NEW AFRICAN in its May issue included an interview under the heading ‘Jakaya Kikwete – SADC cannot abandon Zimbabwe.’ The first question was: “You have been to Europe twice in recent months. Did Zimbabwe come up in your discussions with European leaders?” Reply: “Oh yes. Everywhere. The US, Europe, the Nordic countries. Zimbabwe is a big story of huge interest. There is a lot of dissatisfaction in Europe and beyond on what is going on in Zimbabwe and they see President Mugabe as some kind of devil. They think that we in Africa should have done something to have him removed….. But we have been saying: fine, you can condemn when something is not going right but our approach has been to say let’s talk about the issues”. Continue reading →

According to the Kenyan NATION a Tanzanian held in connection with the US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 has apologised to victims. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (33) told a US military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba on March 17 that he did not know about the bombing and was sorry for assisting the bombers. But he denied charges that he bought a lorry used to deliver the Dar embassy bomb. Continue reading →

The ECONOMIST wrote at length about Tanzania in its September 28 issue. Brief extracts: ‘For the moment, Tanzania is one of East Africa’s few good-news stories. That isn’t saying much. The country remains wretchedly poor, inefficient, with little medical care in its remote areas, few roads and with frequent power cuts, even in Dar es Salaam. But donors, disillusioned by the corruption and/or brutality that goes on elsewhere, are happy to pour money into somewhere that is, at least, both peaceful and stable. And in Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania has found a president committed to doing his best to cut poverty. Continue reading →

According to an EAST AFRICAN STANDARD report on 2nd July, not all was sweet and light in CCM before President Mkapa voluntarily opted out of the chairmanship of the party a year earlier than an election was due. Extracts: Mkapa was quoted as speaking about the poisoned political atmosphere in the party in 1995 when founding President Julius Nyerere had decided to back Mkapa for the presidency, despite Jakaya Kikwete having won the nomination. The grudge was said to have persisted to this day. Continue reading →

In reviewing the probable future of the East African Community in the Kenyan THE NATION (March 26) Gitau Warigi concentrated on Tanzania’s new leader. Extracts: ‘Kikwete has started off doing some sensible things, like cracking down on crime and police corruption. He has also ruffled his country’s male establishment by appointing a host of women to powerful government positions. For me, Kikwete’s main problem is that he is a populist. The worry is whether he will allow this populism to play havoc with sensible governance. Most of the extravagant manna he promised during his presidential campaign is clearly not something poor Tanzania can afford right now. This populism could turn problematic in other ways. There is a powerful political and business lobby in Tanzania, which takes it as its calling to raise red flags about Kenya and its presumed designs to suffocate its neighbours economically. Continue reading →

Uganda’s THE MONITOR published an article in June under the heading ‘The Grave of Kiswahili’. Extracts: ‘One of the jokes that Tanzanian army officers told after they overran Uganda and threw out dictator Idi Amin in 1979 was that they had also discovered the ‘grave of Kiswahili’…..After the beautiful language was born in Zanzibar and grew up in Tanzania, it had been killed in Kenya and buried in Uganda…. But the Kenyans are not the only guilty ones in practicing ‘lingocide’, and nor are Ugandans the only lingual undertakers in the region. The Tanzanians themselves are guilty of a similar offence. What Uganda and Kenya did to Kiswahili, the Tanzanians did to English. Suppose you met this smart young lady dressed in a business suit on Parliament Avenue in Kampala and, on asking her for directions, she smiles apologetically and says in her language that she does not know English! It would be odd, wouldn’t it? In Dar es Salaam it would not be. They killed English decades ago. It was the language of colonialists, exploiters and all those things. They reasoned that English is not the same as knowledge and went ahead to promote Kiswahili as the official language in which everything is transacted. Coupled with massive primary education, they soon achieved 100% literacy, probably the highest in the world ever. All citizens could read and write Kiswahili and everybody was happy, for a while. Continue reading →

A well-balanced five-page article in the July issue of PROSPECT added many more accolades to the ones President Mkapa is receiving as his final term of office approaches its end. The author, Jonathon Power, who writes for the International Herald Tribune, compared Tanzania as it was 20 years ago with what it is like today. ‘Since coming to power in 1995, Mkapa has left his reformist mark on everything from tax policy to privatisation, from the bureaucracy to human rights, from political freedom to the free press. Of Nyerere’s well-meaning but autocratic Christian socialism there is hardly a sign left. As Deputy Foreign Minister Abdulkader Shareef put it to me, as we sailed across to Zanzibar, “Nyerere was redistributing poverty….. we are not anti-socialism…… But before distributing wealth we must create it.” Continue reading →

The London GUARDIAN, writing about global warming (March 14) published a photograph which it said showed that the snowy cap of Mt. Kilimanjaro, at 5,895 metres (19,340 ft) was now all but gone – 15 years before scientists predicted it would melt through global warming.

Kilimanjaro photo in Guardian

The paper reported that 34 ministers at a G8 energy and environment summit meeting in London were receiving a book – published by the Climate Group and entitled Northsoutheast-west: a 360-degree view of climate change – that included a picture depicting global-warming. The book’s text described the devastating speed of climate change documented by ten of the world’s top photographers. Continue reading →

NEW GAME RESERVE
A new 1,574 square kilometre Mpanga/Kipengere Game Reserve which aims to protect the water catchment of the Rufiji River Basin has been gazetted according to the EAST AFRICAN (October 28). The main river draining into the Basin is the Great Ruaha, which is fed by several rivers and streams originating from the new reserve’s catchment area, later joining the Rufiji further downstream. While the two rivers and their adjacent basins have been adequately protected downstream, their catchment within the new reserve and further upstream is unprotected. The Rufiji river basin is the largest of all nine drainage basins in Tanzania, with high and often controversial utilisation of water by multiple users, including irrigation farmers, livestock, wild animals in protected areas, hydroelectric power generation and towns and municipalities. The entire basin covers 177,420 square kilometres and is fed by four major rivers – Ruaha, Kilombero, Luwego and finally Rufiji itself. The Great Ruaha is central to the ecology and tourism in the Ruaha National Park and provides over half the water for Mtera and Kidatu hydroelectric power stations, which have a combined capacity to generate 284 Mw of electricity. In 1993, the Great Ruaha dried up completely in the Ruaha National Park and has since then been drying up every year. Continue reading →

Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a top al Qaeda terrorist suspect, one of the world’s most wanted men with a $25 million price on his head, was taken into custody in Pakistan on August 6th for his suspected role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. He was arrested along with 13 others after a 14 hour gun battle with security forces in Gujarat, 110 miles southeast of Islamabad.
Ghailani’s mother in Tanzania was quoted as saying that her son was a harmless, religious boy who had gone abroad to study six years earlier. “What I look forward to is my son getting a fair trial and that our (Tanzania) Government will ensure that my son is not tortured. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation had visited her house on several occasions over the last six years, ever since Ghailani left home, she said. Ghailani goes by the nicknames ‘Foopie’ or Fupi and ‘Ahmed the Tanzanian’– see also’ Tanzania in the International Press’ below – Editor