WHEN opening parliament after his election last year, Tanzania’s president, John Magufuli, repeated a campaign promise: parents would no longer have to pay for secondary education. “And when I say free education, I indeed mean free,” he assured MPs. This year the government started expelling foreign workers without proper permits, including thousands of Kenyan teachers. Schools that were already straining to cope with a huge influx of new pupils are now at breaking point.
The president, nicknamed “the Bulldozer”, has delighted Tanzanians with an anti-corruption drive and public displays of austerity. Within weeks of taking office last November he had banned all but the most urgent foreign travel for government officials. He spent Tanzania’s Independence Day picking up litter by hand. He has fired officials suspected of incompetence or dishonesty and purged 10,000 “ghost workers” from the public payroll. However, he has a worrying tendency not to think things through.
Take, for example, his efforts to extract more tax from people using the port at Dar es Salaam, a gateway for the region. He has enforced VAT on the costs of...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1scH3fT
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