The paradox Magufuli presidency

Another example is President Paul Kagame of Rwanda. In the early to mid-2000s, he carried out comprehensive reforms of public sector that (I suspect) Magufuli sought to imitate.

These reforms included reducing the number of districts, the size of cabinet and parliament, removing official cars from most government officials, cutting down on unnecessary international travels etc. All of these decisions were first taken to the Political Parties Forum, then to cabinet and finally to parliament and adopted. They did not emerge from below but from Kagame personally and he used all these institutions to ensure buy-in i.e. to build a broad national consensus in favour of a lean and efficient government.

Even in his fight against corruption, where he can be accused of being highhanded, Kagame has always acted not on his whims but on facts based on an investigation. Once he has done the investigations and established culpability, he moves quickly and decisively to arrest and prosecute the culprits. In most cases the state in Rwanda has lost corruption cases against the accused public officials. This only shows that corruption is hard to prove but also that the president could have acted on either false or incomplete information. The bottom-line here is that he acted on the basis of an investigation (institutions), not on his personal whims.

Magufuli was a disastrous imitation of Kagame. He lacked the subtlety of a reformer and the ideological grounding of a revolutionary. He was a boxer who wore a blindfold and went boxing everything in the ring – the referee, the attendants on both sides, the poles, and the ropes. He only boxed his opponent by accident or luck. His equal was Idi Amin who would make decisions based on his dreams, the caresses of his mistresses and the jests of buffoons (as Akena Adoko put it). His decision to chase away Ugandans of Asian descent was, apparently, based on a dream. His decision to allow Palestinian hijackers use Entebbe was spontaneous based on an interview with a French film producer.

Magufuli was lionised by a section of African elites because of their deep sense of psychological insecurity. Growing up in poor countries dominated by images of the affluence of rich nations, African elites want to leapfrog to modernity overnight. But it is impossible to cheat social evolution, and transformative change takes generations. If some nations in East Asia transformed rapidly, it is because they had a long history of statehood, a shared national consciousness, accumulated social capital and norms and values that lent themselves easily to capitalist transformation.

African elites, in their impatient desire to see their nations transformed in an instant to look like Europe or South Korea, have been clutching from one straw to another. In one second they want democracy and its accompanying checks and balances while in another they want one man or woman, the magical leader, to perform a miracle. Magufuli tapped into this. He was a populist and a demagogue who abused power but attracted the adulation of the hordes. I suspect he must have wrecked untold havoc on Tanzania and history will not absolve him of his impunity.

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