The power has been out every other day for the past two weeks, and it looks like it will be the same for quite a while…

Lake Mtera, the main power source for most of Tanzania, is running out of water. The government and power company (a government entity) officially blame this on recent drought, but all of the papers and most people you talk to blame mismanagement of upstream water on the Great Ruaha River. There are huge rice fields upstream that divert millions of gallons of water every year. What’s worse is that the official diversion numbers are way low because local corruption allows many “leaks” in the levies to flood fields that were never supposed to be irrigated.

You might be asking yourself, “Why are they trying to grow rice in a semi-arid environment?” Or making a note like, “We don’t try to grow rice in West Texas, even though we irrigate there.” If you did, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Apparently this is not a short term problem, it’s one that’s been building for years. Even though the government and lots of people know about it, and the economy is taking a huge hit from every-other-day power outages, the rice fields are still there. Amazing and frustrating.

The corruption here is supposedly not as bad as it is in Kenya. We haven’t personally seen any. All of the government officials we’ve dealt with, including police and bureaucrats, have been polite and have not hinted at “rushwa” (Swahili for bribe money). But we’ve heard stories that Tanzanians have to pay bribes to get driver’s licenses and passports and even money at the bank. For example, if someone gets money wired to them, the bank teller will say “Oh, no it’s not here yet.” But it magically appears with some rushwa. My impression is that larger corruption is the real problem. Like the corruption that allowed a huge rice production to go into place upstream of the main dam. Like the corruption that allows officially-sanctioned monopolies to companies that have the “winning bid” in a given industry. I don’t have anything to base this on other than the press. It is a free press, but it does tend to be a little sensationalist. To be fair, the press does point out that the government is taking active steps to reduce corruption, but it seems to be aimed at the small-scale corruption. I’m not sure about what is happening at the top.

In the meantime, we only have power every other day…