Just over a month ago, Tanzanians bought themselves a brand new president, and this brand new president has not taken long to prove to them that he is indeed a brand new president.

They are now settling into the mode of understanding just how much newness he may have under his sleeve, and how they will deal with it.

John Pombe Magufuli is not your regular African politico. He did not emerge from the mainstream political tribe of the country, and even in his own ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi he is seen as an oddity that no one can easily quantify. He has puzzled the most hardnosed pundits within the party and sent them worrying signals that he may be hard to control.

When Magufuli took out the forms to vie for his party’s nomination, he did so in such a discreet manner that some people thought he was not serious. There was no fanfare, no grandstanding, no accompanying throngs of supporters. Just John Pombe and a couple of faceless lieutenants plucked from the bosom of anonymity.

This anonymity ushered John Pombe into the party’s cutthroat arena full of banana skins, drawn daggers dressed as smiles and poisoned chalices presented as wine goblets.

Few people gave him a snowball’s chance in hell to emerge from a colourful pack of aspirants that included a serving vice president, a sitting prime minister, two former prime ministers, a former chief justice, two former spy chiefs and a clutch of ministers.

In the internecine fighting that ensued, Magufuli was, even to those who dared to hope for him, the darkest of dark horses, but he was probably the most favoured by the backstabbing among his co-aspirants and their backers. In the end, he stole into the tent as the sentry slept. His emergence as the eventual winner was truly surprising.

NO FRILLS

But as the presidential campaign train rolled out of the station and the throngs started getting the Magufuli treatment, the initial doubts started to dissipate, as a vigorous and plain-speaking man with no frills emerged to claim the mantle hitherto monopolised by the opposition: Change.

Up to that moment, it had been conventional wisdom to say that change was not possible under CCM, and that the only way to bring about real change was to vote the Grand Old Party out of office.

He distanced himself from CCM and campaigned as an independent candidate might have campaigned, rarely mentioning the party except when talking about the hypocrisy stifling it and the rampant corruption that had eaten it to the core. He won.

The first highly publicised actions he undertook soon after his inauguration looked like the man was truly gunning for change: Even before he named his Cabinet, he had already caused officers in sensitive revenue offices to be suspended, some questioned, suspected tax evaders scrutinised and a lot of shady dealings exposed.

Further, he curtailed celebrations, cut huge foreign delegations to a tenth, and ordered the money thus saved into more useful channels.

All this earned Magufuli accolades here and abroad, although sceptics still asked themselves about the sustainability of dictated change, change that is not anchored in a systemic, global and thoroughgoing transformative overhaul, but is rather dependent on the whims of a well-meaning supreme leader and a posse of his assistants.

That worry may prove justified. The rot Magufuli is trying to do away with is so deep-rooted and all-encompassing, that the body politic can hardly survive the death of corruption, which constitutes the basic infrastructure of the system.

The remedy for such a deeply rotten system is total overhaul, starting with a constitution that the masses of Tanzanians expressed their support for. It cannot be found in a draft constitution that was written by people who should themselves be in jail for exactly what Magufuli says he is fighting against.

On Thursday, after a month or so, Magufuli unveiled his first Cabinet, and it was immediately clear that, as they say in Paris, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]