The denying president of Tanzania’s COVID died this week, prompting an opposition leader to call his death in the midst of the pandemic, “poetic justice”.
President John Magufuli was 61 years old.
“Our dear president passed away,” East African nation Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan said on national television on Wednesday when she announced that the flags would fly at half-mast for 14 days.
Suluhu insisted the leader died of heart failure and said “the president has had this disease for the past ten years.”
Until Magufuli’s death was announced, the authoritarian leader’s administration had insisted he was not ill, although he had not been seen in public since late February.
Even before his death, rival politicians had insisted the president had COVID-19, a disease Magufuli claimed to have eradicated for three days of national prayer.
“We are told that he had heart disease. It’s a crown, ”opposition leader Tundu Lissu told Kenya’s Belgian television network, where he has been in exile since 2017, when he was shot 16 times in an attack that blamed agents of the government.
“It’s poetic justice,” Lissu said of the death, saying “President Magufuli challenged the world in the fight against COVID-19.”
“It simply came to our notice then. He refused to take the basic precautions that are said to be taken by people around the world in the fight against COVID-19, ”he said.
“He relied on faith healers and herbal preparations of dubious medical value … And what happened? He came down with COVID-19,” Lissu insisted.
Magufuli, the son of a farmer, was first elected to the presidency in 2015 and served a second five-year term won in the 2020 elections, which the opposition and some rights groups said were not even free. nor fair.
When COVID-19 first arrived in Tanzania in March 2020, Magufuli urged people to go to churches and mosques to pray, saying that because “the coronavirus is a demon,” it cannot sit in the body of Christ. “.
He spoke out against social distancing and masks and questioned vaccines, rather than promoting herbs and exercising as remedies.
Magufuli announced in June that COVID-19 had been eradicated from Tanzania for three days of national prayer.
The nation has not reported confirmed cases of coronavirus and deaths to African health authorities since April 2020, and experts report that victims are buried at night to hide the death toll.
Health officials who reported COVID-19-related problems were fired, The Associated Press said.
Tanzania’s constitution calls for the vice president to succeed a dying president, making Hassan the nation’s first woman president.
However, as of Thursday, officials had not yet announced plans to swear in Hassan, Reuters told.
With mail cables