How Magufuli laid bare our institutional frailties
Once again, in a very short period of time, Tanzanians have had the opportunity to take stock of where the country has come from following the untimely death of President John Magufuli and just months before that of Retired President Benjamin Mkapa.
I should note that upon Mkapa’s passing away, I wrote of how during his time, the country rather than arresting the political drift given that an intellectual was at the helm, instead became a gradual political wasteland where a premium on CCM loyalty was the order of the day and not anything of substance. Rather astonishingly, the man himself came to admit just as much in his memoirs, but as the saying goes, “too little too late”.
Fast forward to 2015 and enter John Magufuli in the most surreptitious manner imaginable. He himself would come to joke that he was merely trying his luck by “beeping” but the call went through!
Within no time of his ascendancy to State House in November 2015, events began to unfold that had eerie echoes of an interview by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for her book Fascism: A Warning in which she chillingly speaks about the infamous Italian fascist Benito Mussolini: “And then Mussolini had this terrific statement which was that if you consolidate power by plucking a chicken one feather at a time, people don’t notice. And so it is those steps and it’s the normalisation, frankly, of the kinds of things that are going on now that made me want to do a warning.”
Elsewhere she says, “The important thing is that fascists aren’t actually trying to solve problems; they’re invested in exacerbating problems and deepening the divisions that result from them. They reject the free press and denounce the institutional structures within a society — like Congress or the judiciary.”
To illustrate this, just moments after the inauguration of the new parliament, a merry-making reception that accompanied it, which happened to be sponsored by a leading bank for MPs, was cancelled by the President and instead the monies sent to buy hospital beds at the country’s main referral hospital.
As the new parliament got down to business in 2016, like a thunderbolt, it was declared by the Information minister that Parliament would no longer be broadcast live on the grounds of cost saving.
Following the subsequent hue and cry from what had been a docile opposition that had even praised him for adopting some of its campaign promises, the President became bare-knuckled, and declared that all opposition political rallies were banned until 2020, and that their MPs were to be restricted to addressing meetings in their constituencies. Immense focus would gradually turn from taming the Opposition to poaching members of the Opposition – all under the pretty slogan that “development knows no party”.
As the Legislature was witnessing battering from all corners, the Judiciary swiftly found itself on the receiving end. In an extraordinary development following the retirement of the Chief Justice in early 2017, the office would remain vacant for close to a year in what can only be interpreted as an act of probation unheard of in the country.
It led to a deplorable situation where the Law Society Tanganyika president, a lady for that matter who suffers no fools gladly, was denied in advance an opportunity to speak at Law Day 2019 on the grounds of limited time.
Neither was civil society spared as an innocuous leader decided to run an opinion poll for the second time that unlike the first showed that Magufuli’s popularity had plummeted. Within weeks the gentleman had his passport confiscated for investigation.
The lead-up now to the 2020 General Elections was looking as grim as ever without any unity of purpose from the Opposition parties. Magufuli himself had once insinuated that why bother with elections when instead that money could be put to better use.
My deep suspicion is the man was hell-bent on sailing through unopposed and making history on the continent. At least under a one-party dispensation we had a choice of “yes” or “no” at the ballot. But even that was becoming a luxury to imagine under Magufuli.
After all, he kept repeating whilst on the campaign trail “Tanzania ya Magufuli” or “Magufuli’s Tanzania” as though we were his subjects. It was all in the mould of France’s Louis XIV who stated L’ètat c’est moi or “I am the state”.
Indeed when the hour arrived for political parties’ nominations of parliamentary candidates, over 30 constituencies had CCM candidates sail through unopposed. Eventually the results of the General Election were announced, showing that the Opposition had been virtually wiped out not only in Parliament, but at the local authority level as well.
Among the other extraordinary developments witnessed during Magufuli’s reign was the death of trade unions and as a consequence industrial strikes were totally unknown of. Equally, no new political parties were registered as was the norm in the past. In essence, all institutions, including religious, were bludgeoned into submission!
It really is a credit to our citizens how they managed to keep body and soul despite such adversity. John Magufuli’s rule has laid bare just how Mwalimu Nyerere bequeathed a nation with shaky foundations, and of which he himself subsequently warned in his retirement years of its dangerous cracks.
All in all, John Magufuli was a very puzzling figure, even going by the comments of his chum, Raila Odinga, who revealed to the public just after his death how they first met at a conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2003, where Magufuli took immense interest in his presentation that examined the extent of corruption in his roads ministry.
Rather oddly, as president in 2015, Magufuli was invited to an anti-corruption summit of its kind in London by Prime Minister David Cameron, but was not interested in attending. Wouldn’t that have been the right forum to share and learn the best practices at a time he was riding the wave of fame?
Tanzania, now that Magufuli is gone, needs to do serious soul-searching on how it gets itself out of this state of disfigurement.
Many eyes are on Samia Suluhu Hassan, and despite her problematic CCM background, she should not be discounted. To her credit, at least she endured all this period with Magufuli and his oft-times humiliation of women from all walks of life with stoicism. In the face of adversity, it is notable. Indeed, it is hugely ironic that a man who displayed unbridled male chauvinism has been succeeded by a woman of such a contrasting temperament!
