Dar es Salaam. President Samia Suluhu Hassan on Wednesday suggested she could run for president in the 2025 General Election, telling her supporters that Tanzania’s women are yet to put their fellow woman in the State House, referring to herself as a president thanks to only “God wishes and constitutional requirements.”
President Samia revealed her plan during a rally in Tanzania’s commercial capital of Dar es Salaam to mark the International Day of Democracy that is celebrated globally on September 15 of every year. The day is observed with the purpose of promoting and upholding the principles of democracy worldwide.
“What women of this country succeeded at was pushing for this country to have the first female Vice-President,” President Samia told her supporters who gathered at the Diamond Jubilee social hall. Before becoming the president on March 19, 2021, Samia served as Vice-President under the late President John Magufuli.
“But me being here is simply God’s wishes. Now, brothers and sisters, we’ll elect [Tanzania’s] first female President in 2025. If we do our things properly and stand together in solidarity, we’ll elect a female President, and we shall meet here with great ecstasy. They Have Started to Provoke Us By Writing in Newspapers That I Will Not Run, Who Told Them?,” said President Samia.
On August 11, 2021, the government banned Uhuru newspaper, the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi’s (CCM) mouthpiece for fourteen days, for allegedly publishing a false story about President Samia, claiming that the Head of State does not have a plan to run for the presidency in 2025.
Uhuru had carried a front-page story reading ‘Sina wazo kuwania uraisi 2025 – Samia,’ which translates to ‘I do not intend to run for the presidency in 2025 – Samia’ in English. The paper did the story based on an interview the Head of State, who doubles as CCM’s national chairperson, did with BBC Swahili earlier that week.
Observers of Tanzania’s political developments commented then that the incident says a lot about the ongoing suppressed but growing fractions within one of Africa’s oldest political parties, especially between the camp of former president John Magufuli’s loyalists and President Samia’s base.
