The gravy… sorry, graft train to Mwanza

By Erick Kabendera

People travelling on the central corridor train from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza, especially those in third class, usually have pretty good reasons for taking this unreliable and tiresome mode of transport: They need to.
Because the trip is – for lack of a better way to put it – simply horrible.
For example, Joseph Kapama, 65, a businessman takes this train because he can get a ‘subsidised’ or illegally reduced fare. For a mere Sh15,000 – the usual price of a one way third class ticket – Kapama can travel second class with about 300kgs of luggage. However, the ride would be unsuitable for those not in Kapama’s category because it takes much longer than estimated and, believe it or not, the total costs are nearly equivalent to those incurred travelling by bus or plane. And when you take into account all the problems and inconveniences, even walking almost seems like a better option. Anything but that train ride.
Having heard some terrible reports about this train journey, I recently endured the shocking conditions of the central corridor train system when I took the trip from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza and back to see for myself. On the first leg heading north I travelled in third class and on the return I squeezed into the relative luxury of a second-class carriage.
If I had to explain each and every irregularity and problem I experienced on the train then I would require hundreds of pages of space, so I’ll stick to the most obvious and distressing.
Overcrowding is undoubtedly the biggest problem on the train to the extent that those passengers who had to stand basically equalled the number of seated passengers. Although one might expect a long train journey to attempt to offer some comfort and peace, the train turned out be a market place of people and goods, complete with haggling, action and smells.
The overcrowding was immediately apparent at the beginning of the journey when I boarded a third class carriage at Dar es Salaam station. Passengers continued to squash themselves into the already packed train and when all the chairs were occupied, other passengers who kept climbing aboard started sitting on the floor from the door of the carriage right to the toilets. In a few minutes, the corridor was impassable and people trying to get through were stacked so tightly they couldn’t move.
Despite notices stuck on every carriage warning passengers of the fines they would face for exceeding specified luggage weights, with the increasing flood of people came vast amounts of belongings. Third class passengers’ luggage is not allowed to exceed 20kg, but most ignored this directive and brought much more aboard. As the overhead carriers and the space below the chairs filled up, soon the toilets were also packed with luggage and people.
As a result, nobody could use the toilets. If you were so desperate that you simply had to go, you would have to find the toilets for the other carriages and of course have your seat occupied instantly. One return, you would have to explain yourself in order to dislodge the new occupants who would demand to be shown a ticket to prove that you were the prior occupant of the seat.
The train itself is neither attractive, clean, nor remotely maintained.
But when you read the Transport Infrastructure Master Plan for Tanzania conducted in 2002 for the Ministry of Communications and Transport by the Louis Berger Group, this is not surprising. The TRC has 93 locomotives, all over 20 years old and the railway itself was completed in 1912, having started in 1893.
And it shows.

Layers of dusts in all of the train’s compartments cover the original paint colours and the mixed maroon and beige strip on the outside is blurred. This kind of aesthetic neglect I would not mind, but when facilities like the train’s tap water are as dirty as the train itself, you have to wonder if you are on a train or in a sewer.

The carriage we travelled on had more than ten lights of which only one worked and when we reached Dodoma on the second night of the journey, the remaining light was switched off plunging us into total darkness.
Under the cover of darkness a few men who were not visible before the light was switched off, started moving suspiciously around the carriage. We were cautioned by the security man to watch our luggage because of thieves, but none of the train officials bothered to inform the passengers why the light was switched off. You could sense that many people would not be arriving with their property.
From the luggage and the human crush came a mixture of smells (mostly offensive) and the air became increasingly heavy, making it difficult to breathe. At this point, windows became more valuable than seats because everyone wanted the relief of fresh air from an open window.
A woman laden with luggage and four small children – the oldest of which was only ten years old – set herself up at the entrance to the toilet for the entire duration of the two day journey to Mwanza. Both she and her children slept on the hard carriage floor. The woman, Joanitha Marwa, 38, came to symbolise the suffering of the third class passengers as her children were constantly crying from perpetual discomfort.
Marwa had nobody to help her and passengers who walked through the corridor often stumbled on the children causing them to cry from time to time.
None of the seated passengers cared to assist Marwa to even carry one of her children – and most of them couldn’t even move due to over crowding.
Despite travel regulations, which insist passengers sit only in the bucket of the seats, many ignored this and perched atop the backs of the seats with their legs shoved directly into the back of the person in front of them.
Some passengers, like Marwa, balancing whatever possessions they had on their heads with their children strapped to their backs were late in boarding their designated carriage. They then had to move cumbersomely through the carriages to where they hoped they still had a seat.
I tailed a woman and her husband who boarded a carriage that wasn’t theirs at Dodoma. With luggage and children in tow, they walked very slowly from carriage to carriage asking the location of their carriage. After passing through fifteen carriages I lost count, but by the time they found where they were meant to be more than two hours had passed.
It was obvious that many passengers (especially those who had had to stand from when we left Dar es Salaam and some who commuted within stations between Dar es Salaam and Mwanza) paid their ‘fare’ to the conductors without being issued receipts or official tickets.
The whole issue of paying illegal train fares seemed chronic and Tanzania Railways Corporation must be losing a lot of money if the practice has been in use for quite sometime. The conductors are not the only culprits. Engine drivers also have their own passengers who travel in the engine room presumably by paying a fare to the driver.
Similarly the police carriage takes passengers who pay them money and even the securitymen make some money selling seats. At the end of the day, each department of the train staff has his or her territory and seems to receive fares from paying passengers. Think of it as a little graft gravy train losing TRC tons of cash as it crawls back and forth between the coast and Lake Victoria.
Passengers like Juma Mihayo whose destination was Bukoba said the train was overcrowded because students were returning to school after the vacation. Mihayo said most of the students use the facility because it is cheap and they find train travel adventurous.
But the security man guarding the train who preferred anonymity dismissed Mihayo’s idea saying that it was not the season for student travel and that the trains are always packed, students or no students.
The security man thought that TRC is supposed to keep a sharp eye on overcrowding, but he said sometimes even the conductors rent their rooms to passengers while they sleep down in the restaurant.
“Services like security and catering on the train are run by private companies, but I think everything should be privatised,” he said.
As I sat with the security men and listened as they regaled each other with stories of how they had sex in the carriage’s toilets with female passengers in exchange for passage, I learnt even more about the whole sordid system.
According to regular travellers on the train, theft is a problem and some of the people who move about continuously are thieves who have been stealing from train passengers for many years yet nothing is done about them.
A shifty-eyed young man, who I later found out was the restaurant waiter, seemed to facilitate all the deals done on the train. A group of young men who later disappeared and were thought to be thieves used the young man as a middleman to pay their cheap fare to the conductors.
The group secured themselves an area in the toilet, where several sacks of oranges were stored and could often be seen speaking in low tones with the waiter. When the conductor came to check tickets, the waiter whispered to him after which the ticket examiner nodded and left without inquiring about the young men sitting in the toilet or their tickets.
Around 10:30pm on the second day, a scream rang out.
It was Marwa.
She was hysterical as she explained that Sh500,000 that she had concealed in her clothing had disappeared. Before she went to sleep that night, she had checked that the money was still there, but when she woke up her two outer skirts were neatly cut and the money was missing.
Everyone on the carriage inquired about the whereabouts of the suspect young men camped in the toilet, but they had disappeared along with four sacks of oranges. It was thought that they had probably got out at the last station through the window in the toilet.
There were complaints of theft from passengers other than Marwa and it was then that the security men made the belated announcement that everyone should take care of his or her luggage as there were thieves masquerading as travellers on board.
Fed up with the conditions in third class, on the return leg I squeezed into a six-person roach infested second-class compartment hoping that the journey to Dar es Salaam would be more comfortable.
It was only marginally better. And the journey, which was supposed to take two days, was plagued by misfortune and landed up taking an extra day. The delay forced myself and the other passengers to spend more than was initially budgeted for the trip.
As we all waited patiently at the Mwanza station five hours before the train departed for Dar es Salaam on a Thursday, we were horrified to see a typed announcement from the Tanzania Railways Corporation (TRC) stuck to the notice board informing their ‘esteemed customers’ that the train’s departure was postponed to Friday.
As inconvenient as this may have been for Mwanzans, the passengers who had arrived from Bukoba by ship and were planning to transfer and continue by train to Dar es Salaam had to waste their time and money by spending a night in Mwanza. Those who couldn’t afford to rent a place to sleep were forced to camp at the station until the revised Friday departure time rolled around.
On Friday, just as passengers hopes of travelling picked up, they were dashed again by another memo pasted on top of the last one postponing the journey again, this time to eight a.m. Saturday.
Passengers continued camping on the station’s hard floors waiting to travel on Saturday morning. Those of us who were lucky enough to eventually get on the train at eight a.m., watched from the windows as latecomers attempted unsuccessfully to catch up with the locomotive as it gathered speed.
Surprisingly on the technical side things went reasonably smoothly until Sunday afternoon when between Kongwa and Zuzu sub stations, the engine suddenly went silent.
Later, we were told that we would have to wait for more than four hours for another engine to be sent from Dodoma. As we waited, the intense heat started to cook within the carriages forcing most of us to leave our seats and look for a spot of shade in the sparse jungle alongside the tracks.
As we stayed longer, the train’s privatised catering services run by the Valley Inn Hotel of Dar es Salaam took advantage of our plight and hiked the price of everything from food to bottled drinking water. Those of us who did not have cash to spare were forced to go hungry.
The train carried people from all walks of life, the most entertaining of which were the heavy accented Sukuma passengers, who despite the conditions kept most people in good spirits with their funny stories. However, boredom and frustration showed on everyone’s faces and the heat and blatant exploitation got to some passengers as arguments about the situation broke out and nearly led to fights.
The arrival of another engine to support the dead machine was applauded by almost all of us, as we were eager to get moving again and to arrive in Dodoma where we could buy cheap brunch.
There was talk that perhaps we could even get to Dar es Salaam by Sunday night. If only we had known the continual misfortunes we were to face on our long journey.
In the evening when we had just departed from Kidete substation a few kilometres before Morogoro, a blast was heard from the joint between our carriage and the one in front. The engine suddenly stopped and everyone got out as soon as possible, thinking that perhaps the carriage had caught fire.
As the train’s technician successfully put out a smouldering pipe, he and other train employees were heard blaming the Tabora station technicians for replacing the pipe with a fake one. They further explained that the pipe that caught fire was the one connecting the brake system between the carriages.
Someone who appeared to be in charge said that because there was no other pipe to replace the fake, the train would have to continue the journey to Morogoro where a replacement would be found.
It couldn’t get any scarier. But in the middle of nowhere, at the end of your financial rope, you had no choice to but to board and commit yourself to the angels.
The engine was soon switched on to continue the journey to Morogoro, but the last five carriages, including ours and that of the police, had to make do without a brake. Nobody even bothered inquiring whether the pipe was fixed or not upon arrival at Morogoro station. By this stage everyone was fed up and just looking forward to arriving in Dar es Salaam at the constantly revised estimated time of arrival; this time it was Monday morning.
To put it into perspective, at a later stage upon reaching Manyoni station, we were told that a cargo train had derailed two nights prior to our arrival. Eyewitnesses said two people and more than 40 cows were killed. It was hard not to think about what would happen if a train with a faulty brake line and packed with passengers such as ours were to experience the same fate. This is not an unlikely scenario as according to the 2002 Master Plan, TRC experiences 200 major accidents a year.
Such farcical conditions and inept management were instrumental in forcing the government to identify TRC as being among the 400 loss making companies of 2001. Cabinet then made the decision to restructure TRC by introducing a private rail operator while the government remains involved only with the infrastructure ownership.
However, according to the official website of the Presidential Sector Reform Commission (PSRC), the winning bidder to run TRC was expected to be announced in July. So far no announcement has been made.
When he spoke with The Citizen last year, TRC Director General Linford Mboma said after the meeting on the central corridor review the government had allocated over Sh4 billion to the company to buy spare parts to repair about 12 locomotives owned by TRC. Mboma said because the locomotives were outdated, the spares had to be ordered from the manufacturers and the whole process of buying and repairing locomotives was expected to take a year. He added that the process of revamping the coaches was going on at the time.
If these efforts are really being carried out to ensure smooth rail transportation, then why have no tangible results materialised since? There is plenty of evidence that someone somewhere is not doing enough to improve or even maintain this form of transportation.
Everything from the train’s appearance and lack of maintenance to overcrowding, theft, break-downs and corruption by staff exposed this journey for the hell-trip it was. Not only were you liable to be robbed, ripped off and squashed, but with faulty engines and fake parts in the braking system, your safety was not guaranteed either.
If you can afford it, take the bus or even better, a plane. If not, good luck and may God be with you.