Zanzibar Business News (Page 14)

By HELLEN GITHAIGA

The US Embassy in Tanzania has closed for two days because of an internet outage which hit East African countries on Sunday. 

“Due to degraded network service nationwide, the embassy will remain closed to the public,” the embassy said on an X (formerly Twitter) post on Monday.

Due to degraded network service nationwide, the embassy will remain closed to the public. All consular appointments on May 14 & 15 will be cancelled and rescheduled to a later date. The consular section will be open as scheduled for visa pick up and for emergency American citizen…

— US Embassy Tanzania (@usembassytz) May 13, 2024

Consular appointments for Tuesday and Wednesday were cancelled and rebooked for a later date. The embassy said it would remain accessible for handling emergency cases involving American citizens and visa collections.

Businesses and homes in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and seven other countries are experiencing slow internet speeds following a cut on deep-sea fibre cables at Mtunzini, a small coastal town in South Africa.

Read: East African countries hit by major internet outage

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The fault affected submarine cables serving the East and Southern Africa, largely privately controlled Seacom and East Africa Submarine System (Eassy).

Internet monitoring group Netblocks said Tanzania and the French island of Mayotte were the worst hit by the outage.

Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) said it was working on an alternative route to reinstate connectivity to the country’s major telecom networks while the recovery process of the deep-sea cables was being addressed.

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The U.S. Embassy in Tanzania was forced to close its doors to the public for two days due to a widespread internet outage affecting several East African countries, reports BBC News.

The embassy announced the closure via X (formerly known as Twitter) on Monday, citing “degraded network service nationwide”. All consular appointments scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday are cancelled and will be rescheduled for a later date. However, the embassy will remain operational for emergencies involving American citizens and for visa pickups.

The internet disruption began on Sunday morning and caused significant connectivity issues in Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. According to internet monitoring group NetBlocks, Tanzania is the most severely impacted country.

Industry experts believe the outage stems from faults in the undersea cables that connect the region to the global network via South Africa. Some East African internet users were still experiencing slow speeds, with telecom providers indicating ongoing efforts to fully restore service.

Source: allafrica.com

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By THE CONVERSATION

Tanzania, in keeping with global political trends, reserves 30 percent of seats in parliament for women. These so-called special seats were introduced with multiparty politics in 1992, in response to the low numbers of women elected to positions of power.

There were only eight elected female parliamentarians after the first multiparty elections in 1995. Ten years later, 17 women were elected to parliament, representing 7 percent of legislative seats. Fast forward to the 2020 general elections: women make up 37.4 percent of parliament.

However, only 27 women (10.2 percent) were elected directly from the 264 constituencies.

Special seats are credited for increasing women’s representation. This has enabled the passing of a couple of “gender sensitive” laws.

However, the special seats system is not the magic bullet for achieving gender equality in political representation across the board.

Read: Why Burundi women are sidelined despite gender quota

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While political parties have met the legal requirements for nominating women for special seats, concerns linger about the parties’ internal commitment to advancing women’s political participation.

In a recent paper I set out to assess whether the main political parties voluntarily sought to increase women’s participation in their internal leadership positions and candidate lists. In particular, I examined whether their constitutions contained voluntary gender quotas beyond fulfilling the quotas in the national statutes.

I found that the constitutions of both parties recognised women’s rights to representation as enshrined in international and regional conventions as well as national laws, but these commitments largely start and end with the establishment of a women’s wing. Men dominate the parties’ decision-making organs at national and lower levels.

Since its establishment in 1992, Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (Chadema or Party of Democracy and Development) has never had a woman among its six main national leaders. The ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM, the Revolutionary Party) named its first female national chair and the first female deputy general secretary-mainland only in 2021. That is 44 years after the party was formed in 1977.

Where the parties stand

On the face of it, Tanzania has advanced women’s representation. President Samia Suluhu Hassan is one of the few female presidents the African continent has ever had. But that’s not by CCM’s constitutional design. The office of the president became vacant on March 17, 2021, when John Pombe Magufuli suddenly died in power. Suluhu, then the first female vice president in the history of Tanzania, became president.

She was elected CCM’s chair in keeping with the party’s tradition that the president is the party leader.

In addition, for about two years, Christina Mndeme held the position of deputy general secretary-mainland. She was the first woman to hold such a position.

Read: Women’s sparse presence at top health sector jobs stunting progress

As gender representation is not embedded in CCM’s constitution, progress was shortlived.

CCM decision-makers: For instance, while CCM had two women (33 percent) among its six national party leaders in 2021 to December 2022, the number dropped to one (16 percent) after the December 2023 internal elections under Suluhu’s watch.

The national structures of the two main political parties show that commitment to women’s participation is weak. Women now make up 28 percent of the national general assembly, 23 percent of the national executive committee, 25 percent of the central committee, and 16 percent of the national secretariat.

Chadema decision-makers: Over at Chadema, women comprised 10 percent of its national convention after the party’s 2019 election.

Only 8.6 percent of the governing council are women, 15.6 percent of the central committee, and 10 percent of the national secretariat.

CCM would appear to be ahead with 16-28 percent of women in key decision-making organs compared to Chadema (8-15 percent). But both parties are still below the 30 percent critical mass principle established in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of 1995.

They are also way below the 50/50 men and women representation required under the international and regional conventions.

Similarly, the CCM and Chadema constitutions do not set any numerical gender representation goals in electing their leaders and in nomination of candidates to local and general elections.

Currently, women make up only 10.5 percent of party chairpersons and only 10.5 percent of party secretary generals of 19 registered political parties. Women made up 9.2 percent of all candidates for all positions in the 2020 general election.

All-male affair

At lower levels of party decision making, the story is the same. Women form a small minority in boards of trustees, advisory councils and key departments.

Read: Why everything happens when we invest in girls and women

CCM’s board of trustees has a chair and eight members. At the time of my survey, only one was a woman. Chadema fares better on this score with equal representation of three men and three women. This is both voluntary and temporary because the party’s constitution is silent on the gender composition of the board of trustees.

CCM’s advisory council is composed of former presidents who, by custom, served as CCM chairs for both Mainland and Zanzibar. The council also includes former national party deputy chairs. Since its formation in 1977, CCM’s advisory council has been an all-male council.

Finally, representation at departmental level reveals the same skew. Four of CCM’s five departments are headed by men. Men are at the helm of all Chadema’s four departments, known as directorates.

Despite the difficulties in obtaining data, the available information pointed towards the same under-representation of women in the lower administrative tiers of the two parties.

Next steps

The low level of women’s representation requires CCM and Chadema, as well as other political parties, to adopt voluntary gender quotas for leadership positions and candidates’ lists in line with the law governing political party affairs.

Alternatively, the law governing political party affairs should set out the gender representation numerical goals for parties’ leadership positions, decision-making organs and candidates’ lists, including rewards and penalties.

By Victoria Melkisedeck Lihiru – Lecturer, Faculty of Law, The Open University of Tanzania

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By VINCENT OWINO

East African Community (EAC) member states are increasingly trading with one another and with other African countries, while reduce their trade with Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world, shaping the intra-Africa trade dream projected to boost commerce and livelihoods on the continent.

The seven countries in the region (as of last year) increased their trade with the rest of Africa by $584.6 million to $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, a 14 percent rise compared with a similar period in 2022, latest data by the EAC Secretariat shows.

Cross-border trade within the region also recorded a 12 percent rise, from the previous year’s $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion in last year’s Quarter 4, an indication of rising trade within the region over the year.

During Quarter 3, intra-EAC trade rose 20 percent to $3.2 billion, the highest level recorded within the region in over two years. Similarly, trade with the rest of Africa crossed the $5 billion mark for the first time in two years.

Read: East Africa weathers storm to record growth in FDI

But the region’s trade with the European Union (EU) countries, which traditionally account for about 10 percent of EAC’s total trade, recorded a drop of 14 percent, from $2.04 billion in the three months to December 2022, to $1.7 billion in the last quarter of 2023.

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This is a signal of improving trade integration on the continent, coming at a time when governments are pushing for increased implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area, which is projected to lift about 65 million Africans from extreme poverty.

Top EAC partners that saw a sharp decline in their dealings with the region is Belgium, whose trade dropped by 45 percent to $188 million in Quarter 4, 2023, from $263 million the previous year.

The United States, which is the tenth leading trade partner with East Africa, recorded a 19 percent drop in its business dealings with the region, from $200 million in the October-December period in 2022 to $161 million last year.

Germany, Italy, and Switzerland saw their trade with the region drop by 12 percent, 2 percent, and 23 percent respectively. The drop pushed Germany out of the rank of the 10 leading trade partners for the region.

In each of these countries, imports and exports registered a general decline, except in the case of Germany, which bought more of East African exports in the period, but sold much less of their own products in the region.

A similar trend was observed in EAC’s trade with leading Asian producers, Pakistan, Malaysia, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Korea.

While imports from China – the leading source for East African countries – improved, exports to the Asian powerhouse slowed by 12 percent, an indication that regional businesses are finding markets elsewhere.

Exports to Malaysia, which is the fourth leading market for East African goods, also posted a 17 percent drop in in the period, even though imports from the country rose by 47 percent.

Read: Kenya posts $1.2bn surplus in trade with Africa

Amid the decline in trade with Europe, Asia, and the US, some African countries have emerged as important trade partners for the EAC.

Trade between East Africa and the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), for instance, more than tripled to $199.6 million in October-December last year, from $61 million in 2022, raising its share in EAC’s total trade from 0.3 percent to 1 percent.

Similarly, trade with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) saw an improvement in the period, rising by 40 percent to 2.7 billion, improving the share in total EAC trade from 9.8 percent to 12.8 percent.

South Africa is the leading trade partner for EAC countries on the continent, with the trade between them rising by 26 percent to hit $838 million, up from $664 million in the last quarter of 2022.

John Bosco Kalisa, CEO of the East African Business Council, says improvement of EAC’s intra-Africa trade at the expense of Europe, Asia, and the US is a result of improving political will to eliminate trade barriers within the region and trade more within.

“We learnt a lesson from the global shocks; Covid-19, Russia-Ukraine war, and the MidEast disruptions, which have all impacted our trade and investments,” Mr Kalisa told The EastAfrican.

“One shock absorber is to build regional production capabilities, as well as at national levels, under the auspices of Buy East Africa Build East Africa initiative.”

Mr Kalisa, who heads the regional private sector lobby, argues that there are concerted efforts by governments in the region to promote regional value chains, and eliminate barriers to trade with one another in the region and with others across the continent.

Read: NTBs cost region $16m, threatening intra-EAC trade

“That’s why now we can see there is a growth in our trade within the continent, as opposed to our trade with the EU, or China,” he said.

Previously, businesses in the region have been blamed for taking advantage of preferential trade agreements with countries outside the continent than free trade agreements within their local regional trading blocs.

A study done by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) last year found that African countries generally take advantage of PTAs with the US, Canada, EU, and Japan, more than they utilise FTAs within their regional economic communities.

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