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. - @cobbo3
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.
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.
John Pombe Joseph Magufuli: The Tanzanian president who came, went rogue but still developed his people and left a mark bit.ly/3d3jcZb by @cobbo3
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