As usual, that familiar condescending and cynical western narrative is being peddled in an attempt to completely wipe out President Magufuli’s legacy.
It is not hard to read the condescension between the lines of the written reports by the western media, on president Magufuli’s death and the scoffing at the mention of the things that Magufuli did for his people such as his greatly fruitful fight against corruption, his investment in infrastructural development, and his people-centered leadership through which he truly served and worked for the benefit of the common man. He often drove around his country and physically visited his people to actually listen to them. The west calls this populist, with its negative connotation, all to portray him as woefully naive at best and completely ignorant at worst.
His entire legacy is being gloatingly buried under the weight of the single issue that he uncompromisingly disagreed upon with the rest of the world. He refused to bow to the pressure of doing something, not because it was proven to be effective, but because that was what everybody else was doing.
Magufuli had a back bone and could not be pushed around. He lived the narrative that neither him, nor his countrymen and women were hopeless, helpless and desperately in need of saving by the western world. He mobilized resources from within his own country, and cut costs by suspending the honestly often irrelevant pomp of formal “celebrations” and redirecting the funds to where they were more pressingly needed.
This kind of presidency is bound to disrupt cash flows for too many people. Of course he had to have enemies. His approaches were a direct threat to countries that want to exert undue influence through their questionable benevolence in the form of financial aid. By taking the self-help approach to his country’s plight and circumstances, he horrified the countries that hoped to trap his country into the cycle of dependency through loans and financial aid because they could see that this was a man who was smart enough to see through their bullshit and was determined to get himself and his country out of it.
What was even scarier was that he would have become a model after which other African leaders may have followed, thereby upsetting the whole structure.
In the end, fate played Magufuli dirty. His death has driven him right into the jaws of his scoffers, accusers and detractors. The western media are having a field day tearing the man’s legacy apart and if they go at it long enough, we will soon be disillusioned over the identity, heart, intention and eventually the legacy of President Magufuli.
But those of us who know, those of us who see, those of us who feel and empathise deeply with President Magufuli, will live with courage in our hearts knowing that it is indeed possible to work through the challenges of our African countries. We will weep for many long nights knowing that we really lost a true leader.
We will also live with the horror of knowing that the real reward for being a truly uncompromisingly good person, is being loved by the weak you fight for who cannot save you, being disliked by the strong with the power to out you, and having the false narrative of your legacy being propagated by those who cannot discern the truth from the .
