Flag on half mast and two weeks in mourning in Tanzania after the death of Head of State John Magufuli. It is the vice president who announced his death on Wednesday, March 17th. John Magufuli was 61 years old and had ruled Tanzania for five years. He was re-elected for another term in October last year. What consequences could his death have? Some answers with Thierry Vircoulon, Coordinator of Central and South Africa at the French Institute of International Relations.
RFI: John Magufuli officially underwent heart problems, but according to the opposition and social networks, he was infected with Covid-19. We know what John Magufuli died of?
Thierry Vircoulon: People probably know this, but we’m not sure. In any case, he had been missing for a few weeks, he no longer appeared in public, and in fact, the public rumor in Tanzania said that he had Covid.
This disease was also denied by the president and his government. Why have they minimized the disease and its existence so much?
President John Magufuli was part of the strange tendency of covidoseptics or coronaseptics – I do not know what the exact term is. This was part of a kind of general thinking of very anti-Western Tanzanian political culture. Therefore, everything mixed up a bit. It ranges from the fight against contraception, from contraceptive positions to the fact that beans could prevent, save the country from epidemics and especially coronavirus, as he had said several times. He had in fact declared that there was no epidemic in his country, that it was the prayer effort that had succeeded in this. So he was part of this whole trend where people questioned the virus and promoted herbal treatments or inhalations to fight this pandemic. In fact, President Nkurunziza apparently also died from Covid. This corona skepticism is very much present in some parts of Africa.
Are there other countries adopting the same strategy of negation? How do you explain, a year after the onset of the disease, that these theories still exist?
There are other countries. I was talking about Burundi … In Madagascar, this is also the case. We see governments that are in this position of denial that prohibit us from writing about the subject and even that we publish about the subject. In Tanzania, the Catholic Church had to leave the reserve to contradict the president and say that we can see that there are more and more masses to death and that coronavirus is still present in the country. How do you explain that? Honestly, it is surprising to see leaders putting themselves a little on the sidelines of the global fight against the pandemic by embracing this denial.
And how do Tanzanians – the general population – steer to these official announcements? Do they think so?
Some thought so at first. But little by little, due to the fact that people are getting sick, they see that there really is a problem and that the virus is there. However, we in East Africa are obviously not as affected by the pandemic as strong as in Europe. So there are not that many people dying, there is not a very high death rate due to the virus. Therefore, it maintains a certain skepticism, and unfortunately people take less precautions.
John Magufuli is mortal as he entered his second term. What memory does he leave to Tanzanians?
He will leave a bad memory. Because he actually came to power, as president in 2015, after a long political career since becoming deputy in the 1990s. Thereafter, he held various ministerial positions. But it was in 2015 that he was elected president, and from that moment there would be a real authoritarian operation of his regime, while Tanzania was considered a more or less democratic country, although the ruling party has been in power since independence. . But in the 2015 election, he was seriously challenged by the 40% opposition, which grew in strength. John Magufuli turned all this around with an authoritarian drive. He mouthed the opposition, he mouthed the press and he mouthed his party. He won against his rivals in his own party. He was re-elected in 2020 after an election that was completely fraudulent, where he himself went from 58 to 84% of the vote from 2015 to 2020, and where his party went from 73% of the seats in parliament. At 99%.
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