NAIROBI, Kenya – As an unregistered number of Tanzanians succumbed to the coronavirus, the country’s president consistently minimized the pandemic, rejecting protective measures, mocking vaccines and saying that God had helped to eliminate the virus.
Now President John Magufuli’s unusually long absence from public opinion is fueling speculation that he himself is gravely ill with Covid-19 and is being treated abroad.
Rumors started to spin this week after Tanzania’s main opposition figure, Tundu Lissu, said Mr. Magufuli was infected with the virus and was being treated at a hospital in neighboring Kenya. In a text message, Lissu said he learned from “quite reliable sources” that the president was flown to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on Monday night, and admitted to Nairobi Hospital, one of the largest private facilities. from that country.
On Tuesday, Mr. Lissu demanded that authorities disclose the president’s whereabouts, who has not appeared in public for almost two weeks. On Wednesday, he said that Mr. Magufuli was transferred to a hospital in India to “avoid social media embarrassment” in the event of “the worst happen” in Kenya.
Mr. Magufuli did not attend a virtual summit for East African regional bloc leaders on February 27 and was represented by Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan.
“The most powerful man in Tanzania is now being deceived as an outlaw,” said Lissu in a Twitter post on Wednesday.
“His shattered COVID denial, his prayer madness for science has turned into a deadly boomerang,” he said in another post to Thursday.
Mr. Lissu’s Comments came after Tanzania’s human rights organization, Fichua. Tanzania said Mr. Magufuli had left the country to receive treatment in Kenya.
As speculation about his whereabouts and illness continued to abound on social media, Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper also reported that an “African leader” was admitted to Nairobi Hospital and cited diplomatic sources who said the leader was “on a respirator”.
While these and other rumors about the president’s health circulated, government officials defended President Magufuli and threatened to punish those who circulate conjectures about their health.
“The head of state is not a television anchor who had a program, but he didn’t show up,” Mwigulu Nchemba, Minister for Legal and Constitutional Affairs, said in a Twitter post. “The head of state is not the leader of the racing clubs that should be in the neighborhood every day.”
Minister of Information, Innocent Bashungwa alerted the public and the media that the use of “rumors” as official information violated the country’s media laws.
From At the beginning of the pandemic a year ago, Mr. Magufuli, 61, protested against masks and measures of social detachment, defended unproven remedies as cures and said the country had “absolutely ended” the virus through prayer. Popularly known as “The Bulldozer”, Magufuli also questioned the effectiveness of vaccines, arguing that, if those produced by the “white man” were effective, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria would have been eliminated.
Under the leadership of Magufuli, who started with his election in 2015, Tanzania, once a model of stability in the region, has fallen towards autocracy, with officials cracking down on the press, opposition figures and human rights groups. Magufuli won a second five-year term last October, in an election marked by accusations of fraud and widespread irregularities.
Lissu, who was the main opposition candidate against Magufuli, left the country for exile in Belgium, where he remains.
Since last April, Tanzania has not shared data on the coronavirus with the World Health Organization and has reported only 509 cases and 21 deaths from Covid-19. This lack of transparency was widely condemned, including by the Director-General of WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Last May, the head of Tanzania’s national laboratory was suspended after Mr. Magufuli questioned the effectiveness of the test kits provided by the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mr Magufuli said the kits returned positive results on samples taken secretly from a goat and a papaya fruit – claims that were rejected by the Africa CDC and WHO
While lawmakers warned of a wave of deaths attributed to pneumonia, health experts and foreign diplomats urged the government to take the pandemic seriously.
In January, the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s former capital and largest city, warned of a “significant increase” in Covid-19 cases. The Roman Catholic Church also asked the government to admit the truth of the virus and urged its faithful to avoid large meetings.
Tanzanian leaders like Seif Sharif Hamad, the first vice president of the semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar, Tanzania, died after contracting the coronavirus. Shortly after word spread that Hamad had succumbed to the virus last month, Finance Minister Philip Mpango appeared at a news conference in the Tanzanian capital, Dodoma, to deny rumors that he too had died. Mr. Mpango, however, was not particularly comforting when, flanked by unmasked doctors, he started breathing hard and coughing intermittently.
Facing the pressure, Mr. Magufuli finally changed course in late February and asked people to wear masks and followed expert advice.
But for Mr. Lissu, it was a little too late.
“It is a sad comment about your administration of our country that this has happened,” said Lissu in a post to Twitter about Mr. Magufuli’s infection, which he said was evidence “that prayers, vapor inhalations and other unproven herbal mixes that he advocates do not protect against the coronavirus!”