Browsing by Author "Poncian, Japhace"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 21
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    Africa’s Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century: What Can Leaders Learn from Africa’s Pre-Colonial Leadership and Governance?
    (RedFame, 2015-04-09) Poncian, Japhace; Mgaya, Edward
    Africa continues to face serious development challenges despite recent record growth rates. Such challenges as dependency, corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure and production sectors, and leadership and governance are some of the impediments to Africa’s quest for sustainable and equitable development. Explaining such development challenges has continued to elude scholars. To the radical leftist scholars, Africa’s underdevelopment can adequately be explained by its forceful and uneven integration into the global economic system. However, with over fifty years of independence, the debate is increasingly focusing on Africa’s leadership as good explanation for its poverty and underdevelopment. This paper argues that the current poverty and underdevelopment of Africa have much to do with enabling conditions created by African leaders and proposes that addressing this requires Africans to go back to pre-colonial history where they can tap good lessons rather than continuing importing Western based models which may not necessarily fit into Africa’s unique characteristics.
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    Christian-Muslim Relations in Tanzania: A Threat to Future Stability and Peace?
    (Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 2015) Poncian, Japhace
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    Detriments of colonialism on indigenous conflict resolution: an analysis of Pakistan and Tanzania
    (Taylor and Francis, 2018) Yousaf, Farooq; Poncian, Japhace
    Since the process of decolonization started after the conclusion of the Second World War, a major victim of this process was indigenous cultures and social structures in most of the former colonies. This paper draws its analysis from postcolonial theory by considering the detrimental effects that colonialism has left on the culture and governance in tribal societies. The paper attempts to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on indigenous/traditional conflict transformation and peace strategies by studying the role of indigenous strategies in resolving conflicts in Pakistan and Tanzania. In Pakistan, the Pashtun Jirga is a council of elders that plays a significant role in mediating and resolving conflicts among Pashtuns, especially tribal Pashtuns. In Tanzania, two cases of extractive resource conflicts in North Mara and Mtwara show how these conflicts have been resolved and what role indigenous strategies played or could have played if they were to be effectively used. In both Pakistan and Tanzania cases, we find that indigenous strategies of peace and conflict transformation are an important and necessary ingredient to conflict resolution. However, despite their significance, indigenous strategies are hardly a priority for respective post-colonial governments and the international community.
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    Embracing Natural Gas Discovery and Extraction as a Blessing for Equitable and Sustainable Benefits to Tanzania
    (IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2014) Poncian, Japhace
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    Entering in and sustaining a career in male-dominated jobs: an examination of female security guards’ experiences in Iringa region, Tanzania
    (Int. J. Gender Studies in Developing Societies, 2017) Manyerere, David; Poncian, Japhace
    This paper studies challenges confronting women while seeking to enter and sustain a career in the booming male dominated private security companies (PSCs). It uses the socialist feminist approach and qualitative interviews with female and male security guards, and PSC managers in Iringa, Tanzania to show that women seeking employment in PSCs are constrained by sexual harassment and exploitation as well as having to secure consent of their spouses before they can take up the job offers. Similarly, for those who make it into the PSCs, challenges such as tight and long-hour shifts and sexual harassment and exploitation are part of their daily experiences at work. The strategies devised to address these challenges and/or cope with them are not helping women. Moreover, while some challenges are common to both men and women, their sexual differences and burdensome domestic chores make women more vulnerable than men.
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    Explaining Election Violence in Tanzania: The Interplay Between the Union Politics and Electoral Administration and Management
    (Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA), 2015) Poncian, Japhace
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    Extractive resource ownership and the subnational resource curse: Insights from Tanzania
    (Elsevier, 2018) Poncian, Japhace
    The resource curse thesis has dominated much of the recent extractive resource governance literature. Much of the focus on the resource curse has been at the national level around issues of how the curse manifests and what can be done to address it. Recently, a body of literature which scrutinises the resource curse at the subnational level has emerged to address the shortcomings of the mainstream approach to the curse. However, these subnational resource curse studies examine use similar approaches to those of the national resource curse studies—that is, the econometric, political economy and conflict lenses as well as that of decentralisation. This paper draws on insights from Tanzania’s extractive sector to examine how national resource ownership politics influence the occurrence of a resource curse at the subnational level. It argues that national ownership of extractive resources provides the central government with exclusive power to make decisions and shape governance processes which, in turn, trample on subnational community rights over resources and create the conditions for a resource curse at this subnational level. In effect, it shows that weak local governance and national politics combine to make so-called national ownership contribute to the presence of a subnational resource curse.
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    The Fallacy of Limited Financial Resources for Development in Tanzania: Evidence from Local Government Authorities Audit Reports
    (2015) Poncian, Japhace; Mpambije, Chakupewa Joseph
    Often times people are told by government officials that there are limited financial resources to finance different development projects/programmes and to provide assistance for self help. This view is also held by the academic world. This is usually taken as an absolute truth and usually as an excuse for the limited socioeconomic development of the citizens and societies. While this may be true, we propose a problematisation of this by gathering and making sense of evidence from the annual audit reports for the Local Government Authorities (LGAs) in Tanzania. The central aim of the proposed paper therefore is to show the fallacy of “the limited resources” by arguing that it is not a matter of limited resources but whether and how the available resources are put to intended use for development and poverty reduction goals. The relevance of this is to shift focus on development resources available to whether and how the extent to which the resources are put to use and toestablish whether LGAs are keeping people into poverty by using or not using the available resources.
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    The Fallacy of Limited Financial Resources for Development in Tanzania: Evidence from Local Government Authorities Audit Reports
    (Public Policy and Administration Research, 2015) Poncian, Japhace; Mpambije, Chakupewa Joseph
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    Galvanising political support through resource nationalism: A case of Tanzania's 2017 extractive sector reforms
    (Elsevier, 2019-03) Poncian, Japhace
    Resource nationalism has become a fashionable approach to resource governance in many countries across the world. Motivated by the desire to make resource governance deliver to socio-economic development, governments in resource-rich countries have exploited resource nationalism to achieve their populist socio-economic goals. In 2017, the government of Tanzania instituted a strong resource nationalist governance regime. This paper examines Tanzania's re-adoption of resource nationalism to understand how the government was able to institutionalise the reforms. The paper draws on secondary scholarly sources and primary materials such as President Magufuli's speeches during his presidential campaigns in 2015 and afterwards during his government clampdown on Acacia. Like studies on neo-extractivism in Latin America have shown, President Magufuli used resource nationalism as a political strategy to both secure a stronghold in party and national politics and legitimise his economic policy. Faced with a strengthening opposition politics and competitive elections, President Magufuli exploited public dissatisfaction with a liberal resource governance approach and a popular appeal of socialist policies to re-introduce resource nationalism as a strategy not only to re-legitimise extractivism but also to delegitimise the opposition and multinational corporations.
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    The Gender-Energy Nexus in Tanzania: Assessing Rural Electrification in the Context of Gender Mainstreaming among Women
    (Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA), 2015) Kigodi, Henry Michael; Poncian, Japhace
    This chapter presents empirical evidence from the study conducted in two rural districts of Tanzania. The aim was to assess government rural energy strategy undertaken by Rural Energy Agency (REA) to electrify rural Tanzania in the context of gender mainstreaming in energy projects as well as its viability in resolving gender energy challenges that rural women face. A total of 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted with rural women and TANESCO officials in Kilolo and Shinyanga rural districts over a period of two weeks. Our findings indicate that although government takes gender issues seriously, more remains to be done as most of our informants had little knowledge on what rural electrification is; an indication that gender may just have been mainstreamed in energy policy, plans and strategies on paper by a mention of the word gender and gender mainstreaming. Again, the study found out that patriarchal practices that marginalize rural women are still entrenched in rural Tanzania to the extent that rural electrification may only end lighting rural Tanzania instead of altering complex and multiple energy challenges women face. High costs of energy and limited energy choices were also mentioned as main issues that challenge rural electrification. From the findings, it is recommended that the government ought to go down to rural women to learn of their expectations and challenges; build awareness to rural women over the use of different energy sources; diversify energy sources; and implement energy policies, plans and strategies effectively to resolve gender energy challenges.
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    ICT, citizen engagement and the governance of extractive resources in Tanzania: Documenting the practice and challenges
    (Elsevier, 2020-11-01) Poncian, Japhace
    Citizen engagement is one way of improving the governance of extractive resources and overcoming the resource curse. Academic research on Tanzania's extractive resource governance has shown that meaningful offline citizen engagement remains a troubling area mainly because of how it is framed by the government and the measures it takes to suppress organised community initiatives for engagement. Can government use of ICT promote citizen engagement? This paper asks one major question: how do governments deploy ICTs to create and/or constrain opportunities for active citizen engagement in extractives decision-making and governance processes? In answering this question, the paper examines how the Tanzanian government uses ICTs to engage with citizens in extractives decision-making and governance processes and whether this engagement really empowers citizens to influence resource governance decisions. The paper shows that much as the government uses ICT to inform the public about extractives development, it equally takes measures-political and legal- to ensure that meaningful citizen engagement does not evolve. This calls for a nuanced analysis of the potential role of ICT in promoting citizen engagement in governance processes.
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    Managing revenue collection outsourcing in Tanzania’s local government authorities: a case study of Iringa Municipal Council
    (2019) Mgonja, Michael Grayson; Poncian, Japhace
    Due to their critical role in development and governance, local governments need adequate financial resources to deliver the many developmental functions. However, such financial resources are either not available or inadequate. One way of rising to this challenge has been scaling up revenue collection from local revenue sources. This is done through either in-house collection or outsourcing revenue collection. Extant research has focused on the benefits and challenges of outsourcing. This paper expands this body of knowledge by studying how local governments manage private collectors to maximise benefits of outsourcing. From interviews conducted with Iringa Municipality officials and staff, the paper shows that revenue collection outsourcing can be an effective tax administration strategy if properly managed.
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    Natural Resource Conflicts as a Struggle for Space: The Case of Mining in Tanzania
    (International and Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences, 2015) Poncian, Japhace; Kigodi, Henry Michael
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    The Persistence of Western Negative Perceptions about Africa: Factoring in the Role of Africans
    (Journal of African Studies and Development, 2015) Poncian, Japhace; Poncian, Japhace
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    Public–private partnership in higher education provision in Tanzania: implications for access to and quality of education
    (Bandung: Journal of the Global South, 2016-11-24) Mgaiwa, Samson John; Poncian, Japhace
    Public–private partnerships (PPPs) in education are presented as capable of resolving several issues of education provision, financing, management, access and quality. This paper aimed at analyzing the impact of PPPs on access to and quality of higher education in Tanzania. Secondary research was used to gather data and critical review of the data and its analysis made. The focus of the paper was on higher education financing and on private higher education institutions. The findings indicated that PPPs have had a positive impact on increasing access to Tanzania higher education. However, although private universities and university colleges are many in number, enrolment has continued to be higher in public universities. It was further noted that an increase in higher learning institutions and subsequent increase in access to higher education has not meant an improvement in the quality of education provided by the institutions. As such, PPPs have had no significant impact on the improvement of quality of education. This is mainly accounted for by the number and qualifications held by academic members of staff in private universities, the infrastructure as well as the programmes they offer.
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    Resource governance and community participation: Making hydrocarbon extraction work for Tanzania
    (Elsevier, 2019) Poncian, Japhace; Jose, Jim
    Recent discoveries of natural gas in Tanzania have generated optimism and reignited hopes for socio-economic transformation. While extractive companies have not yet announced their investment decisions, the government has anticipated future activities by putting in place institutional, policy and legal frameworks to ensure that there is a stable basis for the development of the subsector. These measures aim to ensure a vibrant level of industrial development. However, it is not clear whether they will be sufficient to enable Tanzania to avoid the fate that has befallen some other resource rich African countries, namely the resource curse. Hence it is imperative that Tanzania finds a way to prevent potential adverse effects from becoming realities that eventually turn into a resource curse. This paper considers the role and significance of active community participation in natural gas decision making and governance processes. The paper draws on government documents for the energy sector and forty-four semi-structured interviews conducted between July 2016 and February 2017 with community members, religious leaders, local government officials, central government bureaucrats, civil society organisations and political representatives in Mtwara, Lindi and Dar es Salaam. The paper argues that active community engagement in decision-making and governance processes is as important as economic participation. This calls for a re-think of local content policy and regulations to ensure that communities not only participate in natural gas value and supply chains but also have the opportunity and capacity to influence decisions about how they participate and benefit from extractive resources.
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    Transparency initiatives and Tanzania's extractive industry governance
    (Taylor and Francis, 2018-06) Poncian, Japhace; Kigodi, Henry Michael
    The proper management of natural resources and its proceeds is critical for resource-rich countries. Many resource-rich countries have arguably been plagued by aspects of what scholars call the resource curse’.Overcoming‘the curse’has thus occupied center stage in studies about extractive resource governance. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has been promoted as having the potential to overcome some aspects of the resource curse especially the‘rentier politics’.Several countries have adopted and domesticated the initiative. However, studies on transparency present contradictory findings about the usefulness of the initiative. This paper examines Tanzania’sadoption and implementation of transparency in extractive sector governance. The paper examinedTanzania’s EITI implementation process, its reconciliation reports and how these reports are used by the parliament, media and civil society to push for governance improvements in the sector. The review of these key documents found that adoption and implementation of the EITI has improved the extractive sector governance by making it more transparent and accountable.