Tanzania’s President John Pombe Magufuli is once again in the news for the positive reasons.
This time, the president, dressed casually and wearing a hat and a pair of gloves, joined hundreds of people in sweeping streets and collecting rubbish in the country’s capital, Dar es Salaam.
Magufuli had cancelled the lavish Independence Day celebrations and asked Tanzanians to clean-up their neighbourhoods.
True to his word, he led people in Dar es Salaam in a clean-up exercise, mingling freely with them.
The cleaning exercise was replicated across the East African country, with schools and shops remaining closed as people swept streets, pruned trees and tidied up their areas.
This is the first time that Tanzania has not celebrated the Independence Day in 54 years.
The president said it would be shameful to spend huge sums of money on celebrations when Tanzanians “are dying of cholera”.
Cholera has killed about 60 people in Tanzania in the last three months – many of them in poor areas which lack proper toilets.
