Isihaka Mchinjita, ACT-Wazalendo’s deputy national chairperson for Tanzania Mainland, may be an unfamiliar name in Tanzanian politics but has recently come up with his own analysis of youth unemployment and how to address it. His solution is to arraign upon embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds. Armed to the teeth with stats, he took us through a maze of factual information to draw up his findings and conclusions. This article regurgitates those stats and solutions and offers alternative insights on the same problem.
Isihaka Mchinjita claims that according to the research carried out by REPOA, more than a million youths are added to the job market every year. Our ability to create jobs is around 70,000 per year, meaning there are around 930,000 unemployed people joining the labour market every year. CCM has failed to provide the unemployed with jobs despite decades of promises. It is a case of broken promises after broken promises. He insisted vital sectors such as education and health are facing huge manpower shortages; the CCM government has not hired enough staff to plug those gaping holes.
He cited specific examples: Tamisemi’s budgetary report of 2023 showed the Ministry of Education had 279,202 teachers. Moreover, our ability to hire teachers has been shrinking. In July 2023, the government announced 8,000 teaching vacancies, but more than 130,000 applicants came forward looking for those few slots to fill. Thereafter, the government announced that the interviewing process was the next stage but was later abandoned. No interviews were carried out. Nobody was hired to fill those 8,000 teaching vacancies in that year! A few days ago, in a local daily, the government announced 14,000 teaching positions, and more than 230,000 applicants came forward in search of those jobs.
In the health sector, there is a manpower shortage of more than 120,000. In the government budget approved in June last year, the government was planning to employ 13,000 medical practitioners. Those medical professionals who are unemployed are more than 80,000. He remarks that the government is clueless about how it is going to solve the problem of youthful unemployment, which keeps growing year in and year out.
In the draft of the 2050 national development plan, the government planned to solve the unemployment problem by 50% after 50 years. So, the CCM government has acknowledged that full employment is beyond its capabilities through this draft of the national development plan. Lack of employment is dragging economic growth down because potential manpower is not directed in the productive sectors. Unemployment is having mouths to feed that are not contributing to the economic growth, wiping away whatever economic growth was expected to generate. Lack of employment is behind the excruciating poverty Tanzanians are experiencing, and they have become accustomed to the humdrum as part of their daily life!
Isihaka Mchinjita said the 2023 CAG report released in March 2024 clearly indicated that the misappropriation of public funds was a significant problem in the management of public affairs. He reiterated that according to that CAG report, there were Tshs 3.2 Trillion that were either stolen, misappropriated, or their expenditures were unknown! He said that if that lost money had been directed to hiring, the problem of unemployment would have subsided.
According to Isihaka Mchinjita, in the last decade, and based on past CAG reports, this country has incurred colossal losses amounting to over Tshs 50 trillion at the current level of prices or inflation rates. He went on to rest his case by calmly asserting that had those 50 Trillions been directed to building an employment base, we wouldn’t have such a serious unemployment consternation.
First, I adopt his analysis as it is, albeit with a few modifications of my own. It is widely accepted that misappropriation of public funds disables the ability of the government to carry out its mandate. By extension, the mind-boggling Trillions the government has razed partially explains why the unemployment problem is now beyond CCM tether. A failure to arraign on misappropriation, mismanagement and embezzlement of public funds dilates why the government’s efforts to widen the tax revenue base at a time when it miserably fails to plug leaking holes. TRA always reminds us of the strides it has been taking to increase tax revenue collections. However, the more they collect, the more Tanzanians are left behind in the economic ladder. This direct proportionality between tax revenue collection and a spike in poverty is easily understood when waste and misuse of public funds are taken into account.
However, waste and misuse of public expenditure are not a full story. It would be foolhardy for us to expect tax revenue to employ all millions who are jobseekers. In fact, I may chip in that, realistically speaking, the private sector ought to spirt out at least 70% of the jobs demanded in the job market. No government can guarantee full employment without the private sector getting involved. Perhaps our most enormous vortex is that the CCM government is clueless about creating an enabling environment where the private sector can play its part. The focus of the CCM government has been to buy loyalty at the expense of job creation!
So, failures of the private sector to create 70% or more of the jobs needed on a yearly basis are largely of our government’s making. Apart from colossal losses, the CCM government has not curbed the expenditure necessary to re-channel national resources to the private sector and stimulate the job market by doing so. Since independence, there has been a general acknowledgement that agriculture is the backbone of the economy, but what does our own government do? First, the CCM government is notorious for sticking with a playbook that doesn’t work. I will cite a few examples.
Since independence, our approach to the agricultural sector has been to tinker with the input side. Agricultural implements, artificial fertilisers, and exotic seeds are where our overzealousness has been shining to a fault. The harsh reality is that acreage productivity keeps dwindling despite those heroic efforts. The marathon time dedicated to farm work is still statistically stagnating as if we are still in the 1960s. There is no improvement to spike efficiency and reduce man hours in order to improve productivity at all. The real issue is where is mechanisation, modern processing and storage facilities to spur productivity? We have a government determined to control all aspects of agriculture, including where the markets are located for milking taxes. As a result, bureaucratic inertia has numbed innovation, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
The Ministry of Agriculture is more interested in developing an industry of stats for the purposes and intents of tax collection but not to lessen the bureaucratic inertia needed to free our small-scale agricultural tillers. If you visit any market in Tanzania today, what is vivid to the eye is
poor storage, leading to mega losses. It narrates why farm products are prematurely harvested because consideration has to be taken of the lack of storage, which may truncate the profit margins. Buyers purchase low-quality farm produce and, as a result, spend more money when compared to the value of the products themselves.
The reorganization of the agriculture and private sectors is the golden key to generating permanent jobs and burgeoning our economic growth. The CCM government loves generating and publicising economic indicators that falsely claim we are doing great, while the harsh realities on the ground depict a totally different story. Leaders who are gobbling up our national cake publish a nation on the march somewhere, but the majority of us who are picking the rotten end of a stick live a hopeless, grim reality.
It is the lack of investment in the right sectors that catalyzes massive unemployment. So far, nobody in the CCM tent sees a nexus between high Internet costs and under-investment in the digital economy. If properly handled, The digital economy can employ over a million youth who are wandering purposelessly today. The focus of our budget is to ingratiate politicians and civil servants who are at the apex. There is nothing in the budget of the last decade, and possibly in the near future, that will marshall deep cuts needed to channel our resources to spearhead job creation and economic growth.
Look at the CCM election expenditures; then, the ends justify the means. Innumerable buses have been bought, choppers and heft allowances are being dished out with no conscience to the plight of the unemployed. CCM says since the days of Nyerere was pompous and remorseless.
CCM still unashamedly claims that a president can come from any political party, but the best president will come from CCM! My question has always been, ” Are you serious, or is this a sick joke?” The very best can live with a ticking petrol bomb and expect what?
Read another insight on Unemployment Crisis: Should the Government Be Blamed or Are the Youth a Burden to the Nation?
