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Time to grapple with problems plaguing our urban centres
2006-03-10 14:45:21
By Editor
A Glance at our cities and towns tells the same story on urban planning, structures and perhaps urban behaviour.
The City of Dar es Salaam, and most of the newly announced cities and towns do not have reliable master plans.
There is therefore a reason to believe that their shabby and unkept structures are an attribute of this organised chaos.
Mwanza, which in the 1950s and 1960s was reputed, as East Africa’s well-planned and cleanest town is today a pale of its shadow. It has become Mumbai of Africa.
The story is the same with Tanga, which gained prominence at the height of the sisal economy, but still maintains most of its old edifices. Arusha is grappling to modernise its buildings and services to match up to its new international status, but still has a long way to go.
But besides the poor planning, most of the towns suffer haphazard mushrooming of buildings without due regard to structure placement, which have in some cases been going on for the past forty years.
And because of this, most of our towns and cities experience dismal provision of social amenities and related services like water, power, health, schools, public transport and even recreation grounds.
It is appalling that none of them can boast of a functioning sewerage system. This has left the residents vulnerable to a myriad of health hazards and it has in the past manifested in the regular outbreaks of related epidemics.
In addition, most of our towns and cities do not have sufficient road networks. There are also no streets and avenues to serve them, and where they do exist they are only ravines of potholes with no names, signposts or streetlights.
Many of the houses, to say the least, are not edifices that many Tanzanians can be proud of in the modern age state-of-the-art architectural designs.
This does not mean that we do not have good houses, but most of what we have can hardly be said to be commensurate with the status of our economy. Yet most of them carry no numbering.
It is known the world over, that street naming and house numbering are key geographical aspects for one to establish a location.
They not only facilitate location, but also help in curbing crime and carrying out business operations.
Living in such a labyrinth, while city, municipal and town councils get billions of shillings in their vote heads every year is a breach of one of the cardinal contracts between the leaders and the wananchi.
Perhaps the most disgusting area when it comes to the question of town planning and aesthetics of cities and towns is the way businesspersons do conduct their operations.
There is every reason to hold them accountable and censored for the manner in which they transact their businesses.
Talk of the advertisers’ billboards, which litter the cities’landscape, are placed wherever advertisers want, and at their own advantage and convenience.
Some are precariously located that they indeed obstruct the vision of motorists and risk causing accidents.
The Fourth Phase Government has just started work and it is our hope that with the new leadership, it is time the administration took stock of all the problems bedeviling our cities and towns with the aim to finding out solutions to them.
What is needed is for the leadership to chart out new paradigms that can phase out the inherent problems facing these urban centres with a view to changing the entire situation altogether.
What the leadership should bear in mind is that like other people elsewhere, Tanzanians deserve to live a decent life and in nice, clean places.
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