192 - Are Women Better Political Leaders Than Men? Could Women Improve Global Outcomes for Humanity?
Tanzania's Mama Samia
Women are more compassionate, more public-interested, more genuinely inclusive than men as political leaders. Their instincts are more democratic, holistic, and sensitive than men. They are less vindictive. Collectively, those are reasonable if not conclusive presumptions.
In today’s very troubled world, with men like Putin causing chaos and death in Ukraine and cutting off food supplies to Africa and the Middle East and male military junta entrepreneurs being responsible for the extirpation of democracy in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Myanmar, Niger, and many other places, the question of who leads, and whether gender matters, is worth exploring. A newish woman president of Tanzania provides a hopeful example, certainly for the countries of the developing world.
Although the hypothesis that women make better political leaders in the 2020s is difficult to test because of the many intervening variables, my acquaintance with Africa suggests that it could be valid – at least in the sub-Saharan African region, but not necessarily in Asia. There Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is a tyrannical autocrat (2009 --), Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (a Radcliffe and Oxford graduate) was a thoroughgoing kleptocrat (1988-1996), and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ruled in a heavy-handed, barely democratic, fashion (1966-1984). At home, Hillary Clinton would obviously have produced better presidential results than her orange-tinted rival, but Electoral College results decided otherwise.
In Africa, such common assumptions about the intrinsic characteristics of women, especially women in leadership positions, have rarely been put to the test. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf served two terms as president of Liberia, helping greatly to stabilize that war-shattered country, but without much denting its rampant corruption or propelling it along a sustainable track of good governance. Joyce Banda was president of Malawi for two years, mostly as a major corruption scandal emerged. She hardly had time to chart a new governance path for Malawi to follow. And male crooks followed her.
Like Banda, Tanzania’s Mama Samia Suluhu Hassan is an accidental president. She was vice-president under President John Magufuli, an egocentric autocrat who died suddenly in early 2021 of Covid-19. Magufuli had upended democratic practices in a nation that the likes of Julius Nyerere and Oscar Kambona had liberated and developed as a darling of Nordic and other donors.
Magufuli ousted opponents, drastically curtailed free expression and media freedom, dealt harshly with would be foreign investors, and embarked with little consensus on a number of large scale infrastructural projects that bled Tanzania financially and are not yet completed: a controversial dam across the Rufiji River, a standard gauge railway from Dar es Salaam (the commercial capital) to Mwanza (on Lake Victoria) -- electrified from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma (the newish political capital in central Tanzania). President Magufuli also introduced harsh censorship. He is alleged to have shot a political rival and to have killed a journalist investigating his purchased doctoral degree from a diploma mill.
President Samia, a Zanzibari Muslim whose previous political experience before becoming vice-president had largely been at the local level, in Zanzibar, has slowly been undoing a number of Magufuli’s mistaken policy initiatives. The press is more free, opposition political figures are allowed to campaign and hold rallies well ahead of the 2025 national elections, and some of Magufuli’s harmful tax and investment initiatives are being reversed. Internet restrictions have been lifted. President Samia is much less opinionated and less determinedly autocratic than her predecessor. She lacks the blustery dramatic flair of Magufuli, too.
In a sharp break with past practices, President Samia has even encouraged an open dialogue among representatives of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and opposition parties. Magufuli had shut down such normal democratic initiatives.
Tanzanian political life is experiencing a healthy new momentum. But President Samia has not yet undone all of Magufuli’s misguided policies. Nor has she necessarily taken full charge of her own (patriarchically run) ruling political party or demonstrated a charismatic initiative capable of exciting and transforming her large and still very poor country.
Tanzania has 63 million people, 7 million of whom live in congested Dar es Salaam, its main port. Tanzania’s GDP per capita is slightly over $1,000, an amount that potentially could grow when and if President Samia’s government concludes favorable revenue arrangements with the multinational companies that are poised to convert vast supplies of offshore natural gas into fuel for Tanzania and liquified national gas for shipment overseas.
But this new revenue stream may not fully compensate for Tanzania’s demographic explosion – about which President Samia almost never talks. According to the UN Population Division’s most recent estimates, Tanzania’s population is poised to grow rapidly to more than 200 million by 2070, equaling Brazil’s numbers. The women who will give birth to such children are already born. Because they are poorly educated, they will have more babies and start having them sooner than Kenyan women. The remedy is educating girls through secondary school and providing clean water so that village girls need not fetch water daily from distant wells. But Tanzania is doing too little to school its girls through the secondary level or to provide water in remote regions.
President Samia is moving slowly -- critics say too slowly – to remove Magufuli’s anti-democratic impress on the nation. Critics, including several within the upper ranks of her own party, also say that the new president lacks a compelling vision. She is going through the presidential motions without as yet shaking Tanzania out of the deadly torpor instilled by her predecessor. Her followers await the kinds of decisions that will prove transformational domestically. Internationally, her administration failed to vote for Ukraine in the UN, preferring to remain neutral between the contenders.
Alas, President Samia has not yet established the case that women are notably better leaders than men in Africa or globally. Perhaps her womanly instincts will win through eventually. For now, she seems to be leading in much the same transactional manner as so many of her fellow (male) African heads of state – neighboring Kenya’s President William Ruto, for example.
Thus far, gender appears less decisive than skill, integrity, and vision in improving outcomes for the world’s poor and conflicted. Those kinds of leaders – the Volodymyr Zelenskys and Jacinda Arderns of the world – make a clear difference. Voters must demand more of their kind to preserve global freedoms and fewer wars.
Very inclusive interesting global piece. I would encourage looking farther as time goes on; comparing regimes and gender in many places. The more global your search, the more we readers learn of other cultures and we must as the population continues to balloon past 8 billion. Contrast and compare; geez, the old question from graduate school haunts me today. One question final exam. One world 🌎, same old question!