Gentle Lady Samia Suluhu Hassan: Tanzania's first female president

De: John Ndembwike

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This work is about Samia Suluhu Hassan, Tanzania's first female president. She was also Tanzania's first female vice president. And she was the only female president in Africa when she went into office. She is also the third female president in Africa with executive powers.

One of the biggest challenges Tanzania faces under the leadership of President Samia Suluhu Hassan is the quest for true democracy.

The country is at the crossroads. It either pursues democracy in the full practical – not theoretical – sense or it abandons the goal and maintains the status quo, reversing whatever gains that have been made in the past in pursuit of this noble goal.

The work looks at the central and critical role Mama Samia, as she is known in Tanzania and sometimes beyond, is destined to play in the quest for this new dispensation.

There are strident and persistent demands by the opposition parties for a complete overhaul of the system. They demand a new constitution. There is an imperative need to establish an independent electoral commission, level the playing field to enable the opposition to compete fairly and effectively against the ruling party which has been in power since the country won independence more than 60 years ago.

Even after multiparty elections were introduced in 1995 after 30 years of one-party rule since 1965, Tanzania has not achieved full democracy. It remains a de facto one-party state.

For the first time in the country's history in the post-colonial era, Tanzania has a leader, Mama Samia, who has promised to undertake fundamental changes and work with the opposition to transform the country into a truly democratic society.

She has promised to level the playing field and has stated that she will make sure opposition parties are able to compete fairly and effectively against the ruling party even if that will cost her the presidency in the next election in 2025.

No other Tanzanian president has made that commitment before, since the -reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1992, or has even implied – let alone admitted – that there is no level playing field in the political arena. They all have claimed there is a level playing field to enable opposition parties to win elections against the ruling party and when they lose they lose fairly.

If President Samia does what she has promised to do, she is going to be the most transformative figure in the history of Tanzania besides the founding father of the nation Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere who led the struggle for the independence of Tanganyika, earning the country - which is also the largest in East Africa - the distinction of being the first in the region to attain sovereign status.

She will be remembered as the leader who gave Tanzania a new constitution, reduced the power of the presidency at the expense of her own ruling party as demanded by the opposition, established an independent electoral commission, levelled the playing field to enable opposition parties to compete fairly and effectively against the ruling party without any interference by the government to block them from doing so, and transformed the country into a full democracy.