THE National Development Vision 2025 outlines key principles that aim at building a new Tanzania in terms of investment, development and attainment of the middle-income and industrial economy by 2025.
One of them hinges on the driving forces for the realisation of the vision whose two of its constituents are, first, the developmental mindset and empowering culture and, second, competence and competitiveness.
In the first place, the focus is on the effective transformation of the mindset and culture to promote positive attitudes of community development and commitment to facing development challenges and utilising every opportunity for the improvement of the quality of life.
In the second place, the focus is on competence and competitiveness through adequate and reliable infrastructural development, effective utilisation of domestic resources, higher productivity and strengthening of the capacity to effectively anticipate and respond to external changes. We have to internalise these attributes if we really want to move forward.
We have outlines these key principles bearing in mind President John Magufuli’s style of leadership, which we can rightly say the majority of us haven’t grasped what he wants us to do or where he wants us to be in the future.
That is why in most cases when he tours some parts of the country to inspect development projects there are people who get into trouble for failing to supervise well the development projects or they haven’t shown their competence in the implementation of the projects entrusted to them.
As a result, some people unfortunately have been demoted, transferred or fired. Sometimes the implementation of a project is delayed because of the bureaucracy we have which ultimately result in protracted project implementation and denial of intended social services.
We have decided to talk about this as we recall President Magufuli’s recent visit to Kiegeya Bridge in Morogoro Region.
The bridge was damaged by heavy rain which affected road transport from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma and other regions connected by Morogoro Road or from Dodoma to Dar es Salaam.
What infuriated the President was to see that rehabilitation had not been timely and even had the place been inspected in time most probably the damage would have been mitigated to a considerable extent.
In light of this, President Magufuli warned Minister for Works, Transport and Communications Isack Kamwelwe and Tanroads Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Eng. Patrick Mfugale for failing him and failing the people and suspended 12 Tanroads engineers responsible for road maintenance.
We have referred to this incident because it is the most recent one, but there are similar ones in other areas where those entrusted with the supervision of the implementation of projects have not played their part as they should and caused unnecessary project delays.
Ours is a reminder of each other to play our part and match President Magufuli’s pace lest we incur his wrath. So, let us change our mindset and work conscientiously.
