Salaam for about a year and you visit the city today, you will be blown away by the decongestion that the Dar rapid transport system has achieved. Writing on this very page three years ago, I had pleaded that Tanzania lend its works minister, one John Pombe Magufuli, to Uganda to bring some sanity to our infrastructure development.
Of course, the suggestion now is not feasible as Magufuli has since become president. But Ndugu Magufuli can lend us some of the people he worked with in sorting out the transport infrastructure of Tanzania so that thousands of people can stop sitting in stationary cars in Kampala instead of being at work or at home.
If we start providing these basics that we have within the East African Community, then rich friends like Kuwait can come in to help out with more meaningful things like computers and aircraft.
Joachim Buwembo is a social and political commentator based in Kampala. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment