Ideas floated for making Belt, Road Initiative tick

THEOPISTA NSANZUGWANKO in Beijing

Secretary General of the Tanzania–China Friendship Promotion Association (TCFPA), Mr Joseph Kahama

THE Secretary General of the Tanzania–China Friendship Promotion Association (TCFPA), Mr Joseph Kahama, has underscored the need of policy coordination coupled with a comparative advantage in trade and economic cooperation to make Belt and Road Initiative successful.

Mr Kahama made the remarks here at the Africa-China Friendship Organisation Leaders meeting which brought together people from 20 African countries, to explore new opportunities for the initiative, among other goals.

He said it was important to maintain dialogue through various platforms so as to pragmatically and openly discuss opportunities and challenges that the people and countries along the key routes and ports might encounter.

Mr Kahama said on policy coordination, it is important that, in order to achieve win-win cooperation, China and other countries which involved in this initiative, institute and implement national policies that are complementary to each other.

“This is important because it will ensure mutual understanding on the part of policy makers and government officials who are in charge of supervising the initiative at the policy level,” he remarked.

He remarked furthermore that, proper policy coordination would make the initiative adoptive to all stakeholders both in China and other participating countries, who would then focus on important issues like trade exchanges and investments, instead of committing valuable time and efforts to overcoming problems stemming from negative policies.

On the agenda of upholding complementary rather than competing interests, he remarked: “Right now China is pursuing industrial capacity cooperation with a few African countries, including Tanzania; there’s an urgent need for that in Africa in order to realise independent and sustainable development”.

Mr Kahama said China had developed a competitive industrial base after years of reform could thus provide advanced equipments and products as well as expertise to Africa. This would help solve the problem of increased labour costs for labour-intensive businesses in China by welcoming such industries to Africa where the labour costs were relatively low.