Tanzania’s populist President John Magufuli has died at 61
President John Magufuli of Tanzania, a prominent COVID-19 skeptic in Africa whose populist rule often cast his East African country in a harsh international spotlight, has died. He was 61 years old.
Magufuli’s death was announced Wednesday by Vice President Samia Suluhu, who said the president died of heart failure.
“Our beloved president passed on at 6 p.m. this evening,” said Suluhu on national television. “All flags will be flown at half-mast for 14 days. It is sad news. The president has had this illness for the past 10 years.”
The vice president said that Magufuli died at a hospital in Dar es Salaam, the Indian Ocean port that is Tanzania’s largest city.
Although the vice president said the cause of Magufuli’s death was heart failure, opposition politicians earlier alleged that he was sick from COVID-19.
Magufuli had not been seen in public since the end of February, and top government officials had denied that he was in ill health even as rumors swirled online that he was sick and possibly incapacitated from illness.
Magufuli was one of Africa’s most prominent deniers of COVID-19. He had said last year that Tanzania had eradicated the disease through three days of national prayer. Tanzania has not reported its COVID-19 tallies of confirmed cases and deaths to African health authorities since April 2020.
But the number of deaths of people experiencing breathing problems reportedly grew and earlier this month the U.S. Embassy warned of a significant increase in the number of COVID-19 cases in Tanzania since January. Days later, the presidency announced the death of John Kijazi, Magufuli’s chief secretary. Soon after the death was announced of the vice president of the semi-autonomous island region of Zanzibar, whose political party had earlier reported that he had COVID-19.
Critics charged that Magufuli’s dismissal of the threat from COVID-19, as well as his refusal to lock down the country as others in the region had done, may have contributed to many unknown deaths.
It is hard to gauge how most Tanzanians regarded Magufuli’s COVID-19 skepticism,
in a country where he remained genuinely popular among many for his seemingly frank talk against corruption even as he curtailed political freedoms and increasingly asserted an authoritarian streak. Police arrested at least one man earlier this week who was accused of spreading false information about Magufuli’s health.
First elected to the presidency in 2015, Magufuli was serving a second fiveyear term won in 2020 elections that the opposition and some rights groups said were neither free nor fair. His main opponent in that race, Tundu Lissu, had to relocate to Belgium after the vote, fearing for his safety. Lissu, who was among the first to raise questions about the whereabouts of Magufuli after he went missing for several days, had been shot 16 times back in 2017, an attack he blamed on government agents because of his criticism of the president.
Magufuli had become so powerful by the start of the COVID-19 outbreak that he could deny the existence of a pandemic without incurring the criticism of his predecessor and other prominent people within Tanzania. In early 2021, amid speculation that Magufuli would seek an unconstitutional third term when his mandate expired in 2025, his ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party was compelled to deny it could happen.
John Pombe Magufuli was born Oct. 29, 1959, in the rural area of Chato in the country’s northwest. The son of a subsistence farmer, he tended his father’s cattle but was a good student, seeing classroom studies as a way out of poverty.
Magufuli earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and chemistry at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1988. Much later, in 2009, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from the same university.
For years, he was a secondary school teacher and then a chemist with a farmers cooperative union before entering politics as a lawmaker representing Chato in the National Assembly. The legislative role was a springboard to a career in national politics, and he served in several Cabinet positions, notably as the hardworking public works minister nicknamed “the bulldozer” in the administration of predecessor Jakaya Kikwete.
A reputation as an incorruptible man was widely seen as one reason for his selection as the new leader of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the party that had dominated Tanzania since independence but whose popularity was declining in large part because of allegations of rampant corruption.
In 2015, the newly elected Magufuli made news on his first day in office. He showed up unannounced in the morning at the Ministry of Finance offices to see how many officials had come to work on time. That week, he also banned unnecessary trips by government officials as an austerity measure. He soon canceled Independence Day celebrations and said the funds budgeted for the event would be used to improve roads and infrastructure in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital. Magufuli also fired a number of top government officials in his anti-corruption crusade.
At least in the early days
of his presidency, Magufuli was seen as the leader Tanzania needed. He was widely admired by Tanzanians but also by others in East Africa who, citing his tough stance against corruption, wished for a leader like him. But very quickly others saw signs of intolerance as Magufuli cracked down on dissenters and those who criticized his work methods.
In early 2016 Magufuli stopped live broadcasts of parliamentary debates in which the opposition criticized the government, and in July that year he banned political rallies.
Magufuli’s harsh rule was extended to the LBGT community, with his government preventing aid agencies from supporting same-sex groups to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Amnesty International criticized several bills supported by Magufuli and passed into laws as designed to “stifle all forms of dissent and effectively clamp down on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.”
But it was Magufuli’s denial of COVID-19 that brought him intense international attention.
Soon after the first case of the disease was confirmed in Tanzania in March 2020, Magufuli urged people to go to churches and mosques to pray. Magufuli, a devout Catholic, pronounced that “coronavirus is a devil ... and cannot sit in the body of Christ.” Then in April the country stopped cooperating with the international community regarding its COVID-19 caseload.
He said in June COVID-19 had been eradicated from Tanzania by three days of national prayer.