David versus Goliath: Tanzania’s Efforts to Stand Up to Foreign Gas Corporations

Abstract

This article presents and analyses how Tanzania, a country on the global “periphery” with a natural resource sector dominated by capital from the Global North, has thus far failed to transform its mineral wealth into sustained economic development. Using Immanuel Wallerstein’s “world systems theory” as the theoretical framework, we exemplify how the “core” exploited gold reserves in the 1990s and into the new century – and what techniques and mechanisms (e.g. asymmetry of information, imposition of inadequate management structures) it now currently uses to develop the nascent gas sector to its advantage. Scrutinising actions undertaken by the Tanzanian president to concentrate power, root out corruption, and to stand up to profit-maximising foreign corporations – or what we call the “Magufuli effect” – as way of illustration, we also demonstrate how Tanzania is trying to change its role within the international division of labour and how the core attempts to maintain the status quo meanwhile.

Infrastructure and the Politics of African State Agency: Shaping the Belt and Road Initiative in East Africa

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‘Win-win’ contested: negotiating the privatisation of Africa's Freedom Railway with the ‘Chinese of today’

“…Reacting to growing discontent, both within the ruling party and the population, over insufficient benefits from foreign investments, the Magufuli administration aligned economic policies with resource nationalism and an autocratic developmental state approach. Magufuli famously earned himself the nickname ‘Bulldozer’ due to his uncompromising anti-corruption campaign, rigid government interventions vis-à-vis foreign investors and repression of the political opposition, the media and civil society (see Andreoni 2017; Polus & Tycholiz 2019).…”

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