AfricaPress-Tanzania: WHILE words can never fully express how much someone means to us in the event of death, language can still provide comfort, solace, hope, and even inspiration especially this time when Tanzanians and friends remember, the third phase President, Benjamin Mkapa, who passed away on the 24th of July last week.
This was a charismatic leader, well skilled in persuasion and commitment to achieve a goal tasked to him by the community especially to bring peace where it is threatened.
Mention the name of Benjamin Mkapa in any quarter and the first thing that rings in many peoples minds is an eloquent speaker of peace, no wonder in many conflicts in the Great Lakes region he was the first to be consulted.
This was a leader who reiterated the importance of education to Africa, saying it would enable its people understand better their constitutional and political rights. “ Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; Easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
My message to this University’s community(on being awarded the honourary degree of Doctor of Letters of the Open University of Tanzania), and to those of our other Universities in this country, is that the time has come for our education system to give our young men and women new eyes; Eyes that will set them off on a true voyage of discovery a voyage of inner reflection, of renaissance and of new sightings,” he would say.
Benja as he was fondly called was a leader, who was mostly described as a shining example of a peacemaker who advocated for justice and equality in East Africa and the world at large.
During his lifetime, President Mkapa led several peace mediation efforts in Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda where, in addition to hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees, they contributed significantly to the restoration of peace to the respective countries.
The list may be long as we now eulogize him, but all these would not live to his goals if Tanzanians and the bloc would not implement and sustain peace he longed for. The greatest homage we can pay him is to maintain, what he left behind
