Hamisi Kigwangalla

Early life and education

Hamisi Andrea Kigwangalla was born on 7 August 1975. His father was a banker with the National Bank of Commerce. His mother, Bagaile Bakari Lumola (a retired CCM employee), was a primary school teacher in Nzega Ndogo Primary School, in Nzega town, where his father was posted to open a new branch of the bank.

Kigwangalla's father, Nasser Mahampa Kigwangalla, descends from a well-known Kimbu clan from Goweko – Igalula, and his mother was the daughter of a Nyamwezi Chief, Lumola Bakari Maulid (a key figure in Hamisi A. Kigwangalla’s upbringing following the divorce of his parents at a young age). His maternal grandfather attended Tabora School a few years ahead of Julius Nyerere.

He was educated at Kigoma and Shinyanga secondary schools before joining the University of Dar es Salaam where he pursued a medicine degree from 1999 to its completion in 2004. He then pursued postgraduate studies in Sweden at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (M.B.A.) and Karolinska Institutet (M.P.H.). He is currently finalizing a (Ph.D.) thesis in Public Health (Health Systems and Health Economics) at the University of Cape Town (South Africa).

Career

He is a young Member of Parliament sitting in the National Assembly (Tanzania) representing Nzega constituency of the Tabora region. He was first elected in the national elections on October 31, 2010. His appointment by the national executive council to run for the post through the ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) ticket was followed by a lot of criticism with critics claiming that he was appointed to contest for the post despite being the second runner up after Hussein Mohammed Bashe (the winner of the primary votes), who was not favoured on account of his citizenship being unclear, and the incumbent Lucas Lumambo Selelii (1st runner up) in the primaries, because he was working for the First Lady of Tanzania's charitable organisation, Wanawake na Maendeleo (WAMA), a rumour which he denies.

Immediately after his nomination by the CCM's top congregation, he was also arrested by the immigration police on charges of being a non-citizen of Tanzania and this became a center issue in the Tanzanian media. He was however cleared two days later. Despite the fact that he was cleared by the immigration officials, he still had to face stern objections from the opposition contestants.

Despite criticism and allegations, Kigwangalla won the elections. He was featured in daily newspapers in Tanzania saying that he intends to table a motion in the National Assembly claiming that the Golden Pride Gold Mine, a gold mining project located in Nzega and owned by an Australian mining giant subsidiary company, Resolute Tanzania Ltd, is useless and has no benefits to people from Nzega and the country at large and that it should be closed. Dr. Kigwangalla was re-elected to the Parliament in the recently concluded (October 2015) Tanzanian general elections to represent the Nzega Rural Constituency on a CCM ticket.

Business

In 2006 Dr. Kigwangalla established a limited liability company and later other sister companies (forming the ‘MSK Group’). He employs himself and more than 400 others directly. Indirectly his enterprises impacts the lives of more than 500,000 rural Tanzanians through a thriving agri-business portfolio. Today the group owns two agro-processing factories, runs a logistics enterprise with a fleet of more than 30 trucks and has rural agro-financing partnerships with farmers. He pioneered a ‘market-linked farmer-buyer rural financing model’ that works beneficially for both parties and manages to reach more than 30,000 farmers (formed into Farmers’ Business Groups - FBGs) and raised cotton production from 20,000 kilograms in the first year of the project to more than 8 million kg in the fourth year of the project in Nzega.

Personal

Kigwangalla has authored a policy framework book, Kigwanomics and the Tanzania We Want: From Renaissance to Transformation, in addition to a number of peer-reviewed scientific articles and op-ed analyses in local and international media.

Kigwangalla is an avid supporter and pioneer of youth rights movements, and he believes that the youth have an important role to play in building the ‘Tanzania we want’ if they are given an opportunity to do so. He has always believed that the future of Tanzania is in better hands if young people are involved in the crafting of the Tanzania they wish to live themselves and to pass over to their children and grandchildren. He believes that this is their time and that they have more reasons to work tirelessly for it than their fathers, and that they have more energy, knowledge, skills and creativity for use in the current times than the people who live today but are from the past generation.