The Tanzanian COVID-denied president died this week, prompting an opposition leader to call his death “poetic justice” amid the pandemic.
President John Magufuli was 61.
“Our beloved president has passed away,” said Samia Suluhu Hassan, the East African country’s vice president, on national television on Wednesday when she announced flags would be hung at half mast for 14 days.
Suluhu insisted that the leader died of heart failure, saying that “the president has had this disease for the past 10 years.”
Until Magufuli’s death was announced, the authoritarian leader’s government had insisted that he was not sick – even though he had not been seen in public since late February.
Even before his death, rival politicians had insisted that the president had COVID-19, a disease Magufuli claimed he had eradicated through three days of national prayer.
‘They tell us he had a heart condition. It’s corona, ” opposition leader Tundu Lissu told the Kenya Television Network of Belgium, where he has been in exile since 2017, when he was shot 16 times in an attack accused of government agents.
“It’s poetic justice,” Lissu said of the death, saying, “President Magufuli defied the world in the fight against COVID-19.”
He defied science. He refused to take the basic precautions people around the world should take in the fight against COVID-19, ”he said.
“He relied on faith healers and herbal blends of dubious medical value… And what happened? He went down with COVID-19, ”Lissu insisted.
Magufuli, the son of a farmer, was first elected president in 2015 and served a second five-year term, winning in the 2020 elections that were neither free nor fair, according to the opposition and some rights groups.
When COVID-19 first hit Tanzania in March 2020, Magufuli urged people to go to churches and mosques to pray, saying that because “coronavirus is a devil”, “it is not in the body of Christ can sit ”.
He spoke out against social aloofness and masks, and questioned vaccines – instead promoting herbs and exercise as remedies.
Magufuli then announced in June that COVID-19 had been wiped out in Tanzania by three days of national prayer.
The country has not reported any data on confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths to African health authorities since April 2020, with insiders saying victims are buried at night to hide the number of deaths.
Health officials reporting problems with COVID-19 were fired, The Associated Press said.
Tanzania’s constitution calls on the vice president to succeed a president who dies in office, making Hassan the country’s first female president.
However, as of Thursday afternoon, officials had yet to announce plans to let Hassan in, Reuters said.
With pole wires