THE higher echelons of the central government’s planning and investment wing appear to be exuding more confidence on our prospects and achievements than critics may see as justifiable or realistic.

These are days of opening, distributing and deliberating on the first draft of our country’s 2050 vision of development.

The relevant minister says that, come 2050, the country will likely have attained five times average incomes from our current level – reaching around 11m/- annually from 2.8m/-.

These statistical averages often bring together heaven and earth or the deep freezer and the stove, etc., to find an average.

A top cleric once used a festival sermon to ask rhetorically whether it was right or fair for a qualified medical doctor to start with 0.7m/- per month in salary, while taking four months to reach the average earnings applicable for the wider country.

Another statistic published in global media and available on internet says that average pay in our country basically hovers at around 1m/- per month. Really?

That is why even our efforts to develop a cohesive vision for the next quarter century ought to be taken up with a pinch of salt.

There is no other way to discuss what concerns incomes or prospects of large numbers of people except via statistics.

But then these figures have to be reduced to averages to serve as comprehensible communication material, and that is where trouble comes in.

For countries where the physical environment relating to things like housing and health care have been ‘levelled up’ or finding jobs is nearly straightforward for those who need to do it, averages are helpful.

But the lower one descends on the ladder of cohesive environments or social conditions comparable across large segments of the population, the data start to look skimpy and not of much utility.

A social critic could easily say that the problem here is inequality, and then start proposing policies to execute in seeking to reduce such inequalities.

However, the problem would be lying elsewhere: too many facets of economic activity or life as a whole aren’t monetised, thus pulling down the rest of the society to take care of ‘disabled’ parts.

In wider society communal land is an idle asset to be found outside the market and effectively unable to attract loans to improve it; at a wider level it relates to many of our parastatal firms.

The idea that Tanzania will become a middle- and upper income nation by 2050 is not altogether erroneous or misleading.

Even currently there is gushing modernity all around us if one compares the situation for example in Dar es Salaam with what obtained 20 years ago.

With the frenetic pace of manufacturing and commercial construction projects, and all of these often purchase land and facilitate new investments, this is not at all far-fetched.

Trouble is as relates to the prospects of worsening levels of agro-sector ruin, shortage of promising farmland as well as exponential rises in urban unemployment and violence.

UN data indicate that by 2030 half of the world’s abject poor will be African children, and those projections speaks volumes whose importance and relevance no one can afford to belittle or ignore.