March 18th, 2021 | Graydon Baker
One week ago, I was in Tanzania. Before that, from July 2020 to March 2021, my family lived unrestricted between rural and urban Tanzania during the height of the pandemic, freely operating our mission and safari business. The family business has been in operation since 2013. My wife and I founded this work in the wilder parts of Tanzania, a place relatively unknown at the time called the Rufiji District. Our young family has made countless trips over the years from Canada to Dar es Salaam by plane, and by landcruiser down bush roads to the property we built-up from nothing on the banks of the old Rufiji River. Before this, I arrived for the first time in Tanzania in 2006 as a bachelor, introduced to the African country we would call home these many years. We are the Canadian Baker family of Tanzania.
In 2015, there was a national election in Tanzania that brought President John Magufuli to the world stage for the first time. Back in October of 2020, President Magufuli was re-elected to a second term. We were in Tanzania for both elections. Though the results of the first election were tight, the second was a landslide victory for Magufuli. Neither result surprised us. President John Magufuli loved his people and earned their love in return. There is no one we spoke with from the villages who wasn’t voting Magufuli for a second term. It was the consensus that it was a futile effort from the opposition party to attempt to unseat the sitting president because he was so beloved. A man of humble roots himself, he was adored by the average citizen of lesser means – which makes up the vast majority of Tanzanians in this underdeveloped country. His critics within Tanzania were almost exclusively the “upper crust” of society who represent a significant minority. The October 2020 election results agreed with this demographic disparity.
Yesterday, President John Magufuli of Tanzania died, at the age of 61. He was a man of faith, who, in this writer’s informed opinion, put the interests of the common man and the country he was charged to lead first, before his own interests. In recent days he was an outspoken critic of the pandemic and measures enforced by other countries, and he resisted international pressure to enforce these same measures on his own poverty-stricken people. This unflinching conviction to lead against the worldwide flow made him a target of criticism. His death is an untimely one, and in the days to follow the international gaggle of bottom-feeder media will leverage this event to cast doubt on his leadership, cause of death and further push their fear- driven narrative.
As a Christian man, the owner of an international business and founder of a mission from Canada to Tanzania, I have experienced firsthand, both extremes, the fallout of pandemic restriction and the vital necessity of liberty. I am also someone uniquely positioned to challenge the media’s interpretation of the situation today in Tanzania.
At the onset of the current pandemic, Tanzanian President John Magufuli announced that he would not be closing churches as a plan to prevent the spread of a disease. He stated that whether the disease was lethal or not, and even more so if it was lethal, the intervention of the Almighty was the country’s greatest ally. Prayer and places of worship became an officially adopted national strategy to contend against the pandemic. Tanzania stood alone among an international community in this decision. Shamefully, church leaders are among those who have joined in criticism of the late president’s actions.
In stark contrast to Tanzania, places of worship in Canada were officially classified as non- essential. They have endured a myriad of lockdowns and restrictions. Corporately they are limited capacity on Sundays with a prior reservation required, and individually, church members are closed off from their neighbours under a new regulatory oxymoron, “social distancing”.
Socially, the average “kijiji” or village in Tanzania greatly lacks infrastructure. This too was something the Magufuli administration was focused on developing; a vestige of neglect and corruption from previous regimes. In our capacity as a mission, our work is focused where our safari business is located, in the backcountry portion of the Rufiji District, Tanzania, a collection of villages along the Rufiji River with a combined population of 40,000+. We work to raise people out of poverty on the whole, physically and spiritually.
Our base of operations is our safari lodge, a collection of cottages and utilities, carved out of the untamed African bush. In 2019, the attention of the Rufiji District Commissioner was turned toward us as some unscrupulous members of the local village sought his partnership in their scheme to take our property and business. This District Commissioner made personal visits to our home, issuing public threats and dragging members of our staff into private midnight interrogations. These extortion attempts persisted until one day in 2020 when President Magufuli made one of many visits to our district. At this time, the Rufiji was becoming an overnight focus of interest for the whole country as the government was about to launch a large hydropower project on the district’s namesake river. The late president was known for identifying corruption and dealing with it decisively. On one such visit to the Rufiji District, President John Magufuli met with our District Commissioner, he sussed out the commissioner’s corrupt ways and summarily dismissed him from his position. The story goes, they met in the morning, by the afternoon the former District Commissioner was unemployed. Our business and others in the district received peace once again.
In 2020 and 2021, our mission developed a project called the “Dinner Club”. Weekly we visit a village along our river and spend a day with the children of that village, which includes filling their empty stomachs, teaching English lessons and usually, a lively game of barefoot soccer. Hundreds of kids attend. For most it’s the highlight of their week, their year; even the highlight of their short underprivileged lives. Life is too often cut-short in a rural East African village. A few weeks ago we felt the weight of this reality afresh as a smiling face from our Dinner Club was lost. One Saturday she was among the many hungry Rufiji kids eating fist-fulls of rice, the next Saturday she was gone. From her mother we learned that earlier that week her head began to throb with pain, within days it had increased to the point of madness and she was dead and buried before her absence was felt by us. Had President Magufuli instituted in Tanzania the same restrictive measures as other country leaders, this little girl would have been cooped in her family mud and stick home, cut off from the light and the love we were able to give her last days. In Tanzania, as Dr. Magufuli was well-aware, issues are much bigger than a flavour-of-the-year disease. There are numerous undiagnosed sicknesses that the average Tanzanian deals with as part of regular life, coupled with the high mortality rate that’s the hallmark of an impoverished nation. Surely the late president was working to bring Tanzania out of poverty, but that plan necessitated a dynamic economy with no allowance or ability to shut that economy down indefinitely. It represents the ignorance of a first-world nation to suggest otherwise.
The purpose of this article is to call the church, in particular my native Canadian church to better. At the very least, to be discerning enough not to fall prey to a culprit of recent days, the media machine. The late president of Tanzania didn’t disregard a disease, he regarded all else and weighed everything as a whole; not being so singularly focused as to allow other country responsibilities and concerns to fall by the wayside. That is the mark of a good leader. Further, the President of Tanzania turned to his faith as a viable solution to a problem. That is the mark of a God-fearing man.
It confounds me, from what I’ve observed, how the Canadian church can conform to a godless Canadian government who calls them non-essential, while participating, at some level in condemning another government on the other side of the world who turned to God and called them – the church – vital.
The church is vital if operating correctly, and non-essential if not.
The country of Tanzania will now go into mourning for 14 days at the loss of their champion, President John Magufuli. He was the champion of the least, the average Tanzanian citizen. Let the same be said of the church, because this is the model of our champion, Jesus Christ.