The Express reported on 24th August that the ‘National Population and Household Census’ which took place in August had had to be extended by a few days in order to give time for all returns to be completed.

Census officers faced a variety of unexpected problems. In Mbulu District the hunter-gatherer Hadzabe people requested the provision of bhang, illicit brew, monkey meat and cigarettes before they agreed to be counted. The local Council offered to provide zebra meat but the Hadzabe refused to accept this saying they were not used to it. Eventually the Council provided them with monkey meat also. About 100 Hadzabe thanked the Government for considering their request and said the gesture had succeeded in bringing them together to be counted. Their request for bhang and illicit brew was not acted upon. Clan leader Salbogo Dofu asked the Government to allocate them special areas in order to avoid interference with the regular livestock and farming activities which destroyed their natural food. The reserved area should contain the fruits, roots and animals that they normally ate. According to the 1988 census there were 1,000 Hadzabe in the area but the number had since been reduced to about 800. They lived mostly in caves and were found in Karatu, Mbulu, and Ngorongoro districts in Arusha Region.

Some Maasai people maintained that being counted was against their customs and ten Italian tourists in Zanzibar refused to be counted on grounds that they were foreigners and were just travelling in the country. It took the hotel management half an hour to persuade them to comply with the rules.

Asked recently why Tanzania had been chosen to host a symposium on deepening democracy in Africa, UN Development Programme Resident Representative in Tanzania John Hendra was quoted in the Guardian as saying that it was chosen because of its low ranking, in terms of income per capita and the Human Development Index, and the number of achievements that Tanzania had made in moving forward in democratic governance. For example the transition to a multi-party system, the implementation of a number of government reforms, liberalisation of the media, efforts being made in the anti­corruption strategy and the home-grown and very important Muafaka in Zanzibar. The Representative went on to point out that urban poverty, particularly in Dar es Salaam, had declined from 28 % to 18% and that some of the indicators on primary education had been extremely positive. Primary enrolment had increased in the last few years more than it had in recent decades. He said that Tanzania was a model because of its sense of national ownership of its poverty alleviation policies.

Dar es Salaam has also been chosen by the IMF and the World Bank as the site of the first ever ‘Development Acceleration Regional Centre.’ This centre will be charged with the provision of locally­based technical assistance and training in the Fund’s core areas of expertise -macroeconomic policy, tax policy, revenue administration, public expenditure management, and building sound financial sectors -Sunday Observer.

A new Bill placed before Parliament has put local and foreign NGOs under state control. All NGO’s will be under a Council to be appointed by the Government. The Council will have the power to register and revoke NGO’s as well as to co-ordinate their activities. The Bill attracted much criticism especially from foreign aid donors. A US spokesman said his country believed in the right of NGO’s to operate in an environment free from overly burdensome registration requirements and regulatory oversight. The Head of the Africa section of the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) was quoted in Mtanzania as saying that to put civil organisations and NGO’s under restrictive legislation would have a negative impact on the country’s development. Sweden was working closely with NGO’s because it considered them to be part and parcel of its relationship with Tanzania. As the time for the Bill to be debated in Parliament approached, various NGO’s conducted what the Guardian described as ‘a spirited campaign’ against it. This involved dozens of lobbyists airing their concern that the Bill would be inconsistent with the rights to freedom of association.

Prime Minister Frederick Sumaye spent six hours ‘grilling’ district commissioners and council executive directors from 18 districts on November 26th They had allegedly failed to spend over 2bnl-for the development of primary education in their areas. The DCs and council directors carried bundles of papers in support of their cases. On November 15, Sumaye had described the DCs and directors as incompetent; he said the funds were lying idle in councils and primary school committee accounts while the shortage of classrooms still persisted in their areas. The amounts unused varied from Kahama (293.6m/-) to Morogoro (105.2m/-). Also on the list were the municipal councils of Kinondoni (l53.5m/-), Temeke (l49.0m/-) and Shinyanga (102m/-).

The Ombudsman’s Office for two World Bank agencies dismissed, at the end of October, the complaint by the Tanzanian Lawyers Environmental Action Team (LEAT), filed on behalf of the Small Scale Miners Committee of Kakola Village in Shinyanga, which had alleged that 52 miners were killed at Bulyanhulu Gold Mine in mid­1996. According to the ‘Assessment Report Summary’ on the complaint, dated October 21 and sent to the LEAT representative in Washington, and the ‘Office of the Compliance Advisory/Ombudsman’ (CAO) for the ‘Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency’ (MIGA) there was insufficient evidence to support the alleged deaths.

The report followed independent investigations by a Principal Specialist from the Ombudsman’s office. It noted that even though the CAO had no mandate to investigate allegations made against Tanzania, the events of 1996 took place before the World Bank Group had any interest in the mining operations and more than three years before MIGA offered a guarantee. However, as the allegations provided a risk to MIGA in its decision to offer a guarantee, the CAO was interested in examining the case. Referring to LEAT’s video evidence, the CAO said that it could not verify from the video, the location, date, timing or other details. The CAO found witnesses and other contemporaneous documentation that refuted the LEAT version of events.

On the issue of compensation paid to small scale miners at the time of the order to vacate the land in 1996, the CAO stated that this was a matter which fell within the government’s exclusive jurisdiction as at the time the mine was not a project of the World Bank Group.

The CAO had asked for a list of names of the 52 people alleged to be having been killed but neither LEAT nor the Small Scale Miners Committee had been able to supply such a list.

Amnesty International had recognized that the evidence for the deaths of 52 people relied on accounts supplied by people who were not present in the area at the time. Amnesty International never investigated the allegations itself and never went to the site or met with local people, eyewitnesses, the company or others. The LEAT President was later quoted in the Guardian as saying: “This report is completely biased. It favours MIGA. We shall tirelessly fight on. There are a lot of untrue and unjustified remarks in the report. It evades our submissions and evidence adduced. We have an uphill task to fight the giant Barrick Gold Company”.

The Guardian (1st October) reported that with the completion of the 85km highway linking Bagamoyo to Dar es Salaam there had been a rush by speculators and other wealthy Dar es Salaam people to buy plots of land close to the road. Local farmers had sold most of their plots and picked instead more remote farming land in the interior. Bagamoyo has a population of 30,000 which is now likely to increase quite rapidly. Several historic buildings in Bagamoyo have been renovated with the help of a Shs 80 million grant from the Swedish Government. Included were the fort-like house where slaves from up-country were kept before being shipped overseas, the old Boma, now used as the District Commissioner’s office, the Customs House, the Old Post Office and the market. Bagamoyo served briefly as the first capital of the country during the early-years of German colonial rule until it shifted to Dar es Salaam in 1892.