Tanzania’s President John Magufuli appears to be acknowledging the problem of COVID-19 in the country, after months of claiming the virus had been defeated through prayer and steam treatments. While not specifically naming the virus, Magufuli on Sunday urged Tanzanians to begin wearing face masks for “respiratory” illnesses that are becoming a problem.
It is almost a year since Magufuli declared his country to be free from COVID-19 and said prayer helped to defeat the virus.
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But on a Sunday church mass in the capital Dodoma, Magufuli urged citizens to take precautions including traditional remedies and wear face masks – but only locally made ones.
We should take health precautions as it was announced, Magufuli said. He said we should put God first, while searching for an alternative, in line with steam inhalation. He said that his own children got sick, some of his little ones got sick and they recovered. It’s all about putting God first, he said, adding that steam inhalation should not be ignored.
At the end of last week, Magufuli called on citizens for three days of prayer to defeat unnamed respiratory diseases amid warnings from the Catholic church, the U.S. embassy and others that Tanzania is seeing a deadly resurgence in coronavirus infections.
Tanzanians such as Baraka Kila found President’s remarks unsettling.
Kila says at first they were convinced that it really did not exist. But looking at social networks like Twitter and Facebook, various people were posting about deaths caused by a coronavirus and it was causing a lot of controversies and the government disagreed. To a large extent, he says, we must continue to believe that some of the deaths that occurred were caused by COVID-19. We are scared because when the president admits the existence of coronavirus, it means it has spread a lot, adds Kila.