DAR ES SALAAM: I HAVE, on three separate occasions in my life, stood at a Dar es Salaam bus terminal before sunrise, bag in one hand and dignity in the other, wondering why the stand I was looking for had quietly relocated while I was not paying attention. Kisutu did it to me once. Ubungo … The post The Dar Bus Terminal that keeps running away from us appeared first on Daily News .
DAR ES SALAAM: I HAVE, on three separate occasions in my life, stood at a Dar es Salaam bus terminal before sunrise, bag in one hand and dignity in the other, wondering why the stand I was looking for had quietly relocated while I was not paying attention.
Kisutu did it to me once. Ubungo did it to me twice. And now, dear reader, it seems our bus terminals have developed a permanent case of wanderlust.
Every couple of decades, someone in government looks at the map, sighs, and says, “Ah! Hapa hapana… peleka mbali zaidi” no, not here. Take it further still.
So here we go again, watching the latest episode of Dar es Salaam’s longest running reality show: “Stendi Iko Wapi?” where is the bus terminal?
This season features Regional Commissioner Albert Chalamila, TABOA – insisting it is not fighting anyone – and a small army of bus companies that appear to have discovered urban planning before the urban planners did.
To understand why this argument feels so familiar, let’s rewind. Before private luxury coaches painted the highways, Tanzania’s upcountry transport story was dominated by stateowned operators.
That is KAMATA (Kampuni ya Mabasi ya Taifa) and TEETEECO (Tanganyika Transport Company – TTCO).
They were all part of the old public transport machinery that followed the 1970 nationalisation of Dar es Salaam Motor Transport (DMT).
KAMATA, established in 1974, was tasked with linking Dar es Salaam to the upcountry regions.
Its Leyland buses became fixtures on major routes and for a while catching a seat was nearly as important as reaching the destination.
TEETEECO, meanwhile, served the southern corridor, carrying passengers and freight through difficult territory where rail links were limited and roads often punished both passengers, drivers and machines.
By the early 1980s, shortages, maintenance problems and rising demand had overwhelmed the public fleets.
TEETEECO fragmented into smaller regional outfits, while KAMATA struggled with shrinking capacity.
In 1983, the government opened the door to private operators. The monopoly faded and today’s colourful army of highway coaches began its long takeover.
The old KAMATA name survived mostly as a Dar landmark proof that in this city, even transport failures can become directions.
In the 1990s and before, if you wanted to leave Dar for Bagamoyo, Kibaha, Mbeya, Njombe or the south, your life revolved around Kisutu and the Mnazi Mmoja grounds.
Operators such as Jamal Ismail, Ilanga Moto and Ruvuma Tours loaded passengers practically in the shadow of the city centre, which was convenient for everyone except, apparently, the city centre itself.
By 1999, congestion downtown had become unbearable, so the buses were marched to Ubungo. At the time, that decision attracted the same grumbling we hear today: too far, too inconvenient, too much trouble for grandma’s suitcase.
Then, two decades later, Ubungo, the shiny solution, became the problem: overcrowded, chaotic and impossible to fix in place.
So, around 2020/2021, the operation packed its bags again and moved to Mbezi Luis, into the grandly named Magufuli Bus Terminal. Notice the pattern?
Every move came with the same promise: less congestion, better order, a cleaner city.
And every move produced the same complaint, delayed by only a decade or two, like a family argument nobody resolves; we relocate the venue.
This time, however, the bus companies did not merely complain. Being business-minded Tanzanians, they solved their own problem.
Many opened private pick-up and drop-off points along Morogoro Road, Shekilango, Urafiki, Manzese, Chanika, Magomeni and Kigamboni, effectively recreating a mini bus network stretching from the city centre almost back to places they had just been told to leave.
It is the transport equivalent of your teenager sneaking back into the house through the window after you have locked the front door and confiscated the key.
And passengers loved it. Anyone who has arrived in Dar exhausted after a twelve-hour journey, only to be told to find a bodaboda from Mbezi at an odd hour, understands why.
These small stops meant less luggagelosing, less bargaining in the dark and fewer headaches.
From the passenger’s seat, this was not rebellion; it was customer service. From the Dar Regional Commissioner’s seat, however, it looked like the slow sabotage of a fifty-billion-shilling investment.
His August 2026 order was blunt: unlicensed roadside stops must go; buses must operate fully from Magufuli Stand; no extensions, no negotiations, no “let’s discuss this over chai.”
TABOA’s response was equally Tanzanian: schedule a meeting, insist there is no fight with government and ask politely whether the hammer might be placed on the table rather than swung immediately.
So, who is right? Annoyingly, both sides are and that is precisely the problem. Government has a legitimate point.
You do not spend billions building a formal terminal only to watch buses reconstruct the old chaos one street corner at a time.
Unregulated stops mean no proper parking, no consistent security screening, no order and a fresh crop of touts fighting over passengers on roads that are already busy enough.
If everyone keeps a side-door terminal, Morogoro Road becomes Ubungo again, only longer. But bus owners and passengers are not wrong either.
Mbezi Luis is genuinely far for a tired traveller dragging bags through an unfamiliar city.
A compromise (buses checking in at the terminal for inspection and order, then serving clearly licensed drop-off points elsewhere) is not wild thinking.
Nor is it fair to give six days to dismantle a whole informal ecosystem of snack sellers, bodaboda riders, porters and small businesses that grew around these stops because demand was real.
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So, what should be the solution to this challenge? Well, frankly speaking, the real culprit here is not about where the terminal sits.
It is about what connects that terminal to the rest of the city.
Move the terminal to the moon and it will still work if getting from the moon to Kariakoo takes ten minutes and costs five hundred shillings.
Until Dar invests seriously in fast, cheap and reliable links between Mbezi Luis and the rest of the city, we will keep staging this drama every fifteen years with a new location name attached.
The Treni ya Mwakyembe, introduced around 2012 as an affordable, high-capacity answer to Dar es Salaam’s notorious traffic, plus BRT could become Dar’s “nosweat” connection to upcountry travel cheap, predictable and considerably less exhausting.
Having already proved that commuter rail can move large numbers of people efficiently, this combination could be a small revolution.
Imagine boarding the train at Mbagala, changing to a comfortable BRT bus at Ubungo and reaching the Magufuli Bus Terminal at Mbezi Luis without wrestling with traffic, bodabodas, daladalas and the usual urban obstacle course.
I mean, a stronger idea now would be to think beyond the Treni ya Mwakyembe’s existing routes and connect it more effectively with the BRT network.
Rather than building an entirely new Mbagala–Mbezi Luis railway immediately, the city could develop a practical rail-and-BRT combination, allowing passengers from Mbagala and other southern neighbourhoods to travel by commuter train and then transfer smoothly to BRT services heading towards the Magufuli Bus Terminal.
So here is my prediction, filed for posterity: if no deliberate action is taken, somewhere around the year 2035, Mbezi Luis will itself be declared too congested.
A shinier terminal will rise even farther out at, say, Kibaha, perhaps, or Chalinze, as one wise online commentator has already joked.
A fresh generation of Dar residents will stand there, bags in hand, wondering why nobody learned the lesson the first three times. Until then: pack light, budget for the bodaboda and enjoy the show.
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