Hii ndio Story iliyoandikwa kwenye Gazeti la Australia kuhusiana na Rais Magufuli..

Tanzania’s new President John Pombe Magufuli holds up a ceremonial spear and shield to signify the beginning of his presidency on November 5. (AP Photo/Khalfan Said)

AS TWO in three Australians wallow in the warm glow of Malcolm Turnbull’s first 11 weeks of procrastination, indecision and waffle, over in Tanzania a brand new president is actually getting on with doing the job.

In his first month, President John Magufuli has launched an extraordinary austerity drive (note to young readers – no, “austerity” is not a swear word) to tackle his government’s wasteful spending.

Where Turnbull has headed off parading around the world pontificating at pointless exercises like the Paris climate change conference, upon winning last month’s election Magufuli cancelled all further overseas travel and first and business class airfares for government officials. Where Turnbull has presided over endless economic gabfests where “everything is on the table” and “nothing is ruled in or ruled out”, Magufuli immediately ditched all such seminars being held in expensive hotels, insisting government ministers use their own boardrooms.

Impressively, Magufuli cancelled the Independence Day celebrations and put the money into hospitals and health. “It is so shameful that we are spending huge amounts of money to celebrate 54 years of independence when our people are dying of cholera,” Magufuli said last week.

He also slashed the budget for his own inauguration parties by 93 per cent, putting the cash into a nationwide clean up, and, in an intriguing version of our own Clean Up Australia Day, has instructed people to celebrate his election by cleaning up their own backyards. Where Turnbull boasted to Parliament that it was “no news to anybody” that he is wealthy, Magufuli is lauded for the opposite reason: as a government minister he could have made himself incredibly rich but chose not to. Determined to tackle Tanzania’s endemic corruption, Magufuli has ordered government engineers who are used to driving around in expensive V8s to go and get utes instead, and the new President immediately scrapped a plethora of special tax “exemptions” and “sitting allowances” for wealthy government officials. Where Turnbull likes to pretend he is a man of the people by tweeting on trams, Magufuli actually drives the 600km from his home town to the capital to avoid the cost of the airfare.

On an unannounced visit to a major hospital Magufuli insisted on walking through the worst sections, normally hidden from view. He then fired the director and the board, put in a new director, and told him that unless all the medical equipment was fixed within a fortnight he too would face the sack. Surprise, surprise, everything was repaired within three days

So popular and successful is his austerity drive that his name has coined a new verb: to “magufulify”, one wit claimed, is “to make something faster and cheaper” and “to deprive public officials of their capacity to enjoy life on taxpayer’s expense”.

Even better, his measures have spawned an entire social media campaign where Tanzanians question their spending habits by asking #WhatWouldMagufuliDo? As with the best social media campaigns, these are both insightful and hilarious. One shows a trio all perched on the one motorbike dragging a wheelbarrow behind them with the caption: “My boys and myself wanted to hire a car to go to the village but then we thought #WhatWouldMagufuliDo?’’

This is practical innovation, rather than the faux-innovation that Turnbull talks a lot about but has yet to demonstrate in any tangible way. As Australian national government debt still sits around $400 billion, it’s a tragedy for our offspring that we didn’t get a John Magufuli instead of a Malcolm Turnbull.

This week, despite making vague mutterings about spending, Turnbull grandly announced there would be “no slashing and burning” of our federal budget. Rather than using his authority and popularity to sell an austerity message, he has done the opposite. The message is clear: our high debt, profligacy and government waste are here to stay. With his astronomical poll ratings, Turnbull could have done anything he wanted on gaining power – if only he’d used his popularity to offer economic leadership as inspirational as that of John Magufuli. Indeed, he justified his coup on the spurious grounds of talking up our economic performance, or some such twaddle. Yet, in the past 11 weeks we’ve had an awful lot of talk, but as the Financial Review reported on the weekend, new research shows “voters marking down the government’s performance in every policy issue of concern since Tony Abbott was replaced.”

Where Turnbull drones on about “agility”, “flexibility” and the like, Magufuli has opted for a simple three word slogan: Hapa Kazi Tu, (loosely translated “here all we do is work to serve”). Now that’s innovative.