We will sell the land along the SGR railway line in exchange for stocks in the technology companies that buy the land. Those stocks will be evenly distributed to every Tanzanian: Children, working age Adults and the Elderly.
Connecting Economic Growth to Wage Growth
The World Bank’s recommendation to African governments on how to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal No. 1, No Poverty, is to increase economic growth until poverty rates fall below 3%.
This assumes that economic growth is what causes poverty rates to fall. In reality, economic growth is corelated with falling poverty rates not the cause of falling poverty rates.
You can have strong economic growth while wages remain stagnant. This phenomenon is being experienced in the United States which has been experiencing economic growth for several years while wages have remained stagnant.
The phenomenon occurred when American companies offshored their manufacturing to lower wage countries. American workers lost their manufacturing jobs and often ended up with lower paying jobs after that. While at the same time American companies grew their profits due to the lower labor costs and an expanded customer base. The Chinese were both the low wage workers and the consumers of products designed by American companies but manufactured in China.
America’s GDP grows all while the American Dream continues to fade away. Instead of owning a home, the inflationary effect caused by the money earned by those whose jobs were not offshored, leads to more and more people being priced out of their rented homes – Which leads to rising homelessness.
This phenomenon also occurs when workers are displaced by robots. Company profits grow while those workers who lost their jobs often end up in lower paying jobs. Increased productivity means that those who kept their jobs will likely get higher pay – Which leads to rising income inequality.
The phenomenon will likely repeat itself with the continuing development of AI agents. White collar workers will lose their jobs similar to factory workers and end up with lower paying jobs. The economy will grow, through increased productivity, while wage growth fails to keep up.
Having learned the lesson that economic growth does not necessarily lead to falling poverty rates, my administration will create a direct link between economic growth and income/wealth growth by making each Tanzanian citizen a financial shareholder of the economy.
Doing this for the whole Tanzanian economy is currently not possible. We need to create a new economy from the ground up with the deliberate intention of making Tanzanians shareholders of that economy. This new economy will be called Africa City, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with Hong Kong levels of autonomy. The city will be a linear city, 1 kilometer wide and 512 kilometers long, from Dar es Salaam – Tanzania’s commercial capital to Dodoma – Tanzania’s political capital along the new SGR railway line.
The districts of Africa City will be privately owned and governed by the world’s largest stock corporations with a focus on technology companies due to the growth potential in the value of their stock valuations. The districts will be auctioned to different corporations. These stock corporations will buy the land along with the rights to autonomously govern that land using corporate stocks.
Those shares will be evenly distributed to every single Tanzanian: children, working age adults and the elderly. The growth potential in the value of those stocks will come from profits made in Africa City as well as profits made from the products and services that these technology companies already sell globally.
The people owning the means of production is a socialist concept. My administration will achieve the objectives of socialism using capitalism. Tanzanians will earn capital gains through their tech stock ownership.
Aaron Kalikawe