The Bulletin understands that even in far away Singida (and presumably everywhere else in Tanzania) when you are thirsty and want a strong drink you no longer ask for a ‘Safari’ beer. You ask for an ‘Mtikila’!

The growing popularity of the Chairman of the Democratic Party, has been giving cause for concern to people within and outside Tanzania. German TV journalist Iris Karlovits interviewed him recently for the Dar es Salaam ‘Express’. The following are extracts from the interview:

ON RELIGION AND THE SECULAR STATE: I believe that those in power try to separate politics from religion because they want to be free to do evil against mankind; as a Pastor and evangelist, politics has never been separated from my ministry especially when it deals with people’s rights and with the resources which keep them happy. Politics and religion are one and the same because they both deal with people’s rights.

ON TANZANIA’S GREATEST PROBLEMS: 1. The moral decay of our society; 2. mental anaesthesia (Julius Nyerere deliberately administered some political anaesthesia into the brains of the people of this country in order to subdue them; we were reduced to the level of livestock who just lived for the wishes of the master); 3.the total decay of health services; 4. the economic ruin.

ON EDUCATION: We need intensive education for democracy. The subject should be called ‘civics’ as in the colonial days. It was so nice. It taught us all to be proud of our country. We were taught to try and do our best. We strived to lead, to be the best in our studies, in our work. But all this spirit is dead. Most of the education used to be provided by missionaries. Many of the teachers came from outside. The missionaries taught good discipline and patriotism. Now these guys deliberately nationalised those schools and crushed them down. We need to restore those schools to the missionaries because by taking them away we have ruined our education system.

ON HOW TO RAISE MORE MONEY TO PAY FOR BETTER EDUCATION: 1.Cut the intelligence service which spends billions of shillings. Its major work was to prevent the emergence of opposition and to suppress democracy. But now opposition is legal; 2.Stop the extravagance on creating new ministries; 3. There are too many tax exemptions for influential persons; 4. Huge amounts of money are being taken out of the country.

ON THE ‘MAFIA SYNDICATES’: Our party has a list of 160 people who are responsible for all this. They are businessmen, top men in the CCM, high ranking officials, some foreigners and diplomats. There are the ‘Gabacholis’ who are of Asian origin. They are Arabs, Zanzibaris from Pemba, Somalis and a few Westerners. They are importing containers full of drugs and re-exporting to Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Those people who say that we are going to fail in business if we chase away the ‘Gabacholis’ are only insulting the Tanganyika people. They think that God put beans in the heads of Tanganyikans and brains in the heads of the thieves from other countries who come to loot our country.

ON INDIGENISATION: Indigenisation is education and change of the regulations for commerce. Our business people here have been denied opportunities. Foreigners have their own motherlands. They’ve come here to get rich. A Tanganyikan is a person of Tanganyikan origin not only born here. Being born anywhere is meaningless. If I were staying in Switzerland and my wife delivered a baby there, this does not change her Tanganyikan origin. We do not have to go into archaeology to dig up bones to see who was here before whom.

ON THE ‘SELLING OF THE COUNTRY’: The country is on sale! They are selling the land. What about Loliondo, the game parks, everything? So they say I am an instigator and what have you. They are sick. All the diamonds are going. We had 300,000 elephants at independence. No one should point a finger at the British, because they left us with everything intact. Now we have got about 8,000 left. If the Germans are compensating the Jews for having killed them and if the Americans are to pay the West Africans for the slaves they took, we have got to start discussing compensation from the Arabs.

ON ZANZIBARIS: They have a different identity (from Tanganyikans). They are Zanzibaris.