47 quotes found
"It's very sad that Tanzania is a poor football country. If elected, I promise to put this country on the world football map. I will make sure we produce our own Okochas, El Hadji Dioufs and Zinedine Zidanes here."
"Those who expect radical changes in policy and direction are mistaken and lost. The government of the fourth republic will build on what was undertaken by previous governments and will continue with all good things."
"Normally, foreign media organizations and others from the developed countries do not see anything good on the African continent. Those of us, who are well-traveled, know better. In their countries, the only news you get or hear about Africa is negative news... However, due to the good work done by our electoral bodies, the exemplary conduct of our defence and security organs, and your calmness and patience, we denied them the bad things they wanted to write about."
"I told them (TFF) that I will pay the salary of a foreign coach but to date nobody has come to me with any plans concerning the hiring of a coach. I have only heard them saying that Tanzania has been drawn in a tough group. They are just complaining instead of starting preparations. They are waiting to make excuses when the team fails to qualify."
"This year alone, total world cereal production was estimated to be 2,114 million tonnes, while total cereal demand was projected at around 1007 million tonnes, less than half of the cereal production. Ideally, no one should starve or die of hunger in the world we live. Strangely and sadly enough, they do. This is not fair. This is not right."
"What became a problem is there was a clause that allowed investors to cover losses. As long as you made losses one year, you could carry them over to the next and to the next. And because of that they would pay no taxes. So this fellow takes all the gold away and he says he makes losses and so he does not pay us anything. So he is the only one that is being protected. Those of us who are losing our resources are not protected. This is the thing that created the kind of debate that we had and we had to renegotiate."
"The presidency is not an office job. If I only sit in the office in Dar es Salaam I’m not running the country. I visit the country to inspect development programmes, to inspect activities, to see how things are going, how the government agenda is being implemented, what are the teething issues. And some of these problems simply need my simple word. My simple word of do it, then it is done."
"I’m not sure. I’m not sure if you talk to the opposition, they would consider that to be an insult. They think they are doing a tremendous job."
"That day may come. But I’m not seeing it coming soon. We are still strong enough; we’re still popular; I think we are doing the right things."
"I don’t know how to get the money but if [the radar] is overpriced, definitely we deserve to be paid … They cannot take money from a poor country."
"Tanzania is standing by the people of Zimbabwe including President Mugabe... Mugabe is there, he is president, he has been elected. If Tanzania had simply said, stupid, you’re hopeless, a murderer, a violator of basic human rights; does that remove Mugabe from office? It doesn’t."
"I would have been surprised if you had not asked that question, because everywhere I am, I am asked how about the Chinese. There’s a lot of sudden interest on the Chinese and Africa. You know, what is it that we are trying to do in Africa? Africa as a continent in pursuit of development."
"Why China suddenly is a question? Of course, there has been the concern that they may not be giving loans that are concessional, and the danger is that these countries might go back into the debt, some of the countries that they have been forgiven their debts. This I found to be a valid point, maybe not with Tanzania, because we don’t have much in terms of this huge Chinese development assistance."
"I don’t think they (the Chinese) have better friends in Africa than us. But when we compare to how much money we get, if we succeed, if the MCA is funded by the US Congress for Tanzania, it’s going to be $700 Million. It’s going to be huge, it may be a total of all the Chinese have been giving us all these years."
"They discuss no strings. There, the people, they don’t discuss anything. You can’t beat the British, you’ve got to sit with them for hours. They talk about this, they talk about that."
"You’re negotiating all these problems for several years, they will talk about that, about a newspaper, they will talk about an underage boy in prison (for example). He’s 17 and he raped a nine-year-old, and they ask: “Why do you lock him up?” And so I say, what do you do, this is a rape case, and they want to discuss, I spend so many hours discussing whatever it is this boy... So what do they want us to do? Release him? So that he can go and rape another one?"
"This is senseless cruelty. It must stop forthwith... I am told that people kill albinos and chop their body parts, including fingers, believing they can get rich when mining or fishing."
"This is our kind of politics-to involve the people in staging protest marches, but not in matters that concern their very lives."
"I gazed at that small boat and said to myself, mhh, I am a Mkwere without swimming skills. Better for Membe because he has married in Mbamba Bay. He can swim."
"Justice has to be done, justice must be seen to be done, what the AU is simply saying is that what is critical, what is the priority, is peace. That is priority number one now."
"There are no demands - undue demands... There are many questions we get? why China? why now and the answer is why not?... There is no any hidden agenda in our cooperation with China, it is a relationship based on mutual understanding and equality; they understand our situation."
"We cannot continue to mourn about our country being poor while our minerals are lying untapped and with harvesting at Lake Natron, we will not be the first to do so, because our neighbours, Kenya, are doing the same on the other side of the lake."
"Roads are the blood vessels of the economy."
"Our reason for withdrawal is simple. We are party to too many regional trading organisations. The sum effect of this means that our membership is extremely costly to sustain and we must rationalise our participation in such ventures."
"The idea of African brotherhood is often just a cover-up for laziness. We must see what is achievable in our circumstances and evaluate all decisions. In terms of regional economic integration, sentimentality is not enough. We really have to be frank and honest."
"We have a propensity for starting and joining all kinds of organisations, the result was that we were spending more time in conferences than implementing the decisions."
"Terrorist attacks in their own countries do not generate travel advisories aimed at discouraging citizens of other countries from visiting. Why is it that only when threats of terrorist attacks are perceived in our kind of countries are travel advisories issued?"
"We could have waited for a banana to appear, but we believe in the spirit of cheese-development and confidence. We are not so poor that we are unable to carry out this project."
"When a jumbo jet crashes, we will rush in with assistance, but we forget that each day 30,000 children die unnecessarily from poverty-related preventable causes - equivalent to 100 jumbo jets crashing every day."
"(I support Mugabe) Because we have completed the process of decolonisation while Zimbabwe has not."
"There is a thought that poverty is a public policy failure; poverty is man-made by action and non-action: poverty can be eliminated."
"I am aware that many regard me as an anti-sports character person, but the truth is that the country’s economy by then was in bad shape. Tanzania being among the highly indebted countries, I had to give sports the least prominence during my first term, while setting priorities in revitalising our economy."
"We in Africa have no more need of being "converted" to socialism than we have of being "taught" democracy. Both are rooted in our past—in the traditional society which produced us."
"Freedom to many means immediate betterment, as if by magic … Unless I can meet at least some of these aspirations, my support will wane and my head will roll just as surely as the tickbird follows the rhino."
"Those who receive this privilege therefore, have a duty to repay the sacrifice which others have made. They are like the man who has been given all the food available in a starving village in order that he might have strength to bring supplies back from a distant place. If he takes this food and does not bring help to his brothers, he is a traitor. Similarly, if any of the young men and women who are given an education by the people of this republic adopt attitudes of superiority, or fail to use their knowledge to help the development of this country, then they are betraying our union."
"Democracy is not a bottle of Coca-Cola which you can import. Democracy should develop according to that particular country. I never went to a country, saw many parties and assumed that it is democratic. You cannot define democracy purely in terms of multi-partist parties."
"I have read and re-read the Arusha Declaration and found nothing wrong with it except perhaps replacing a few commas here and there... it was clear for some of us that it would only be a mad man who would stand up and defend the Arusha Declaration."
"Yes, we have one party here. But so does America. Except, with typical extravagance, they have two of them!"
"Education is not a way to escape poverty, it is a way of fighting it."
"Small nations are like indecently dressed women. They tempt the evil-minded."
"Julius Nyerere...was the only head of state to offer his country an economic and political program for development that was anticapitalist, nonaligned, and based on grassroots self-activity...Anti-imperialists everywhere recognized the Arusha Declaration (1967) as a document relevant not only to Tanzania but to all newly independent African countries and some thought more generally: it was proposing development that avoided reenslavement via the capitalist market. It must be noted that not even the most astute and dedicated supporters of Nyerere's Declaration had as far as I know ever even mentioned what it says about Tanzanian women working much harder than men-and the profound implications of this for development."
"Many Indian leaders were educated at British universities where socialist – often Marxist – economics was in vogue. This applied to other leaders of the Third World who had been educated in Britain such as Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania from 1964 to 1985, who also implemented Fabian and African socialist ideas. He had read economics and history at the University of Edinburgh. He enforced collectivisation, and when peasants resisted, he burnt down villages. The result was economic decline, corruption and food shortages. When Tanzania tried market economics, it recorded impressive growth: gross domestic product (GDP) rose 40 per cent between 1998 and 2007."
"Here is a man who retired as a head of state and went back to his small village house to live a pension like any other public servant."
"While reiterating Tanzania's support to the right of the Saharawi people to self-determination, please accept, Your Excellency, the assurances of my highest consideration"
"Dr Magufuli has so far shown a no-nonsense approach in taming corruption, laziness and the business-as-usual syndrome among public servants. This has endeared him to most Tanzanians. Whereas in the October polls he received only 58.46 per cent of the votes cast, the survey commissioned shows that if elections were to be held today, Dr Magufuli would win by a resounding 70 percent."
"Those criticising the president have nothing better to do. It is for the president to decide which meetings he wants to attend and which he wants to delegate to the vice-president or the prime minister who can also serve the purpose"
"We are following the policies carried out by the new government. President Magufuli has the support of Tanzanian people. He is also very popular in other African countries. Now we see the optimism in Tanzania and this is very positive."