Middle East & Africa | A dose of bull

Tanzania’s leader, the “Bulldozer”, runs off course

President John Magufuli hates critics, gay people and accurate statistics

|DAR ES SALAAM

SEDITION AND statistics are two words that crop up with increasing regularity in the utterances of officials loyal to Tanzania’s president, John Magufuli. Last month a usually compliant daily newspaper, the Citizen, had the cheek to mention that the Tanzanian shilling’s value at the unofficial exchange rate had been sliding. Though this was plainly the case, it flouted the country’s bizarre Statistics Act, whereby no figure may be disseminated without verification or publication by the official organs of state. The Citizen was duly closed down for a week. These days Mr Magufuli, known in Swahili as Tingatinga (the Bulldozer), tries to squash anything that gets in his way: “I would like to tell media owners: be careful, watch it.”

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The charge of sedition is more frequently invoked. Last week the leader of the biggest opposition party, Freeman Mbowe, was released from prison on bail after four months behind bars. But he and eight other politicians are still due to be tried for sedition for attending a banned meeting the government says incited a riot.

According to Zitto Kabwe, another prominent opposition figure who has been arrested several times, no fewer than 17 of his colleagues face—or have recently faced—prosecution, also mainly for sedition. Four, including Mr Mbowe, have served time in prison. But the politician who most rattles Mr Magufuli may be Tundu Lissu, a member of parliament who had been arrested at least six times (including for the sin of insulting the president) before he was shot 16 times in broad daylight shortly after leaving parliament in the sleepy capital, Dodoma, over a year ago. No one has been arrested for the crime.

After a week in a coma followed by a string of operations in neighbouring Kenya and in Belgium, Mr Lissu is back in full cry, with well-aired performances at Western think-tank forums and on television abroad. He has yet to return home, but insists he will do so. Mr Magufuli, he says, is “determined that by 2020 there will be no political opposition in Tanzania. Essentially he wants to return it to one-party rule as it was before 1992,” when the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), or Party of the Revolution, allowed multiparty democracy. The CCM, which evolved out of the party that took over at independence from Britain in 1961, has ruled longer without a break than any other party in Africa.

A leading (but necessarily anonymous) journalist in Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, says: “There’s no more investigative journalism. People are afraid to give you information, especially people in government. The media these days is more controlled.” The Citizen, which is owned by Kenya’s Nation Media Group, part of the Aga Khan’s stable, may, he thinks, be sold to a Middle Eastern bigwig friendly to Mr Magufuli. The office of a leading human-rights lawyer, Fatma Karume, a granddaughter of Zanzibar’s first post-independence ruler, has been bombed. Aidan Eyakuze, who runs the country’s top independent research group, Twaweza, was harassed last year when he published the results of an opinion poll that showed Mr Magufuli’s once sky-high popularity to be falling fast. Under Mr Magufuli a raft of legislation, including on the media, cybercrime and political parties, makes it harder, often illegal, to criticise him. Live television coverage of parliamentary debates, where Mr Magufuli is still castigated, has been barred. The government urges citizens to redirect their anger at gay people, whom Mr Magufuli says “even cows” should condemn.

Western donors, who have indulged Tanzania for many decades, at one point paying for more than a quarter of its annual budget, are losing patience. The head of the European Union mission, Roeland van de Geer, had to quit his post late last year. The Danes and the EU have withheld tranches of aid. Mr Magufuli is looking to the Middle East and China for less conditional help.

The president has been foolish in economic matters too. The effect of his closure of the Citizen was the opposite of what he intended: the shilling’s true rate dipped further. After Mr Magufuli’s row with the paper, capital is reckoned to have fled to Kenya, which Mr Magufuli views as an adversary. Foreign-exchange controls are widely said to be imminent.

Two years ago Mr Magufuli appalled investors by demanding that the country’s biggest mining company, Acacia Mining, a subsidiary of Barrick Gold, based in Canada, should pay the absurd sum of $193bn in back taxes—about four times Tanzania’s GDP—for allegedly undervaluing its gold exports. Acacia’s gold exports have since dipped sharply. Several past and present Acacia officials were arrested last year. The World Bank says foreign investment since 2014 has more than halved. “A lot of us are jittery,” says a businessman in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital. “But it’s the unpredictability that really scares us.”

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "A dose of bull"

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