The COVID-denying president of Tanzania has died this week, calling on an opposition leader to call his death amid the “poetic justice” pandemic.
President John Magufuli was 61.
“Our beloved president has passed,” East African Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan said on national television late Wednesday when she announced that flags would be flown at half-mast for 14 days.
Suluhu insisted the leader had died of heart failure, saying “the president has had this disease for the past ten years.”
Until the announcement of Magufuli’s death, the government of the authoritarian leader insisted that he was not ill, even though 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 had been wiped out by three days of national prayer.
“They tell us he had heart disease. It is corona, ”opposition leader Tundu Lissu told the Kenyan television network from Belgium, where he had been in exile since 2017, when he was shot 16 times in an attack he blames on government agents.
“This is poetic justice,” Lissu said of the death, saying, “President Magufuli has challenged the world in the fight against COVID-19.”
“He defied science. “He has refused to take the basic precautions that people around the world are being told to take in the fight against COVID-19,” he said.
‘He placed his trust in faith healers and herbal concoctions 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 serves in the 2020 election a second term of five years that the opposition and some rights groups have not had free or fair.
When COVID-19 hit Tanzania for the first time in March 2020, Magufuli urged people to pray to churches and mosques, saying that ‘coronavirus is a devil’ that it ‘cannot sit in the body of Christ’.
He spoke out against social distances and masks and questioned vaccines – promoting herbs and exercise rather than drugs.
Magufuli then announced in June that COVID-19 had been exterminated from Tanzania through three days of national prayer.
The country has not reported any confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths to African health authorities since April 2020. Insiders say the victims are buried at night to hide the number of deaths.
Health officials who reported problems with COVID-19 have been fired, The Associated Press said.
According to Tanzania’s constitution, the vice president must succeed a president who dies in office, making Hassan the country’s first female president.
However, from Thursday afternoon, Reuters announced more plans to swear in Hassan.
With Post Wires