What Twitterverse Thinks of Magufuli
The king is dead, long live the king! President Magufuli of the United Republic of Tanzania succumbed to heart failure on 17th March, 2021. He leaves a mixed legacy of infrastructure development, accusation of human rights abuses, and COVID-19 skepticism. Analysis of 15,700 tweets show that one of the major achievement lauded to the president is the tarmacking of 5,000 km of road in 5 years.
The Roads
A report dubbed “Tanzania Transport Sector Review” published by the African Development Bank in September 2013 indictates Tanzania has a road network of of 86,472 km in the formal inventory of which 12,786 km are categorised as trunk roads, 21,105 km as regional roads and the remaining 52,581 km as district, urban and feeder roads.
According to World Highways, in Tanzania,9,951km or 27% of the country’s 36,258km classified national road network is paved. The country’s State-run roads agency, Tanzania National Roads Agency (TANROADS) dreams of paving an additional 4,000km by 2022.
Within the five years, TANROADS, which has spent $2.1 billion on road development and maintenance since 2015, also hopes to construct or upgrade 76 trunk roads of 3,398km and 112 regional roads of 5,3318km. An additional 1,683km of trunk roads will be rehabilitated and 29km of regional roads by 2021. These are in addition to the construction of 21 bridges, rehabilitation of two others and construction of 18 flyover, interchanges, junctions over the five-year period. It is plausible the president is responsible for the construction of 5,000 km of roads — he served as the MInister of Works, Transport and Commucation from 28th November 2010 to 5th November 2015 prior to assuming the role of President of United Republic of Tanzania.
The Topics
Applying LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), a topic modelling algorithm to the tweets we get 5 topics that mostly talked about president magufuli.
These topics are:
- Tackling mining issues in the country
- Lauded as a pan africanist
- Tackling neo colonialism
- COVID denial
- Paving the way for first female presient in the country
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