Tanzania's railway culture

[John Ashworth]

TANZANIA’S RAILWAY: “A CULTURE THAT KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT MAINTENANCE”

Posted on 06 April 2010 by Railways Africa Editor

Jenerali Ulimwengu, writing in the Tanzanian press on 22 March about the railway concession, says: “Finally the deal has come unstuck and the government is once again saddled with an unwanted baby, having to dig deep into its pockets to get the wherewithal to run a service that is crucial to the country’s economy but has been neglected for decades.

“But more than the finances, the government is called upon to summon its intellectual resources to comprehend the absolute necessity of having a working railway system.
Need anyone be reminded of the importance of a sturdy and efficient railway network in buttressing the nation’s carrying capacity, servicing the interior and reaching out across our borders to link our landlocked neighbours to our ports?

“Does anybody need any more lessons in infrastructural longevity than the fact that the central line, laid at the dawn of the last century by the German colonists, still lies there – defying age, the elements and a culture that knows nothing about maintenance? Can any road, except those thoroughfares built by the Romans of antiquity, compete with this line, or with the Lunatic Line built by imperialist William Mackinnon to link Uganda to the Kenyan coast? The French word for railroad is chemin de fer, ‘road of iron,’ and it’s not for nothing.

“A major problem with our decision makers is that they hesitate to make decisions, real game-changing decisions that reinvent landscapes and liberate slices of geography to send the human spirit soaring through spaces hitherto unimagined. In this sense, they have remained painfully pedestrian, tied to the treadmill of mundane pursuits, tinkering at the edges of whatever they propose to tackle.”