The president of Tanzania, John Magufuli, has asked the population on Friday to pray to overcome the coronavirus pandemic and has stressed that the authorities will not impose a confinement, after denying on several occasions that there are cases in the African country.
“God is omnipotent. I ask the religious leaders to continue encouraging the prayers. We will win. We won last year and we will win this year,” he said.
“We will not impose confinement because we know that God exists and this nation is in God’s hands,” he added, according to the Tanzanian station Capital Radio.
Magufuli’s words came two days after the death of Zanzibar’s First Vice President and leader of the opposition ACT-Wazalendo party, Seif Sharif Hamad, about two weeks after being admitted to a Tanzanian hospital after testing positive for coronavirus.
Magufuli spoke out in January against vaccination, saying that “vaccines are dangerous.” “If the white man was able to create vaccines he should have found one for AIDS, for tuberculosis, for malaria, for cancer,” he said.
“Let’s not think that they love us very much. This country is rich. Africa is rich and everyone is envious of our vast wealth. We have to be very careful,” said the president, who in June 2020 said that the country had defeated the pandemic with the help of prayers to God.
The management of the pandemic by the Government of Tanzania has been criticized on numerous occasions due to the lack of restrictions and the absence of official data on infections and deaths since the beginning of May 2020.