Their countries are miles apart but their sentiments and actions do not set them apart.
They both came to office with the promise to drain the swamp and make their countries great again.
But while US President Donald Trump got off to a bad start, what with the missteps and mishaps that have characterised his administration, his Tanzanian counterpart John Magufuli was the darling of many.
Only three weeks into office, Dr. Magufuli’s work, for all good reasons, captured headlines from East Africa to Australia.
In that period, he had instituted austerity measures such as banning the annual Independence Day celebrations, all but essential foreign travel, cancelled meetings and conferences in hotels for public servants and reduced Parliament’s budget by 90%.
All these would ordinarily consume billions of shillings annually but Magufuli directed that the money is instead channelled to improving roads and hospitals.
On a continent whose leaders are known for corruption and embezzlement of funds, his actions were termed ‘Un-African.’
But while Trump has stayed true to his character, the Mugufuli of today is unrecognizable to the one of 2015. He has cracked down on the opposition, media and applied a draconian cybercrimes law to jail critics.
The new Magufuli is now feared more than he is loved and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has mirrored that of Trump, bringing to the fore the similarities between the two men.
Deny, deny, deny
Both of them have either denied the existence of coronavirus in their countries or downplayed its impact. Even today, when COVID-19 numbers in the United States are six million-plus with over 200,000 deaths, President Trump is still living in denial.
“We’re lower than the world,” Trump said in an August 4 interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios on the US death toll, currently the highest in the globe.
Trump has blamed everyone but himself and to date, he refuses to accept that he acted too late.
In Tanzania, the government last released coronavirus numbers on April 29 and Magufuli has denied the existence of the disease in his country. He has termed it a creation of the West and the media, telling his citizens to ignore such ‘rumours.’
Journalists who report COVID-19 are arrested while the media outlets are shut. “He officially made the country operate in data darkness,” a local analyst told the BBC in July. A risky strategy that unfortunately, many are willing to accept.
Economy at all cost
Both men have been praised for shoring up their economies. It was going to be Trump’s trump card in the November 2020 election until coronavirus happened.
Before the pandemic drove the US into a deep recession, the unemployment rate was hovering around a 50-year low of 3.5%, with Trump taking all the credit. But in April, that number went to an all-time high of 14.7% with nearly half of the American population without a job.
With the virus claiming lives and jobs in record speed, Trump went on a warpath with governors, putting pressure on them to lift restrictions in their respective states to boost job numbers.
Most governors slammed the President for thinking about jobs when lives were at stake but he must have been delighted when most states started easing restrictions in May with job figures in June revealing a drop in unemployment to 11.1%. and 10.2% in July.
Even with a second wave of infections hitting the US, Trump will be hoping the rate of unemployment keeps going down so that he has something to sell to the voters.
In Tanzania, Magufuli chose to put statistics on lockdown, not people. He closed schools, stopped international flights and banned gatherings but much of the regular economic activities continued.
That was in April but by May, it was business as usual with schools reopened, sports and concerts back.
He has been praised for economic reforms and tackling corruption and with a resurgent opposition, which has largely been kept quiet through intimidation, Magufuli would rather risk lives than give them a voice ahead of the October 2020 election by locking down the country.
Frosty media relations
The media is always ‘biased’ against them. We have lost count of the number of jibes the US President thrown at reporters because they are ‘anti-Trump.’
He has made fake news more popular than it should, called reporters “terrible,” “nasty,” “never going to make it” and in May 2020, he told an Asian-American journalist “don’t ask me, go ask China that question, Ok.”
In Tanzania, privately-owned media outlets, just like the state-broadcaster, have to sing government praises. This year alone, three newspapers, a radio and TV station have been suspended and shut down for publishing or broadcasting ‘misleading’ information on COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS.
In April, Kenya’s Citizen TV and its sister radio station were forced to carry a live apology every hour for seven straight days, if they did not want to have their license revoked, after describing Magufuli as ‘stubborn’ for refusing to impose a total lockdown.
Open defiance
They are both well-educated, Trump, an economics graduate and a successful businessman, while Magufuli has a PhD in Chemistry. With this, you would think they are humble enough to listen to wise counsel but alas!
They are a nightmare to their aides. Trump has often defied and disregarded advice be it on the economy, national security, climate change and politics. The results have been fallouts, scandals, sackings and resignations. As of May 2020, 415 people had either been dismissed or resigned from the Trump administration, a record for a sitting US President.
While most of that has happened behind the scenes, it is the coronavirus that has exposed his shortcomings the most. Despite setting up a White House coronavirus taskforce with top infectious disease experts in the US such as Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx on board, Trump has often openly differed with them while giving conflicting, if not misleading, information to the public.
The President’s insistence that Hydroxychloroquine works, his refusal to wear a mask and the bizarre claim that people with COVID-19 should be injected with disinfectants are in stark contrast to what Dr Fauci and Dr Bix have been telling the public. However, some of Trump’s supporters believe him, making it difficult for the US to fight the virus.
In Tanzania, it is difficult to know if Magufuli has advisers because most of the time, it is either his way or the highway.
In May, he blamed the spike of coronavirus cases in the country on ‘fake’ positive tests, claiming he had randomly obtained several non-human samples, including from a pawpaw, a goat and a sheep, but had assigned them human names and ages.
They were sent to Tanzania’s National Laboratory and samples from the goat and pawpaw tested positive, proof that his labs were falsifying results to sabotage Tanzania. He temporarily closed the lab to pave way for investigations and sacked its director.
A few days later, he placed an order for ‘COVID Organics,’ a herbal remedy touted by the president of Madagascar for treatment of COVID-19 despite lack of scientific evidence to back this claim.
After constantly telling his citizens to pray away the virus, he recently declared the country ‘corona-free’ and told them to forget about masks, sanitization, handwashing and social distancing. Most of them believe him and only time will tell if he is right.
Tit-for-tat is a fair game
“Chinese virus,” “Kung-flu” etc. Trump has refused to take responsibility for acting too late on coronavirus and instead maintained anti-China rhetoric which includes a number of proposals to make the country pay.
The latest is an executive order banning any transactions with the Chinese owners of the apps TikTok and WeChat issued on August 6.
In April, Trump said he would use the Defense Production Act to retaliate in cases where companies ship medical equipment elsewhere that is needed in the US to cope with the pandemic. This is typical Trump, he prefers intimidation, bullying and retaliation.
He threatened to hit 52 Iranian sites ‘very hard’ if Iran attacks Americans or US assets in retaliation for the drone strike that killed the Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani and an Iraqi militia leader in January.
In the aftermath of his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial in February, he went on a payback mission, sacking two witnesses who worked for the administration and who testified in the House inquiry.
Magufuli, meanwhile, has gotten rid of realists and replaced them with sycophants who are willing to go the extra mile to please him.
He fired Dr Faustine Ndugulile as deputy health minister, after he contradicted his steam therapy claim as a cure for coronavirus, and replaced him with Dr Godwin Mollel who once advised against mass testing.
Since the pandemic, doctors and media are unable to give the true picture of the situation in the country for fear of retaliation while neighbouring countries are having it rough.
At the start of August 2020, Tanzania banned Kenya Airways from its airspace after they were omitted from the list of 16 countries allowed to resume international flights into Kenya.
In May, Magufuli barred cargo trucks from Kenya after the latter closed its borders with Tanzania following huge numbers of COVID-19 positive cases from the country and later told farmers from his nation to sell their produce expensively to neighbours who had imposed lockdowns ‘to teach them a lesson.’
