All will say, ‘Magufuli was here’

Tanzania’s fifth president, John Pombe Magufuli, will be buried in his Chato hometown, in Geita region, northwestern Tanzania, today. Dr Magufuli was more than a handful, and there will be a lot of more personal things to say about his rule in the times ahead. 

At the big picture level, since the end of the 1960s in East Africa, no leader has shaken up a country in peacetime, and the region, in five years — for better and for worse — like Magufuli did. 

One has to go back to the very opposite spectrum, to military dictator Field Marshal Idi Amin in Uganda, an avowed enemy of Tanzania and then President Julius Nyerere, to find something close.

More recently elsewhere, the closest was Donald Trump in the United States. In the US, it was long-settled wisdom that a democracy that was over 200 years old couldn’t be disrupted by one man. That its political traditions ran so deep, its institutions so entrenched and constitutional norms so well practised, a president could only chip away at the edges and tinker, but wouldn’t tear its heart out.

Pan-Africanist

Trump, in four short years, got about 75 per cent there, and it became common to refer to his America as a banana republic. There seemed to be no whim Trump couldn’t indulge in, and no norm he couldn’t break, as the “American system” flailed in the wind. Absent a grassroots movement that was partly outside the political mainstream in states like Georgia, Trump would have won re-election.

But Trump forced a rethink of the old comfortable argument that Western liberal democracies had reached a fail-safe point, where institutions would stymie a demagogue. It seems, after all, that most institutions are no match for a determined person who manages to arouse a fanatic following and officials devoted to his cause. All it takes is for one to dare try.

Likewise, Magufuli dared, and shattered, most of how, at least from the outside, the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and the person who rules Tanzania as its leader were supposed to conduct themselves.

Even at its most thuggish and corrupt, CCM’s leader as the national president and the party always had a red line they didn’t cross. CCM was always not just pan-Africanist, but internationalist. Magufuli kept up the pan-Africanist bit, but was crudely nativist in ways his predecessors wouldn’t even think of.

Ruthless and cruel

He was provincial, and had an extremist son-of-the-soil streak in him. In all of five years, he travelled outside Tanzania less than six times — a staggering contrast with his predecessor Jakaya Kikwete, nicknamed “Marco Polo” for his wanderlust.

Past presidents knocked down the opposition, civil society activists and journalists. But they did do with a wooden hammer. Magufuli used a giant maul. He was ruthless, punitive and even cruel.

The party and Tanzanian leaders from Nyerere on were always rationalist and, therefore, largely scientific. Magufuli was an early-20th Century conservative Catholic purist, given to extreme positions — against pregnant school girls, against data and the scientific method, leading to a ban on independent social and economic inquisition of government and the most restrictive laws on use of the internet in the region. And, most fatally, into Covid-19 denialism.

On East African issues, every post-Nyerere leader has been coy, but adopted a centrist approach that allowed the regional integration project to plod along at snail pace. Magufuli tore up the book on that. Issues with Ugandan and Kenya chicks? Gather them all and set them on fire in a dramatic show.

Takeover of Tanzanian state

Magufuli had terrified the rest of East Africa so much that even the leaks about his health in the days before he died could only be written about very carefully — because of concerns he could, for example, expel all the citizens of an “offending” outlet, and in Uganda there were fears he could scuttle the oil pipeline to Tanga.

In five years, Magufuli completed a takeover of the Tanzanian state in ways that no leader who has come to power in a normal political transition has in Africa. And, according to critics, he unleashed his carnivorous legion on it after an early flirtation with fighting corruption.

Yet, for all that, he still achieved a lot. Writing last year in CGTN Africa, University of Dar es Salaam’s Richard Bonaventura Mbunda, in quite a partial, but nevertheless revealing, piece said: 
“During Magufuli’s administration, 71 new hospitals, 487 health centres... Water services in rural areas have also improved from 47 per cent in 2015 to 70.1 in 2020 while in urban areas water availability has increased from 74 per cent in 2015 to 84 per cent in 2020. In 2015, only 2,081 villages had electricity supply. But in 2020, the Magufuli administration had increased the supply of electricity to 9,112 villages.”

This picture of an anti-scientific, repressive, parochial and developmental leader is not a contradiction. His nativism, unvarnished African pride, contempt for “foreigners”, and puritanism meant he was also a patriarch who prided in feeding his household.

We’ll remember Pombe for a long time.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. @cobbo3