Deceased Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli (right) was declared winner of an October 2020 election after he defeated opposition Chadema party presidential candidate Tundu Lissu. PHOTO/AFP
“In the Name of the President: Memoirs of a Jailed Journalist,” a 2024 book by Tanzanian journalist Eric Kabendera, chronicles the experiences with authoritarianism he was subjected to, being harassed, jailed amid widespread suppression in the shadow of John Pombe Magufuli’s rise to Tanzania’s presidency in 2015.
Across Africa, Magufuli personified a new brand of leadership: shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal the sweat of his Tanzanian peoples’ brow and Africa’s revival. In the West, his ascension was greeted with restraint. His anti-colonial rhetoric endeared him to few in the Western citadels of Washington, Paris, Berlin and London.
However, from Kenya to South Africa to Nigeria, users of the social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), heralded his tough approach to corruption and used the hashtag #WhatWouldMagufuliDo to draw attention to their own leaders’ failings in this regard.
Magufuli became the stand bearer of honest and clean leadership across Africa.
Former Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli. Inset is the "In the name of the president" book cover. PHOTO/FILE
As Magufuli’s popularity hit a crescendo in Africa, Tanzania descended into the bowels of repression. Tanzanians found themselves facing down the autocracy of Magufuli’s presidency as fear silenced would-be critics of Magufuli. This as the Tanzanian strongman’s actual critics were thrown into jail. Others were murdered.
Democratic backsliding?
In the book, Kabendera shares his firsthand account of these turbulent years. As a freelance reporter for international publications, Kabendera exposed the legal and moral squalor of the Magufuli years.
In this well-written book, he exposes the stark and naked reality of fear and repression behind the façade of revolution and stability, which served as a carapace shielding the real Tanzania (under Magufuli) from the prying public eye.
Kabendera’s investigations made him a target of assassination attempts before being kidnapped and imprisoned on trumped-up charges as the already slender democratic space shrunk around him.
With Magufuli’s sudden death of Covid-19 in 2021, though, Tanzania managed to avert a succession crisis and elected Samia Suluhu Hassan as the sixth and current president of Tanzania.
Tanzania's President Samia Suluhu Hassan. PHOTO | FILE | NMG
A month ago, Ugandan lawyer and activist Agather Atuhaire became the second of two foreign activists —the other being Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi—who had been detained after arriving in Tanzania's most populous city, Dar es Salaam.
They went there to attend the first court appearance of Tundu Lissu. The Tanzanian Opposition leader, a trained lawyer, stands accused of treason, and indicated this month that he will represent himself in the ongoing treason trial.
The incarceration of Lissu and the attendant effects have led to fears that Tanzania is no longer the beacon of free expression it once was.
Kabendera’s dauntless expose reminds us that Tanzania can still slide back into the Magufuli years by shining the light on the fragility of democracy when power remains unchecked.
The good, bad, ugly
The late Prof Ali A Mazrui once turned a phrase to describe Kwame Nkrumah as “a great African but a very bad Ghanaian.”
Nkrumah, an intellectual and political colossus, was deemed a paradox to so many, a truly polarizing personality. However, these same sentiments could be shared regarding the legacy of Magufuli, who served as president of Tanzania from 2015 until his death in 2021.
Kabendera, also a PhD candidate at the African Leadership Centre at King's College London, seems to argue in his book that this Mazurian witticism applies to the paradox that was ultimately Magufuli.
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa (3rd R) pays his last respects at the coffin of the late Tanzanian President John Magufuli during his national funeral at the Jamhuri Stadium in Dodoma, central Tanzania on March 22, 2021. African leaders from across the continent on March 22, 2021 paid tribute to Tanzania's late president John Magufuli, who leaves a complex legacy following his sudden death from an illness shrouded in mystery. PHOTOS | AFP
Across Africa, Magufuli was hailed as a tribune of Africa’s silenced and shirtless, as it were.
He spoke up against the insidious and invidious influence and control exerted on dislocated African polities arbitrarily corralled into geographic statehood.
They say if you want to find an anti-colonialist in Africa, scratch an African. It is guaranteed that Africans will suddenly and spontaneously bleed “Uhuru!”
So Magufuli’s defiance to the West struck a chord with every African who has ever looked at their cratered bank balance and, almost concurrently, witnessed “foreigners” living the Ghetto Fabulous lifestyle in the so-called Motherland, so to speak.
To this social seething stratum, the majority poor and Kikomando Middle Class, Magufuli did fit the saying: A good man is hard to find and a hard man is good to find.
Not what it's cracked up to be
However, there was a darker side to Magufuli’s uncompromising character.
He was allegedly involved in sexual harassment and spousal abuse. His wife, Janet, features prominently here as something of a cautionary tale on happily-ever-afters. It is bad.
To compound matters, Magufuli’s regime became the very definition of totalitarianism.
This book catalogues the atrocities, which is understating it, against Muslims in particular and Tanzanians in general.
The man literally took no prisoners. Well, except for the author.
His memoirs will engrossingly rope you in. And you will start nodding or shaking your head as you read each line in agreement and disenchantment, respectively.
Kabendera does not stop there.
He leans in some more with his view that Julius Nyerere, a man venerated by official Kampala, was something of a flatfoot when it came to building and sustaining democratic traditions and institutions in Tanzania.
But don’t take my word for it. Take a peek:
“In hindsight, however, some of Julius Nyerere’s policies may have inadvertently contributed to the erosion of democratic institutions and the rise of authoritarian tendencies. During the negotiations for Tanzania’s independence from British rule, Nyerere discouraged the colonial government from including a Bill of Rights in the Tanzania constitution, arguing that a poverty-stricken nation like his needed economic development rather than the protection of human rights,” writes the author.
Doesn’t this suddenly sound eerily familiar?
“With the country having attained independence, Nyerere consolidated his political power by banning Opposition parties in 1965, ensuring his own party, Tanu or Tanganyika African National Union, remained the sole political force. Trade unionists and former Opposition leaders were promptly detained, while members of Tanu, who dared to challenge Nyerere’s economic and political policies faced the harsh consequences of imprisonment, detention or even death.
President Museveni hosts Maria Nyerere, widow of former Tanzanian president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere (inset), at State Lodge Nakasero in Uganda in June 2023. PHOTO/PPU
Nyerere’s internal oppression – characterised by one-party domination and efforts to impose socialism – was not only one of Tanzania’s most egregious human rights violations, it also put the country on a tumultuous political and developmental trajectory,” writes the author.
Beyond that mic drop moment, as it were, there seems to be a pattern emerging.
African leaders who are loved across Africa are rarely loved in their own countries.
This ambivalence towards our leaders could be simply the difference between the illusion and the reality, and which one we choose to subscribe to.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Book Title:In The Name of The President: Memoirs of a Jailed Journalist
Author: Erick Kabendera
Publication date: December 17, 2024
Cost: $23 (Shs82,000)
Pages: 280 pages
Available: Amazon Online
