Kikwete: Katiba making delayed my operation

National

President Jakaya Kikwete shakes hands with Mama Maria Nyerere at the Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam yesterday after arriving from the United States where he had been for medical treatment. PHOTO | RAFAEL LUBAVA 

By The Citizen Reporter

In Summary

He told her eight months after it was detected and he was encouraged that she was not too disturbed by the news. “I thank God that she is a very religious person and she prayed for me,” he said.

Dar es Salaam. Doctors advised President Jakaya Kikwete to have an important operation in November last year but the Head of the State told them he had to postpone the medical procedure in favour of the constitution-making process.

Speaking yesterday, Mr Kikwete declined to comment on the goings-on in Parliament, which has for the past three days been debating the Tegeta Escrow Account scandal, with calls from MPs for some top public officials to resign.

“I am not going to say anything about what is happening in Dodoma because I have no details of what is going on,” Mr Kikwete said shortly after addressing journalists. “I might comment, if there is a need to do so, when I get details of what has been going on.”

The President told reporters yesterday that his prostate problem was diagnosed last year and a doctor in the US advised him to have surgery immediately. He was speaking at Julius Nyerere International Airport yesterday upon his return from the US, where he underwent the operation two weeks or so ago.

After the diagnosis, he asked his doctors to defer the operation to July this year. In November last year, the doctors assured him that the procedure would not take too much of his time. He would have been hospitalised for three days and then allowed to go home. “But I did not want to undergo an operation at the time because we were about to receive the second draft constitution,” he recalled. “This was an important undertaking.”

He then suggested that the surgery be carried out in July this year, believing that the Constituent Assembly would be done with it by then.

Mr Kikwete thanked the doctors for the successful operation and said it had given him relief in two ways: First, he had been working in the knowledge that he was a cancer patient and that made him apprehensive.

Second, after postponing the operation he was not sure how the cancer was behaving in his body.

He added: “Many people were seeing me as a normal and healthy person but, deep inside, I knew I was sick. Worse still, I was not in pain and, therefore, I could not tell how far the disease had spread.”

The President did not tell anyone when he was first diagnosed, not even his wife.

He told her eight months after it was detected and he was encouraged that she was not too disturbed by the news. “I thank God that she is a very religious person and she prayed for me,” he said.

Mr Kikwete advised other Tanzanians to have health checks regularly, which would help detect such problems in the early stages--leading to getting the right treatment in good time.