In Arusha, Tanzania’s Top Bureaucrat Tells Ministries to Stop Building Digital Empires and Start Following the Law

The Arusha eGovernment meeting was not staged as a technology fair. It opened as a reprimand.

When Chief Secretary Moses Mpogole Kusiluka addressed officials at the gathering in Arusha last week, the language was administrative, not aspirational. Follow the law. Stop building disconnected systems. Integrate cybersecurity from the start. Officials who bypass approval processes will face disciplinary action. No soft phrasing. No applause lines.

For a region where digital government announcements often arrive wrapped in optimism, the tone stood out. The message was that digital reform has become a governance problem.

Across East Africa, public institutions have digitised in fragments. Ministries procure systems in isolation. Agencies build platforms that cannot speak to each other. Vendors are hired on short cycles, then replaced. Data is duplicated, stored in silos, or left exposed. The result is a patchwork state that looks modern on the surface yet remains structurally brittle underneath.

Tanzania’s leadership appears to have grown impatient with that model.

When Digital Reform Turns into System Sprawl

Over the past decade, governments in the region have invested heavily in online portals, digital payments and electronic records. The promise was administrative efficiency. The practice has been uneven.

The problem is not digitisation itself. It is institutional coordination. Once ministries begin commissioning their own tools without architectural discipline, complexity multiplies. Systems cannot authenticate each other. Databases conflict. Cybersecurity gaps widen because oversight is diluted.

The Arusha eGovernment meeting addressed that problem directly. Tanzania’s eGovernment Agency has long operated under a statutory framework intended to standardise procurement and system design. What Kusiluka emphasised was enforcement. Projects that bypass the required approval chain will not be regularised after the fact.

That detail matters more than any speech. In many bureaucracies, compliance rules exist but are treated as optional until an audit forces attention. Here the instruction was explicit: approvals first, implementation second. Not the other way around.

The subtext is institutional fatigue. When digital projects proliferate without coordination, maintenance costs rise. Cyber risk expands. Integration becomes a retrofit exercise, which is more expensive and often politically fraught.

Kenya’s Expanding Digital Spine

Kenya sits in the background of this conversation, whether named or not. Its digital infrastructure already functions as a revenue and identity backbone. The Government Digital Payments Unit under the National Treasury is mandated to digitise all government payments. That is not a cosmetic change. It centralises cash flow and audit trails.

eCitizen has grown from a portal into a financial artery. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner enforces the Data Protection Act 2019, which governs lawful data sharing across departments. On paper, that architecture is coherent.

In practice, integration remains a work in progress. Agencies scale services while contending with fraud attempts, system downtime and compromised credentials. Skills gaps persist. Cybersecurity budgets are finite.

The Arusha eGovernment meeting reads as a cautionary note for Nairobi. Standardisation cannot be retrofitted indefinitely. Governance frameworks must precede system expansion or the clean-up becomes structural.

There is also a political layer. Digital systems concentrate power. When payments, identity and service access converge, oversight must keep pace. Otherwise disputes over data access and institutional turf follow.

The Culture Problem Inside Government

One of the sharper comments in Arusha concerned workforce management. Kusiluka criticised the habit of transferring underperforming staff instead of building capacity.

That is not an ICT issue. It is organisational culture.

Digital government demands a different skill mix. Cybersecurity specialists. Data architects. Compliance officers who understand both code and statute. When those roles are thinly staffed, systems drift.

Training is expensive. Retention is harder. The private sector competes aggressively for the same technical talent. Governments that do not invest in structured career pathways often watch their trained personnel depart within 24 months.

If Tanzania enforces legal discipline on system approvals but fails to professionalise its digital workforce, the framework will strain. Enforcement without capacity produces bottlenecks. Capacity without enforcement produces fragmentation.

Kenya confronts the same arithmetic. As digital services multiply, the margin for technical error narrows. One data breach can undermine years of trust-building.

Cybersecurity Is Now Administrative Infrastructure

At the Arusha eGovernment meeting, cybersecurity and personal data protection were framed not as add-ons but as foundational elements.

That framing reflects a regional reality. Cyber incidents in public systems are no longer rare. Ransomware, phishing, credential theft and insider misuse have become routine threats. When public data is compromised, the consequences extend beyond inconvenience. Identity fraud increases. Financial losses accumulate. Political credibility erodes.

The regulatory environment has tightened. Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 imposes compliance obligations that carry financial and reputational costs. Tanzania’s legal architecture has also expanded in scope. The pressure is similar across borders: digitise, but do not expose citizens in the process.

Emerging technologies add another layer. Artificial intelligence is increasingly used for document processing, fraud detection and service automation. That introduces algorithmic bias risks and data governance complications. Oversight mechanisms must evolve alongside deployment. Otherwise automation amplifies old administrative weaknesses.

Integration Is a Political Choice

Technical integration sounds procedural. In reality, it is political.

When systems integrate, data flows. When data flows, control becomes contested. Ministries accustomed to guarding their information resist central oversight. Agencies fear loss of autonomy. Vendors defend proprietary architectures.

The Arusha eGovernment meeting implicitly addressed that tension. Integration by design requires authority to override institutional inertia. It requires budgetary leverage and legal backing. Without both, interoperability becomes a slogan.

Tanzania’s insistence on disciplinary consequences suggests central authority is prepared to assert itself. Whether that posture endures beyond conference halls remains to be seen. Enforcement is rarely popular.

Kenya’s experience offers lessons. Centralising digital payments strengthened revenue visibility. It also intensified scrutiny of expenditure flows. Transparency reshapes internal dynamics.

The Regional Stakes

East Africa is in the middle of a long administrative recalibration. Paper-based systems are receding. Digital infrastructure is advancing unevenly. The risk is not stagnation. It is acceleration without alignment.

The Arusha eGovernment meeting may be remembered less for its resolutions than for its tone. The emphasis was on compliance, integration and capacity. Less celebration. More instruction.

That approach recognises a basic truth. Digital government is not an app. It is an institutional reordering that affects procurement rules, staff hierarchies, budget controls and citizen trust.

If enforcement holds, Tanzania could stabilise its digital architecture before fragmentation deepens. If enforcement falters, system sprawl will continue under a more disciplined vocabulary.

For Kenya and its neighbours, the message is plain. Expansion is easy. Integration is hard. Oversight is harder. The next phase of digital government in the region will not be defined by how many services go online, but by whether the systems behind them hold under pressure.

The Arusha eGovernment meeting placed that question squarely on the table.

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