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An outsiders Tribute to Magufuli as a Pan Africanist

000 8U92DG
000 8U92DG
KDRTV News Nairobi- When you want to distract a dog, throw it a bone to chew.
Almost exactly a year ago, I predicted that the People’s President Daktari Pombe Magufuli would be “taken out”. What I couldn’t have envisaged then was how soon that would come to pass.
Disclaimer – I have no evidence of a faceless assassin from the globalist Mafia delivering a package to the President laced with fermented maize flour. But I know someone did something, so humor me!
Magufuli had demonstrated, by word and deed, his steadfast refusal to play ball with local, regional and global graft cartels. Kenya’s ruling class couldn’t find a comfortable angle with him, with good reason – His allergy to corruption as a way of life was both acute and chronic, depending on the day of the week!
Magufuli banned Kenya’s President Uhuru’s Brookside Dairies from sourcing Tanzania’s raw milk, transporting it to Kenya for processing and returning it to market in Tanzania. Brookside’s aggressive foray into the Tanzanian market demonstrated impressive business instincts and, strictly speaking, did nothing wrong.
However, many situations can be both right and wrong, depending on one’s vantage point and from Magufuli’s watchtower, as defender and protector of Tanzanian interests, this one stunk!
His country’s dairy sector was hemorrhaging from the “generous contributions” of a neighbors’ business forays. Is it beyond our wit and capacity to process our milk and sustain a thriving dairy industry? Does Tanzania not have a government and a functioning business sector? He wondered aloud.
His frustration was not so much with the foreign entity as with “crooked” Tanzanian milk cartels who were willing to sell their raw milk away for a quick buck, without the foresight of its destructive consequences to their nation’s industrial base.
And so, without fear of stepping on his brother and contemporary, Uhuru’s toes, or favor of keeping-the-peace-to -get-along with an important friendly neighbor, Rais Magufuli publicly put a stop to the nonsense.
To Magufuli, it mattered little from whom or where a whiff of sloth or impropriety emanated. Whether it was a middle manager at the airport slacking on security procedures or a hapless road toll station operative returning from a three-hour lunch break, to be greeted by two sets of news. The good, that while he was away, he had the most senior person in Tanzania pay him a courtesy call. The bad? He was fired!
The small. The medium. The mighty. Daktari Pombe treated everyone’s “illness” with an equal and predictable dose of bitter, unadulterated censure, softly administered with a smile.
The milk spat with Uhuru – and by extension, Kenya – seemed like a storm in a tea-cup compared to what was to come with mighty China.
China is systematically colonizing Africa’s entire landmass with her Trojan-horse development “loans” and white-elephant infrastructure projects.
It’s doing the same – albeit by a more sophisticated angle – in Europe, Australia, Latin America, the United States and Canada.
The script is simple. Swoop into a struggling country, chuck desperately needed cash at the government, making sure it’s an amount and terms that they could never be able to repay.
When the inevitable default happens, swoop in again, only this time, with a one-way ticket, accompanied by your entire clan and their pets – You’re here to stay!
At this juncture, China assumes ownership of core strategic national assets, one after another, as the African nation’s President helplessly watches from the sidelines, deep in contemplation of his new role as Chairman Xi Jinping’s bitch!
Take Zambia, for instance. All of her most significant national assets have fallen to Chinese ownership – The state energy company, Zesco, Kenneth Kaunda international airport, all the copper, nickel and cobalt mines, and crucially, the state-owned TV and news channel, ZNBC.
When you have control of the media, of course, you dictate the narrative. And boy, have Zambians been smothered by warm and fuzzy tales of their fantastic partnership with benevolent China, read by hostage Zambian newscasters, scripted by faceless communist party surrogates.
I’d be laughing if it weren’t so damn tragic. Being Kenyan, the equivalence would be of a Baboon that laughs at the strangely-formed and hued rear ends of other Baboons. We are in an identical creaking boat, just a few nautical miles behind.
President Magufuli was the only African leader who righteously raised his middle finger at the Chinese communist predators and kept it held up straight and high until they realized the mohine wasn’t bluffing.
He was the only sub-Saharan African leader who stood guard at the gates of his country’s rich mineral deposits, the theft of which has characterized Africa’s deeply dysfunctional, centuries-long relationship with the west and now China.
He placed stringent rules on the mining and export of raw materials to develop local mining, processing, and manufacturing capacity.
The man had the vision for a prosperous, graft-averse Tanzania, a clear path on how to get there and crucially, the courage to push it through.
“Bulldozer” Magufuli would publicly declare to his people and detractors’-“Mimi sitishwi, na wala sitishiki.”
China is like the Glenn Close character in the 1987 Blockbuster  movie “Fatal Attraction.” She’s incapable of taking “No” for an answer, and her way of showing it is – to put it in PG terms – unhealthy for all concerned.
Australia is getting a taste of China’s unhinged response to rejection. In 2018, she shut the door on Beijing’s political and social interference in her internal affairs (too little, too late, but that’s a story for another day). She also put brakes on China’s bid to build Australia’s 5G infrastructure.
China’s response was nothing short of Glenn Close boiling the bunny rabbit! The tit for tat diplomatic reprisals that ensued has exploded into what is now a full-blown trade war, for which Australia is bearing the brunt.
The Coupe de grace of Magufuli’s dealings with China came in April 2020 when he cancelled China’s biggest “Killer loan” project to build an ultra-modern port at Bagamoyo.
It would be a mega port city with express rail and road infrastructure links to inland oil fields and mineral mines.
Signed by his predecessor, Jakaya Kikwete, in 2013, Magufuli had sought to renegotiate the terms of the 10 billion dollar loan agreement since his first day in office, to no avail.
Such an ambitious project would be good for Tanzania. So why put a bomb in the works? Because the devil’s always in the detail. The Chinese would run it for 99 years, and Tanzania would have no say in its operational decisions.
Put another way, Tanzanians would be mere spectators in decisions regarding the mining and export of their most essential minerals – for a century!
Their gold, oil, diamonds, tanzanite, rubies, sapphire, iron, nickel, cobalt……………the list is a lot longer, but you get the drift. All that good stuff would be Tanzania’s only in name. The net benefit to Tanzanians in this 10 billion dollar trap? Chinese colony.
Magufuli, an economist, declared, “Only a mad man would accept the terms of such a project”.
It was a poisoned chalice that had to be binned. In April of last year, he righteously did just that.
Any remaining doubters of his conviction to step on big toes where necessary – by deem of this action – finally got the memo.
And with that, I saw a man signing off his demise. China, after all, is the deranged Glenn Close. And I am an incurable conspiracy theorist.
But, but…..What about Covid? I hear you ask. He was a Covid denier who fell on the sword of his foolhardiness, right?
Remember the bone thrown at a dog to distract it?
Keep chewing that bone….Tribute to Magufuli by Michael W Kapten

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