Jakaya Kikwete
Jakaya Kikwete was president of Tanzania from 2005 to 2015, the foreign minister of ten years whom the ruling party chose as the affable face of a country that had become the donors' favourite, elected in December 2005 with eighty per cent, the largest majority in the multi-party era, and re-elected in 2010 with sixty-one, the smallest, as the opposition Chadema grew in the towns. The ten years were the growth of seven per cent a year on gold, tourism, aid and construction. There was the discovery of gas off the southern coast in 2010 that has yet to be produced. There were the secondary schools built in every ward, the road network doubled, and the Chinese-built port and railway plans. There was the Richmond power scandal of 2008 that cost him his prime minister Lowassa, and the escrow scandal of 2014 in which a hundred and twenty million dollars of a power company's money went to officials and the donors froze their budget support. There was the constitutional review of 2012-14 whose draft proposing a three-government union was never put to the vote, and the killing of albinos for their body parts that he made a national cause. He was born in Msoga in Bagamoyo in 1950, studied economics at Dar es Salaam, served in the army to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, ran the party's finances. He was Mwinyi's energy and finance minister and Mkapa's foreign minister from 1995. In that office he was the region's mediator in Burundi and the Congo and chaired the African Union in 2008, when he took the Kenyan post-election deal from Kufuor to its close. The Zanzibar question, the union's other half, produced under him the government of national unity of 2010 that ended the islands' election violence for a decade. He stepped down in 2015 after the constitution's two terms, as every Tanzanian president has. He chose Magufuli as the party's candidate over the man who had expected it. He has since been the African Union's envoy to Ethiopia's Tigray peace and chairs the Global Partnership for Education, and is the elder the party consults when Samia needs a witness.
- Lived: 1950 CE – ?
- Nationality: Tanzanian
- Roles: president, politician
