John Magufuli
John Magufuli was president of Tanzania from November 2015 to his death in March 2021, the chemistry teacher and works minister called the Bulldozer for the roads he built, whose first months, when he cancelled the independence day celebrations to clean the streets, cut his own trip abroad, sacked the port's managers on a surprise visit and struck ten thousand ghost workers from the payroll, made him the hashtag WhatWouldMagufuliDo across Africa. His years after that made Tanzania, which had been the donors' model, a state in which newspapers were shut, opposition politicians shot at, jailed or driven abroad. A law made it a crime to publish statistics the government had not approved, pregnant schoolgirls were expelled, the gold miner Acacia was handed a bill for a hundred and ninety billion dollars. The election of October 2020 was won with eighty-four per cent after the opposition's rallies were banned and its candidates disqualified. In the pandemic he said that prayer and steam inhalation would protect the country. He mocked the tests that had found the virus in a papaya and a goat, stopped publishing the case count in April 2020, and refused the vaccines. He died in March 2021 of what the government called heart disease and the opposition called Covid, after seventeen days in which nobody would say where he was. He was born in Chato on Lake Victoria in 1959, the son of peasants, studied chemistry and mathematics at Dar es Salaam and took a doctorate in chemistry, taught secondary school, and worked for a cooperative. He was elected to parliament for Chato in 1995, holding the works, lands, livestock and fisheries ministries under Mkapa and Kikwete, in which he built the roads and fought the contractors. The development was real, the standard-gauge railway and the Rufiji dam begun, and the Air Tanzania fleet bought. The capital was moved at last to Dodoma, the mining law rewritten so the state took a share, and the growth kept near six per cent. The fear was also real, and the opposition's leader Tundu Lissu was shot sixteen times outside parliament in 2017 and lived in Belgium. His vice-president succeeded him, the country's first woman president, and reversed the pandemic policy and some of the rest. Then she found the machinery he had built useful in her own election of 2025.
- Lived: 1959 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Tanzanian
- Roles: president, politician
