PRESIDENT Samia Suluhu Hassan has had occasion to turn down several requests for the division of districts.

The government is wary of demands to create new districts and even regions in part as, when such demands succeed, they tend to turn serial and test the government’s resolve.

The president explained summarily that there are many such requests and implementation of such needs requires a lot of money.

It is hard to deny this, the crucial issue being the sort of administrative harmony needed at local level.

Often there are visible divisions of a spatial sort, including between tribes or clans, or resource contentions diminishing people’s ability to speak with one voice. Picking representatives at all levels reflects such dichotomy, complicating cohesion.

The point is that the demand for new districts and even regions is ages old. There is a sense of freedom when a cluster of wards and villages considering themselves ‘kindred’ in relation to those with whom they form a district via a higher or wider classification.

There is a point at which such sentiments arise, whether in administrative or religious provinces or parts of them but aren’t tailored to pre-existing capacity by such administrative overload.

Looking at the way former prime minister Mizengo Pinda is quoted as having recently presented a demand to that effect, it was clearly balanced.

He is said to have pleaded that the government divide Katavi Region and create another district as the region is too big for smooth or effective management.

While the formulation isn’t quite vivid, it speaks of something like having a new region in addition to Katavi, with one of the two regions being handed an extra district carved out of an existing one.

An illustration is that the president was visiting Mlele District, itself earlier a part of Mpanda District in the respective region.

Demand for more administrative districts is part of a developing sense of collective individuality, just as it was with national independence.

While the thrust towards independence is recognised as of utmost importance to dignity, for Africa it also arose from lack of tolerance of animosities that are similar to those leading to regions or entire countries being divided.

That is what founding President Nyerere warned in 1995 when a parliamentary resolution was on the table to finish up Tanzania, as it were.

While that is history, there are huge pressures for dividing up administrative entities, which could hurt the delivery of social services in comparison with those closer to the administrative centre.

When a district is created, duplicating the facility becomes a preliminary requirement ending the complaints hitherto existing while specifically demanding a health centre for a village or ward would have been difficult to emphasize.

As the president quipped, the demand is not irrational but considering it definitely needs time.