Is Dodoma, the new capital city of Tanzania, a socialist city?

This paper examines the nature of development of the new capital city starting with an analysis of the National Capital Master Plan (NCMP) itself. The decision to relocate the capital was a follow up programme of action to the Arusha Declaration and the Decentralization policy. Hence, Dodoma was supposed to be a city which reflected socialist values bearing the fact that it was to become the nucleus of a nation aspiring to build socialism. This paper argues that in both theory and practice this has not been the case due to the fact that the socialist policy of Tanzania does not emanate from a dialectical class analysis of the entire society, but it is very much a 'belief', an attitude of mind. Hence there are conceptual as well as practical difficulties in identifying the key agents for socialist construction.-from Author