A queue of container trucks battered by hundreds of thousands of kilometres on the unforgiving roads of East and Central Africa snakes out of the port of Dar es Salaam. Amongst the rainbow of container colours are ones imported by the Sumaria Group, one of Tanzania’s biggest and most successful companies.

Each month it imports up to 100 containers filled with a kaleidoscope of raw materials to supply the company’s numerous activities; plastic granules from West Asia and China to manufacture plastic products, pharmaceutical ingredients from China and India to produce drugs, and sugar from Swaziland to make soft drinks.

In the other direction, the company is exporting some 300 containers of cotton each year, as well as a cornucopia of its manufactured products; plastic kiosks, drinks medicines, and more.

“In the past, it was normal to wait for up to a month to clear goods out of the port of Dar es Salaam and this had a huge impact on our business,” says Jayesh Shah, managing director of Sumaria.

Tanzania’s trade is made up of a complicated web of up to 27 government agencies and private enterprises, including inspection departments and regulatory authorities. Then there is the harbour authority, the container terminal company, shipping lines and agents, clearing and forwarding agents and financial institutions. And, last but not least, the importer or exporter itself.

But central to the running of the whole operation is the customs and excise department, which is ultimately responsible for letting cargo in and out of the country and for collecting taxes and duties on all taxable items on behalf of the government.

Ten years ago customs and excise was, by anyone’s standards, doing a pretty bad job. It presided over what some business people called a “chaotic system” that encouraged corruption, smuggling and thus naturally resulted in low revenue collection rates. A modernisation programme, which led to the creation of the semi-autonomous Tanzanian Revenue Authority (TRA) under which customs and excise falls, radically boosted the government’s ability to collect taxes.

The reform programme targeted the facilitation of trade to speed up imports and exports, as well as enforcing the collection of revenues. It did simple things like computerising the import/export process. Over the last two years, customs and excise has boosted its revenue collection to just over $1bn a year and contributes almost 50 per cent to the government’s overall tax revenue.

It is, however, not all good news. Get a random group of business people together and anecdotes of petty corruption at the port in the guise of non-documented “facility fees” will start flowing, although most admit that it is not nearly as bad as it used to be.

Ravi Chande, a business consultant who specialises in import/export issues, says “there has always been a lot of suspicion of importers because of what happened in the past and while the senior management of customs and excise has built a new trust with importers and exporters, that trust is not always matched at an operational level”.

BBC News