NAIROBI, Kenya – As unsigned numbers of Tanzanians succumbed to the coronavirus, the country’s president has repeatedly downplayed the pandemic, rejected protection measures, mocked the vaccinations and said God had helped eliminate the virus.
Pres. John Magufuli’s extraordinarily long absence from public view raises the speculation that he himself is critically ill with Covid-19 and is being treated outside the country.
Rumors began to circulate this week after Tanzania’s leading opposition figure, Tundu Lissu, Magufuli said was infected with the virus and was treated in a hospital in neighboring Kenya. In a text message, Mr. Lissu said he had it “from fairly authoritative sources” that the president flew to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, on Monday night and was booked into Nairobi Hospital, one of the largest private facilities in the country.
On Tuesday, Mr. Lissu insisted authorities announce the location of the president, which 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 embarrassment on social media’ when ‘the worst in Kenya’ happened.
Mr. Magufuli did not attend a virtual summit for the leaders of the East African regional bloc on February 27 and was represented by Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan.
“The most powerful man in Tanzania is now being sneaked like a ban,” he said. Lissu said in a Twitter post on Wednesday.
“His COVID denial to shreds, his folly about prayer over science has turned into a deadly boomerang,” he said in another put on Thursday.
Mr. Lissu’s comments came to the Tanzanian human rights organization Fichua Tanzania said Mr. Magufuli left the country to receive treatment in Kenya.
As speculation about his place and illness continues on social media, the Daily Nation newspaper in Kenya also reported that an ‘African leader’ was admitted to Nairobi hospital and quoted diplomatic sources as saying that the leader ‘ was on a fan ‘.
While these and similar rumors about the president’s health circulated, government officials praised President Magufuli and threatened to punish those suspicions about his health.
“The head of state is not a television anchor who had a program but did not show up,” said Mwigulu Nchemba, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs. said in a Twitter post. “The head of state is not the leader of running clubs that have to be in the area every day.”
Minister of Information Innocent Bashungwa warned the public and the media that the use of “rumors” as official information violates the country’s media laws.
Of at the start of the pandemic a year ago, Mr. Magufuli, 61, opposed masks and social distance measures, advocating unproven drugs as drugs and saying the country had absolutely completed the prayer with the virus. Mr. Magufuli, popularly known as “The bulldozer”, is also questioning the effectiveness of vaccines and arguing that as those produced by “the white man”, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria would have been eliminated.
Led by mr. Magufuli, which began its election in 2015, slipped Tanzania, once an example of stability in the region, into autocracy, with the authorities cracking down on the press, opposition figures and rights groups. Mr. Magufuli won a second term of five years last October, in an election accused of widespread fraud and irregularities.
Mr. Lissu, who is the biggest opposition candidate against Mr. Magufuli was, left the country for exile in Belgium, where he lives.
Since April, Tanzania has not shared coronavirus data with the World Health Organization and has reported only 509 cases and 21 deaths due to Covid-19. This lack of transparency has been widely condemned, including by the director-general of the WHO, dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Last May, the head of the national laboratory in Tanzania was suspended after Mr. Magufuli questioned the effectiveness of test kits provided by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mr. Magufuli said the kits yielded positive results on samples secretly taken from a goat and a pawpaw fruit – allegations rejected by the Africa CDC and the WHO.
When lawmakers sounded the alarm over a spate of deaths attributed to pneumonia, health experts and foreign diplomats called on the government to take the pandemic seriously.
In January, the US embassy in Dar es Salaam, the former capital and largest city of Tanzania, warned of a ‘significant increase’ in Covid-19 cases. The Roman Catholic Church also called on the government to acknowledge the truth of the virus and urged its congregations to avoid large gatherings.
Tanzanian leaders like Seif Sharif Hamad, the first vice president of Tanzania’s semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar, have died after contracting the coronavirus. Shortly after the news spread that Mr. Hamad 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 was also dead. Mr. However, Mpango was not very reassuring when he started, flanked by doctors who were not masked, whistling and coughing appropriately.
Under pressure, Mr. Magufuli finally changed from the end of February and asked people to wear masks and take the advice of experts into account.
But for Mr. Lissu, it was too little too late.
“It’s a sad remark about his stewardship over our country that it came to this,” he said. Lissu said in a statement post on Twitter about the infection of mr. Magufuli, who he says is proof “that prayers, steam inhalations and other unproven herbal concoctions he has put forward are no protection against coronavirus!”