When challenged by World Bank officials about the failure of his policies, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's first president and a strong advocate of education, is reported to have said: "The British Empire left us a country with 85 percent illiterates, two engineers and twelve doctors. When I left office, we had nine percent illiterates and thousands of engineers and doctors." However, over the next 15 years education was practically forgotten and, by 2000, just 55 percent of seven-year-olds were enrolling in primary schools, most of which were poorly maintained and lacking teachers, according to government figures.