President Uhuru Should Take Notes from Buhari and Magufuli

There are two presidents in Africa whose fight against corruption baffles many. In fact, they have made their peers from other countries to look like they have never worked at all. These presidents are newly elected President John Pombe Magufuli of Tanzania and President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria.

Immediately he was sworn into office, President John Pombe Magufuli started working. He first banned all the foreign trips for civil servants. It was discovered that the government of Tanzania often spend billions in funding trips for state officials. No state official, after the declaration was going to travel abroad without the approval of the president himself. Just a week ago, President Magufuli shocked many when he reduced the number of state officials who to travel abroad for an official state function from fifty to five.

President Magufuli too fired the head of the main public hospital when he physically visited the hospital and found ailing people sleeping on the floor. He also visited the national treasury without warning and found most employees off-guard. Some had not even reported to work.

Muhammadu Buhari, the president of Nigeria amazed many when he ran his government without ministers for over three months. This implies that the government of Nigeria ran normally for more than three months without ministers. In fact, the president himself was the Minister of oil and everything ran without any hitch. Buhari also fired the chairman of the anticorruption in the country Mr. Ibrahim Lamorde whose more than 5 billion US dollars had gone missing at the commission.

What can Kenya learn from this? First we should ask ourselves these questions:

• How much do our state officials spent on foreign trips?
• How many people usually accompany the president whenever he travels abroad?
• How much does the office of the foreign affairs spent in catering for the foreign trips for state officials?
• How much do our honorable MCAs spent on benchmarking trips?
• What are the benefits of these regular foreign trips?

President John Pombe Magufuli said that the embassies representing Tanzania in other countries had the capacity to represent the country in the foreign functions. This is a fact. There is no justifiable reason for instance, for some Kenyan state officials to use the taxpayer’s money to go and market Kenya abroad when we have ambassadors in those countries.

The president of Kenya should stop talking about misuse of public funds and provide a glue to zeal all the channels that are swallowing public money.