Tanzania: Bulldozing Democracy

TANZANIA

Bulldozing Democracy

Tanzanian President John Magufuli, popularly referred to as “the bulldozer” from his time as the nation’s roads minister, was once viewed as an outsider capable of demolishing the deep-seated corruption that had long plagued one of Africa’s most dynamic economies.

But just three years after taking office, Magufuli is instead showing himself to be the demolisher of a promising African democracy.

A populist with few known enemies and untainted by corruption allegations, Magufuli swept 2015’s elections and became immensely popular once he took office. His unplanned visits to public offices to boost productivity, subsidizing of education and crackdowns on cronyism made him beloved in Tanzania and the greater East African region, the Economist reported.

Soon thereafter, however, the bulldozer went rogue.

Investors, once encouraged by his strong leadership style, were shaken by his punitive taxes on foreign companies, an attempt to redistribute Tanzania’s vast mining wealth, the Wall Street Journal reported. The World Bank subsequently downgraded the nation’s impressive 7-percent growth estimates, the Journal wrote.

Meanwhile, new defamation laws have shuttered at least four newspapers and led to the arrests of dozens of journalists and opposition figures, International Policy Digest wrote.

Such censorship now also extends to the digital realm, where a new cybercrimes law forces bloggers to pay almost $1,000 for a publishing license and allows the government to jail citizens for something as innocuous as a social media post – a move taken by other strongmen in Russia, China and Uganda, Foreign Policy wrote.

The raft of worrisome developments – from the public firing of defiant ministers to the banning of pregnant girls from completing their education – has caused Magufuli’s approval rating to plummet. As high as 96 percent in 2016, his approval has dropped to 55 percent, according to numbers from pollster Twaweza, as reported by CNBC Africa.

But numbers don’t scare the bulldozer, either: Last month, he said that his party would be “in power forever, for eternity,” shoring up such claims by banning all opposition political rallies until 2020and threating to jail Twaweza pollsters for publishing the unflattering figures.

Society has taken the hint, NPR reported. Many refrain from speaking out against the president out of fear of reprisal. The media and the opposition have censored themselves and no longer attend civil society press conferences. Citizens even worry that there are spies among them.

“It is very bad because it’s something which you don’t expect in this country,” Helen Kijo Bisimba, who runs Tanzania’s Legal and Human Rights Center, told NPR. “We were celebrating 56 years of independence, but I think we’ve gone so back – so back.”