John Magufuli, Tanzania’s covid-denying president, dies aged 61
Many believe that the virus was to blameMar 18th 2021WHATEVER THE true cause, the death of John Magufuli, Tanzania’s president, will almost certainly not be listed among the country’s covid-19 statistics. That has nothing to do with the results of any tests for the virus that may have been performed in the weeks since he was last seen in public on February 27th. It has everything to do with Mr Magufuli’s policy of denying the existence of an illness that has ravaged Tanzania and the ranks of its government. Few doubt it has claimed the life of its president at the age of 61. His death from “heart complications” was announced on March 17th.Officially Tanzania, with nearly 60m people, has suffered just 509 cases of covid-19 and 21 deaths from it. Or, at least, that was the case almost a year ago, when the country stopped releasing official data. At the time Mr Magufuli said he did not trust his country’s statistics because the national laboratory was “releasing positive, positive, positive results”.Instead of urging Tanzanians to wear face-masks or keep their distance from each other, Mr Magufuli insisted that God had swept the virus from their country. Even as neighbouring ones began to vaccinate, Mr Magufuli instructed his officials to hold off on giving jabs because he doubted they would work.Nothing seemed to faze him, not even the mounting deaths—of Catholic priests and nuns, a former governor of the central bank, and the vice-president of Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous archipelago. In February Mr Magufuli ordered his ailing finance minister, Philip Mpango, out of his hospital bed and into a press conference. Between gasps for breath, Mr Mpango insisted he was in robust health. A few days later Mr Magufuli himself disappeared from view. Opposition leaders said he was taken in secret for treatment to neighbouring Kenya. He has been replaced by Samia Suluhu, the vice-president, a Zanzibari.Mr Magufuli will probably be remembered best for his covid denialism, but history should judge him as harshly for the damage he inflicted on Tanzania’s fledgling democracy. Though the country has been ruled since its formation in 1977 by a single party, known by its initials CCM, it has held multiparty elections since 1994 and had been moving steadily towards opening up its economy and its politics. Ahead of the presidential election in 2015 a deadlock between CCM’s main factions over its choice of candidate led them to pick an outsider who was nobody’s favourite: Mr Magufuli. Many in the party thought the man known as “the bulldozer” was slow-witted and pliable. “He was like Forrest Gump,” says a member of his cabinet.Yet almost immediately after winning the election, he revealed a steely authoritarianism. A leading opposition politician was shot in the sleepy capital, Dodoma. Activists and journalists began disappearing, while bodies began washing up on the shores of Coco Beach in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital. In elections last year Mr Magufuli claimed to have won 84% of the vote, up from 58% in 2015. Opposition candidates dismissed the result as rigged. His party won enough seats for Mr Magufuli to abolish term limits to cling to power beyond 2025, if he wished. Many Tanzanians worried that he might. Without him Tanzania has a chance of renewing its democracy—and of trying to fight back against the virus.