“I, Samia Suluhu Hassan, promise to be honest and obey and protect the constitution of Tanzania.”
That was Tanzania’s first female president taking the oath of office Friday, after the sudden death of President John Magufuli from heart disease.
According to Tanzania’s constitution, the vice president serves out the remainder of the term of a president who dies in office. Magufuli was first elected in 2015, he secured a second five-year term in October last year.
Excitement and fanfare usually accompany Such occasions but for Hassan, it was sadness and morning.
“It’s not a good day for me to talk to you because I have a wound in my heart,” said Hassan after being sworn in on Friday.
“Today I have taken an oath different from the rest that I have taken in my career. Those were taken in happiness. Today I took the highest oath of office in mourning,” she said.
She said this is the time to hold hands and move forward to build the new Tanzania that President Magufuli aspired to.
Magufuli died after more than two weeks he was last seen in public, and thereby paving the way for Hassan to ascend to the presidency.
In her first public address as president, the 61-year-old new president announced 21 days of mourning for Magufuli and declared March 22 and 25 as public holidays, the day the late president will be buried.
The world earnestly await how Hassan will deal with the coronavirus pandemic. This is expected to be a major test of her new presidency.
Under Magufuli, Tanzania made no efforts to obtain vaccines or promote the use of masks and social distancing to combat the virus.
Hassan rose through the ranks over a 20-year political career from local government to the national assembly.
Hassan became Tanzania’s first female vice president after Magufuli selected her as his running mate in 2015. She was the second woman to become vice president in the region, after Uganda’s Specioza Naigaga Wandira, who was in office from 1994 to 2003.
Born in Zanzibar, Tanzania’s semi-autonomous archipelago, in 1960, Hassan went to primary school and secondary school at a time when very few girls in Tanzania were getting educations as parents thought a woman’s place was that of wife and homemaker.
After graduating from secondary school in 1977, Hassan studied statistics and started working for the government, in the Ministry of Planning and Development. She worked for a World Food Program project in Tanzania in 1992 and then attended the University of Manchester in London to earn a postgraduate diploma in economics.
In 2005, she earned a master’s degree in community economic development through a joint program between the Open University of Tanzania and Southern New Hampshire University in the U.S.
Hassan went into politics in 2000 when she became a member of the Zanzibar House of Representatives.
In 2010, she won the Makunduchi parliamentary seat with more than 80% percent of the vote. She was appointed a Cabinet minister in 2014 and became vice-chairperson of the Constituent Assembly that drafted a new constitution for Tanzania, a role in which she won respect for deftly handling several challenges.
