The Tanzanian president, who denied 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 beloved president has passed away,” Samia Suluhu Hassan, vice president of the East African country, said on national television on Wednesday night, announcing that the flags would be raised at half-mast for 14 days.
Suluhu insisted that the leader died of heart failure, saying that “the president has had this disease for 10 years”.
Until the announcement of Magufuli’s death, the government of the authoritarian leader insisted that he was not ill – although he had not been seen in public since the end of February.
Even before his death, rival politicians insisted that the president had COVID-19, a disease that Magufuli claimed to have eradicated through three days of national prayer.
“They are telling us that he had heart disease. It is a crown, ”opposition leader Tundu Lissu told the Kenyan Television Network in Belgium, where he has been in exile since 2017, when he was shot 16 times in an attack he attributed to government officials.
“It is poetic justice,” said Lissu of the death, saying that “President Magufuli challenged the world in the fight against COVID-19.
“He challenged science. He refused to take the basic care that people around the world are being instructed to take in the fight against COVID-19, ”he said.
“He put his faith in religious healers and herbal mixtures of questionable medical value … And what happened? He fell with COVID-19, ”Lissu insisted.
Magufuli, the son of a farmer, was first elected to the presidency in 2015 and was serving a second five-year term expired in the 2020 elections that the opposition and some human rights groups said were neither free nor just.
When COVID-19 first reached 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 on the body of Christ”.
He spoke out against social detachment and masks, and questioned vaccines – instead, he promoted herbs and exercises as medicine.
Magufuli then announced in June that COVID-19 had been eradicated from Tanzania by three days of national prayer.
The country has not reported records of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths to African health officials since April 2020, with sources saying the victims are buried at night to hide the death toll.
Health workers who reported problems related to COVID-19 were fired, the Associated Press said.
Tanzania’s constitution requires the vice president to succeed a president who dies in office, which would make Hassan the country’s first female president.
However, on Thursday afternoon, officials have yet to announce plans to get Hassan to take office, Reuters said.
With Post Wires