Dodoma
Tanzania's 50-year capital transfer finally completed in 2023, but Dodoma still lacks sewage for 94% of residents — the slowest institutional transplant in Africa.
Tanzania announced it was moving its capital to Dodoma in 1973. The State House opened fifty years later, in 2023. Dodoma sits at 1,125 metres on the central plateau, a city of roughly 765,000 people designated as the national capital to replace coastal Dar es Salaam and centralise government in the geographic heart of the country. Wikipedia notes that Dodoma is the capital. What it undersells is that this is the longest-running capital transfer in modern African history — and the city that received the designation still lacks basic infrastructure to support it.
President Nyerere envisioned Dodoma as a non-monumental capital: functional, egalitarian, free from Dar es Salaam's colonial port geography. Parliament moved in 1996. But the rest of government didn't follow for another 27 years. The final offices relocated only when President Hassan opened the new State House in Chamwino in May 2023. In the meantime, Dar es Salaam grew to 4.3 million people, became East Africa's largest city and the continent's ninth-fastest growing, and retained the commercial, maritime, and diplomatic functions that make it Tanzania's de facto capital in everything but name.
Dodoma's growth has been rapid but hollow. The built-up area expanded 440% since 2000 — from 11 to 60 square kilometres — but only 6% of residents are connected to the sewage system. The other 94% rely on informal disposal. Population grows at 6.4% annually, straining water, education, and healthcare. A $200 million World Bank project approved in 2025 targets transport infrastructure, aiming to create 10,000 jobs and lift economic output by 2%. The region's main economic activities remain grape farming, livestock, and small-scale mineral extraction.
The biological parallel is the baobab. Baobab trees grow extraordinarily slowly — taking decades to develop their distinctive trunk — but once established, they become the structural centre of their ecosystem, storing water, housing colonies, and supporting entire food webs for up to 2,000 years. Dodoma's 50-year germination period mirrors baobab biology: an organism that invests almost nothing in visible growth for decades, then becomes irreplaceable. Whether Dodoma completes that transformation or remains a hollow trunk depends on whether the infrastructure catches up to the designation.