East Africa Supply Chains Rebalance After Port Closure

The temporary 48-hour closure of Dar es Salaam Port on 30–31 October 2025 highlighted the structural vulnerability of Tanzania’s logistics backbone to social and political disturbances. As the country’s primary maritime gateway—handling around 17 million tonnes of cargo annually, equal to 95% of seaborne trade and roughly 37% of East Africa’s transit volumes—the disruption exposed systemic dependence on a single chokepoint. Immediate throughput losses are estimated at about $60–65 million, with secondary spillovers of roughly $15–20 million affecting supply chains in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The unrest, triggered by localized urban labor and fuel distribution disputes, temporarily halted trucking corridors that normally move about 2,200 containers per day. While Tanzania’s 2025 GDP growth forecast of 5.7% remains intact, the brief suspension introduced a marginal output gap of roughly 0.1 percentage points if congestion were to persist beyond one week. The Central Corridor—responsible for 70% of Rwanda’s imports and 80% of Burundi’s fuel—experienced short-term delays that underscored how non-economic shocks can generate fiscal and external-sector effects through customs shortfalls, demurrage costs, and temporary exchange-rate pressure.

The Tanzania Ports Authority (TPA) recently completed a $450 million modernization program under the FYDP III framework, raising container throughput capacity to 1.6 million TEUs and cutting average dwell time from 12 to 6 days. The closure briefly reversed operational efficiency gains, prompting some shipping lines to reroute to Mombasa and Beira. Maritime insurance premiums across East African routes rose an estimated 8–10 basis points during the period, reflecting transient risk repricing. The swift reopening on 1 November, coordinated by TPA, the Police Force, and the Ministry of Works and Transport, restored functionality within 36 hours—demonstrating institutional responsiveness uncommon among frontier peers.

Macroeconomic fundamentals remained stable. Headline inflation held at 3.2% in October, the Tanzanian shilling stabilized near TZS/USD 2,515, and reserves covered about 4.9 months of imports. However, port-linked revenues, accounting for roughly 7% of government non-tax income, underscore fiscal sensitivity to logistics disruptions. Freight charges for regional exporters—especially Zambian and DRC copper and gold shipments routed through Dar—rose by around 7% before normalizing later in the week.

From a market standpoint, the incident may introduce a temporary caution premium on Tanzanian logistics-linked assets, but systemic investor confidence remains intact given the short duration. The episode reinforces the strategic rationale for redundancy via the Bagamoyo and Mtwara port expansion projects, now approaching mid-phase completion under public-private partnership frameworks. Diversification of maritime capacity is increasingly viewed as essential for sustaining East Africa’s trade resilience amid climate and security volatility.

Looking ahead to 2026, three indicators will determine the sector’s recovery trajectory: average dwell time remaining below six days, freight volumes exceeding pre-closure levels of roughly 20 million tonnes, and insurance rates returning to baseline by mid-2026. Achieving these thresholds would confirm that the October 2025 unrest was a short-term operational shock rather than a systemic constraint, preserving the integrity of Tanzania’s ongoing $3.4 billion national logistics and trade-facilitation agenda.