Who among the following has become the first woman President of Tanjania in April 2022 ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Samia Suluhu Hassan. She is Tanzania's first and so far only woman President, and no other name on this list has ever held that office, so the identification is not in doubt. The DATE printed in the question is, however, wrong, and a student should know it. Samia Suluhu Hassan was sworn in on 19 MARCH 2021 — not April 2022 — two days after the death of President John Magufuli was announced on 17 March. She had been Vice-President since 5 November 2015, elected on the ruling CCM ticket alongside Magufuli, and she succeeded to the presidency under the constitutional line of succession to serve out the remainder of his second term. So by the time this paper was set, on 12 June 2022, she had already been in office for nearly fifteen months; 'in April 2022' corresponds to nothing in her career. Following the 2020 precedent for this series, the card argues the commission's marked answer — option (b) is right, and it is right on the only thing the question can properly be testing, which is the name — while stating plainly that the accompanying date does not match the record.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The right kind of person, the wrong country. Sahle-Work Zewde was President of ETHIOPIA, not Tanzania, taking office on 25 October 2018 and serving until 7 October 2024; she was Ethiopia's first woman president. She was in office on the date of this exam, which is exactly what makes her the strongest distractor here — a candidate half-remembering 'Africa's woman president' can land on her.  (c) Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was President of LIBERIA from 2006 to 2018, not of Tanzania. She was Africa's first elected woman head of state and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, so she is the name most likely to surface first when a candidate is asked about a woman president in Africa — but her presidency had ended four years before this paper was set.  (d) This is the option a candidate is tempted into precisely because the date in the stem is wrong — noticing that nothing happened in Tanzania in April 2022, they conclude the question describes no one. But option (b) names a real person who really is Tanzania's first woman President, so 'none of the above' is false. In an examination, a defective date does not convert a correct name into no answer at all; the commission's key marks (b).

Concept: Samia Suluhu Hassan is from Zanzibar and rose through Zanzibari and then Union politics, serving as a minister, as a member of the constitutional review body and, from November 2015, as Vice-President of the United Republic of Tanzania. Tanzania's constitution provides that the Vice-President succeeds on the death of the President and completes the unexpired term, which is what happened on 19 March 2021 when Magufuli's death was announced. Her succession was widely noted internationally on two counts: she became Tanzania's first woman head of state, and she moved quickly away from her predecessor's positions on the COVID-19 pandemic, restoring official reporting and a vaccination programme that Magufuli had resisted. As of the June-2022 exam she was serving out that inherited term. To bring the record up to date honestly for a student reading this in 2026: she subsequently contested and won a presidential election in her own right in October 2025 — the result was announced with 97 per cent of the vote — and was sworn in on 3 November 2025.

State PCS 2022 Q50 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q50 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer