Dar es Salaam | Tuesday
TANZANIA’S President Benjamin Mkapa has assured his country’s benefactors that no donor funds will be used to pay for an expensive air traffic control system Dar es Salaam is importing from London.
”We are going to use our own resources to buy the facility, not aid or any part of proceeds from debt relief,” Mkapa told a news conference late on Monday after he had talks with the managing director of the International Monetary Fund Horst Koehler.
The decision to grant British aerospace giant BAE Systems an export license to sell the system to Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest countries, provoked a fierce row in last December, with both International Development Secretary Clare Short and Finance Minister Gordon Brown opposing the sale.
The facility will cost Tanzania 28-million pounds ($40 million, 45-million euros).
Critics of the deal argued that Tanzania could have acquired a perfectly adequate civil system for a quarter of the price.
Finance Minister Basil Mramba said earlier this month that Tanzania had already paid half the price of the system.
Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) has delayed a 10-million-pound ($14-million, 16 million euro) aid payment to Tanzanian pending a report into whether the African state had breached its commitments to alleviate poverty. – Sapa-AFP