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Youth business forum should also ponder about overseas investments
2006-05-05 08:09:14
By Editor
There are a number of ongoing efforts aimed at creating and ascertaining the position of an indigenous local business class that would act as the basis to spur economic growth in Tanzania.
This process has a long, strenuous and protracted historical background. It all started initially in the late eighties with efforts of the businesspersons to turn the private sector so that it becomes the engine of the economy.
This liberal process or economic movement crystalised later into the formation of commercial chambers in the nineties and recapping with the Tanzania National Business Council (TNBC) in the 2000s.
This groundwork, having being laid, it became easier for Tanzanian businesspersons to meet their foreign counterparts for dialogue on capital movement, investments, technology and trade.
Thanks to this process, Tanzania is currently enjoying roundtable meeting with business persons from other countries every year from which they conduct trade investment and capital products from across the globe.
Nevertheless, this paradigm, despite the economic viability it has had and with the entire intended purposes it is serving; it is not without certain shortcomings.
This is so particularly when it comes to think of the nation as a socio-economic entity that has to have some people as the leit motif.
Besides the much success associated with it, the paradigm has all along concentrated on a small fraction of businesspersons, and there are doubts if with such a small figure it would be able to spur the future required economic growth.
The nation needs a much larger figure, numerically and in qualitatively terms, to prod in the present state of affair, from a resourceful, but poor undeveloped economy to a burgeoning social market one where the mass of people no longer wallow in the aegis of poverty.
The futuristic strategy undertaken by the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC) in collaboration with the Tanzania Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (TCCIA) this week in which youths formed their own business forum, we believe is an answer to the prototype one and a move in the right direction.
The move, according to the Executive Director of TIC, Emmanuel Ole Naiko, is aimed at creating about 3 million young businesspersons, the kind of South Africa’s economic revolution effected over the past ten years.
It is our view that though the programme looks a novel one, it is time overdue. South Africans undertook the strategy by the very time they were turning on the lights of political reforms.
This was also the case with Malaysia in their case of the Bahmaputra (small-scale entrepreneurs) against the intruding Chinese effected in the seventies.
In our case we went through the forty years of independence creating neither a tangible strong upper class nor a class of middle businesspersons.
Yet this is a real and haunting void in our economy that demands to be filled immediately, in creating the economic growth that we require.
The question then is what should be done to reach this noble goal? Our humble view is that, perhaps it would be necessary that we jump or run where South Africans and Malaysians walked.
And, should this be the case, would it not be pertinent for the nation to think of creating overseas firms as well, in the way South Africa did so that Tanzanians could as well invest outside to beef up the country’s balance of payments.
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