TANZANIA: Government Drops Aid Pleas Until Corruption Mastered

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Barbara Borst

PARIS, Nov 18 1994 (IPS) - In a rare decision Tanzanian officials postponed their pleas for nearly one billion dollars in additional aid until they can deal with an urgent domestic problem — that of raging corruption.

Tanzania was to have met with international donors at the World Bank’s Paris offices on Thursday and Friday but has put off that meeting and its request for 940 million dollars until next year, Tanzanian and bank officials said.

President Ali Hassan Mwinyi, in a statement on Nov. 9, launched a campaign against tax evasion, unfair exemptions and corruption that he said are costing the government “a significant amount of its import taxes” — estimated at currently 140 million dollars a year.

“I will not allow the government to go to the donor community with a cap in hand when we the Tanzanians have not played our part to raise funds necessary to educate our children, to provide health services and to maintain our economic infrastructure,” he declared.

Mwinyi ordered Tanzania’s auditor general and the attorney general during the next three months “to lead a full investigation into each case to determine whether a violation of the law has taken place and to prosecute offenders in accordance with the standing law of the country”.

“I want to make it absolutely clear that there will be no negotatiations of the taxes to be paid,” he stated, adding that public officials as well as private are to be brought to justice. Samuel Mdee, Tanzania’s representative in Paris, said the president’s instructions to the attorney general and the auditor general are an unusual move that is “trying to breath new life into the institutions that deal with this.”

It marks an intensification of efforts begun with a leadership code and a presidential commission of inquiry in the 1960s and an anti-corruption squad in the 1970s.

“With human nature, corruption is not something unknown. All you have to do is look at Britain, Italy, Eastern Europe, Japan and you see it,” Mdee said. “Every time it rears its ugly head, we try to fight it.”

Patrice Dufour, communications officer for the World Bank in Paris, said Tanzania’s anti-corruption stance is “not something that came up by chance but is completely in the order of the day”.