Tanzania president who denied COVID-19’s gravity
NAKURU, Kenya — 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.
Mr. 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 Ms. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Magufuli’s death was heart failure, opposition politicians had earlier alleged that the president was sick from COVID-19.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 confirmed COVID-19 cases or 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 COVID-19 cases in Tanzania since January. Days later, the presidency announced the death of John Kijazi, Mr. Magufuli’s chief secretary. Soon after, the vice president of the semi-autonomous island region of Zanzibar, whose political party had earlier reported that he had COVID- 19, was announced to have died too.
Critics charged that Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
First elected to the presidency in 2015, Mr. 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. Mr. Lissu, who was among the first to raise questions about the whereabouts of Mr. 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.
Mr. 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. Early this year, amid speculation that Mr. Magufuli would seek an unconstitutional third term in 2025, his ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party was compelled to deny such a thing could happen.
John Pombe Magufuli was born on 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. Mr. 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 Mr. 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. Mr. Magufuli also fired a number of top government officials in his anti-corruption crusade.
In early 2016, Mr. Magufuli stopped live broadcasts of parliamentary debates in which the opposition criticized the government, and in July of the same year, he banned political rallies.
Mr. Magufuli’s harsh rule was extended to the country’s 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Magufuli’s denial of COVID- 19 that brought him intense international attention. Mr. Magufuli claimed in June that COVID-19 had been eradicated from Tanzania by three days of national prayer. He criticized social distancing and mask-wearing and baselessly questioned the efficacy of vaccines.
However, people leaving Tanzania reported that intensive care units in hospitals were filling up with people with severe respiratory illness. Others said burials were being held at night to hide the numbers of deaths. Migrants from Tanzania were found to have COVID19. Government officials denied most of these accounts, and health officials who reported problems related to COVID-19 were fired.
Mr. Magufuli is survived by a wife and two children.