AfricaPress-Tanzania: ON 5th last week, Dr John Magufuli was sworn in as the President of the United Republic of Tanzania in Dodoma, in a ceremony that was attended by the public, some leaders as well as others sending congratulatory messages including the President of China, Xi Jinping.
In his message to Tanzanians he repeated thrice was-elections are completed (this is besides other speeches he made) meaning his CCM formed government was henceforth, focusing on development to address poverty, ignorance, disease and fourth enemy of the people named corruption.
These are enemies of Tanzanians from the grassroots levels, where a local man want to see addressed to the State peak, where leaders live.
Tanzanians want to see the Councillors and Members of Parliament they voted routinely coming back to supervise projects initiated by the government in their respective areas.
Tanzanians want leaders who would be addressing their challenges and problems on the ground, for instance land disputes, not leaders who will be remotely manning developments and preferring arm-chair duties in offices.
In his past first term in office, President Magufuli set a record of addressing the citizens’ problems (a culture that should be emulated by other leaders), because that is what Tanzanians want, not leaders who technically visit them and then melt away only to resurface when elections are announced.
The President alone countrywide can not address all the problems of the citizens and supervise all community projects individually.
We expect full cooperation, like a duty delegated, to these leaders routinely visiting the grassroots levels to have firsthand information of what is lacked in their Wards and Constituencies.
Leading by examples, Tanzanians want to see the great contributions of leaders voted to power fully cooperating to fight corruption, because this is a cancer that eats and damages the reputation of the country and exacerbates poverty.
Corruption threatens equal access, quantity and quality of education the government has been spending money, energy and time to build.
Equally, misallocation and loss of talent because students and teachers are promoted on the basis of bribes rather than merit depriving a country of competent leaders.
When looked at the economic realm, not only does corruption affect economic development in terms of economic efficiency and growth, it also affects equitable distribution of resources across the population, increasing income inequalities, undermining the effectiveness of social welfare programmes and ultimately resulting in lower levels of human development, no Tanzania would be willing to stomach.
As leaders would be taking oath of office, they are all reminded to realise that swearing in to serve Tanzanians, means swearing in to address the four major named community problems.
