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THOUSANDS of tonnes of drill pipes are neatly stacked in a yard at Mtwara port in southern Tanzania, waiting to be loaded onto vessels supplying gas rigs 100km (60 miles) offshore.
There drill bits, guided with centimetre-level accuracy, will bite into the seabed 2km underwater and then penetrate the reservoirs of gas that locals hope will fuel a long-awaited leap forward for their sleepy country.
Tanzania has seen many false starts. When the British colonial authorities opened the deepwater port at Mtwara in 1954, partly to replace a naval port at Simonstown in South Africa, it was billed as a turning-point for east African trade.
But the port decayed and Mtwara and its cashew-growing hinterland were neglected by Tanzania's rulers after independence in 1963. Work on a road linking Mtwara to Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital, began half a century ago and is still unfinished.
Most tellingly, Tanzania's education system has failed to equip the local Makonde people with skills. Many are illiterate and lack the work ethic to satisfy even the most tolerant of employers.
The Makonde are often stereotyped elsewhere in Tanzania as dancers and guards, with a love of the sensual, a talent for wooden sculpture and a taste for bush meat. But the scale of the coming gas bonanza bears no comparison with anything in the past.
Tanzania's gasfields abut even richer ones in the waters of neighbouring Mozambique. Britain's BG and Norway's Statoil have won licences to exploit the bulk of the gas found so far.
Tanzania's government wants the companies to put some of the gas to use in Tanzania and to invest in local infrastructure. Exporting the rest will mean constructing a liquefied-natural-gas plant that will be the biggest project in Tanzanian history.
The government has also signed up a Nigerian company, Dangote, to build a cement factory near Mtwara. A new railway will have to be laid to carry material from the port to the factory. Within a few years coal, ores, timber and food should be shipped out of Mtwara in greater quantities than before.
Joseph Simbakalia, who is in effect the region's governor, sees the coming railway as a further opportunity for local development. Why not, he wonders, insist that spur lines are built to serve the people of Mtwara, where the population is expected to grow tenfold, to 1.3m, by 2025.
Despite laws making it hard for foreigners to buy land, property prices in the Shengani area of Mtwara have tripled in the past year. As a former army engineer and a loyalist in the ruling party, Mr Simbakalia is adamant that New Mtwara must be well laid out. He says he is unrattled by festering protests, the rise of Islamists or the prevalence of witchcraft. "I am juju-proof," he says.
A shortage of skills may be more of an obstacle. Ron Foster, the logistics manager at Mtwara's port, says his company looked for 25 locals to train as welders but found only two who were suitable. As the required number of workers in the port doubles every few months, that means that companies must hire from abroad.
Local tribes such as the Makonde, the Yao and the Makua may miss out. Foreign mining companies have previously extracted Tanzania's diamonds, gold and ores without benefiting the locals much. Tanzania's challenge now is to make sure that does not happen again.
Source: The Economist: Tanzania
There drill bits, guided with centimetre-level accuracy, will bite into the seabed 2km underwater and then penetrate the reservoirs of gas that locals hope will fuel a long-awaited leap forward for their sleepy country.
Tanzania has seen many false starts. When the British colonial authorities opened the deepwater port at Mtwara in 1954, partly to replace a naval port at Simonstown in South Africa, it was billed as a turning-point for east African trade.
But the port decayed and Mtwara and its cashew-growing hinterland were neglected by Tanzania's rulers after independence in 1963. Work on a road linking Mtwara to Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital, began half a century ago and is still unfinished.
Most tellingly, Tanzania's education system has failed to equip the local Makonde people with skills. Many are illiterate and lack the work ethic to satisfy even the most tolerant of employers.
The Makonde are often stereotyped elsewhere in Tanzania as dancers and guards, with a love of the sensual, a talent for wooden sculpture and a taste for bush meat. But the scale of the coming gas bonanza bears no comparison with anything in the past.
Tanzania's gasfields abut even richer ones in the waters of neighbouring Mozambique. Britain's BG and Norway's Statoil have won licences to exploit the bulk of the gas found so far.
Tanzania's government wants the companies to put some of the gas to use in Tanzania and to invest in local infrastructure. Exporting the rest will mean constructing a liquefied-natural-gas plant that will be the biggest project in Tanzanian history.
The government has also signed up a Nigerian company, Dangote, to build a cement factory near Mtwara. A new railway will have to be laid to carry material from the port to the factory. Within a few years coal, ores, timber and food should be shipped out of Mtwara in greater quantities than before.
Joseph Simbakalia, who is in effect the region's governor, sees the coming railway as a further opportunity for local development. Why not, he wonders, insist that spur lines are built to serve the people of Mtwara, where the population is expected to grow tenfold, to 1.3m, by 2025.
Despite laws making it hard for foreigners to buy land, property prices in the Shengani area of Mtwara have tripled in the past year. As a former army engineer and a loyalist in the ruling party, Mr Simbakalia is adamant that New Mtwara must be well laid out. He says he is unrattled by festering protests, the rise of Islamists or the prevalence of witchcraft. "I am juju-proof," he says.
A shortage of skills may be more of an obstacle. Ron Foster, the logistics manager at Mtwara's port, says his company looked for 25 locals to train as welders but found only two who were suitable. As the required number of workers in the port doubles every few months, that means that companies must hire from abroad.
Local tribes such as the Makonde, the Yao and the Makua may miss out. Foreign mining companies have previously extracted Tanzania's diamonds, gold and ores without benefiting the locals much. Tanzania's challenge now is to make sure that does not happen again.
Source: The Economist: Tanzania