Dar es Salaam. Good morning! The Chanzo is here with a rundown of major news stories reported in Tanzania over the weekend.
Crackdown on DP World deal critics intensifies in Tanzania as arrests continue
Dr Willibrod Peter Slaa, one of the critics of the Tanzania-Dubai intergovernmental agreement, was reportedly arrested at his home in the city Sunday as the crackdown on the critics of the controversial deal appears to intensify in Tanzania.
The agreement, which will allow Dubai-based multinational logistics company DP World to take over some operations at the Dar es Salaam port, has stirred harsh criticism from several actors who think it will benefit the company more than Tanzania and its people.
According to reports circulating on social media, Dr Slaa, who served as Tanzania’s ambassador to Sweden between 2017 and 2021, was arrested at his home in Mbweni, Kawe, before he was taken to the Kawe Police Post for interrogation.
Full story here.
Workers constructing SGR are striking over delayed pay: ‘Enough is enough’
Turkish workers employed by the Turkish construction company Yapı Merkezi in the Tanzania Standard Gauge Railway project have been on strike since August 5, demanding payment of their unpaid wages for the past seven months.
On Friday, when the strike entered its seventh day, the Yapı Merkezi workers stated, “We will continue our strike until our voices are heard and until we receive our wages. We do not do charity, we want what we deserve.”
Ömer Tanrıverdi, one of the Yapı Merkezi striking workers, told Bianet, a Turkish press agency based in Beyoğlu, Istanbul, that he has been working on the project for 10 months and hasn’t received his salary since February.
“The company has put us in a difficult situation,” Tanrıverdi recounted. “When financial difficulties increased, they deducted US$600 from friends who wanted to leave, claiming it was for the plane ticket. Lately, as more people quit their jobs, they raised this deduction to US$3,000, and now it’s up to US$4,000. People are practically held captive here.”
Full story here.
Tanzania, Uganda agrees to internet sharing deal
Tanzania and Uganda have reached a deal where the National Backbone Infrastructures (NBI) of the two countries have become interconnected to ease internet connection for citizens.
Uganda’s New Vision newspaper quoted the country’s ICT and National Guidance Minister, Dr Chris Baryomunsi, saying: “We have now hooked the National Backbone Infrastructure (NBI) of Uganda to that of Tanzania so that our systems can speak to each other.”
Baryomunsi added that Uganda has been relying on the fibre optic cable running through the Indian Ocean and Mombasa, Kenya, but that was sometimes unstable.
He says the connection has been responsible for increasing Internet supply and reducing the cost of supplying it to the end user in Uganda.
According to the New Vision’s analysis, It now costs US$35 to consume one megabit per second (Mbps) per month of internet generated by the Ugandan government. This is a drop from US$70 per megabit per second per month previously.
Mbps are units of measurement for network bandwidth and throughput. They are used to show how fast a network or internet connection is.
Although this price reduction applies to only government-generated Internet, analysts told the paper that the move could have far-reaching effects on the prices Ugandans pay to use Internet provided by local telecom providers.
This is it for today, and we hope you enjoyed our briefing. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter (see below) or following us on Twitter (here), as that is the best way to ensure you do not miss any of these briefings. And in case you have any questions or comments, please drop a word to our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
