How TB Joshua Influenced Tanzania’s Approach of covid-19

Tanzania’s Handling Of Coronavirus Highlights
President Magufuli’s Relationship With TB Joshua
The respected Pan-African magazine ‘The Africa
Report’ has written a detailed report on
Tanzania’s unique approach to the coronavirus
pandemic, citing the faith of its President John
Magufuli and his relationship with Nigerian Pastor
TB Joshua as a mitigating factor.
With just months to go to the end of his first term,
Magufuli is making global headlines as his
administration continues its unusual approach to
controlling COVID-19 within its borders.
On 3 May, Tanzania’s head of state triggered
shockwaves after he said fruits and inanimate
objects he had had secretly sent to the East
African nation’s main lab had come back positive
for COVID-19, casting doubt on the efficacy of
testing kits they had received from the World
Health Organisation (WHO).
While President Magufuli’s scientific background
makes him a rarity among his peers in the region,
the outspoken leader has clearly decided to rely
more on faith than science, insisting on not
closing down any churches or religious gatherings
or initiating a strict lockdown.
He was recently seen in pictures at a ‘prayer
mountain’, seeking God’s intervention for his
nation.
“Other than the chemistry doctorate and a decade
and a half spent serving in the cabinets of two of
his predecessors, there’s little in President John
Magufuli’s recent political and personal life that
suggests he would have reacted any differently to
a health crisis,” the article in The Africa Report
details.
“For example, the Tanzanian president is a
follower of popular Nigerian preacher T.B
Joshua,” the report explains, adding that Joshua
had controversially revealed the virus would stop
spreading in Wuhan, China from March 27th
2020.
Around the same time, President Magufuli asked
the nation to “use the three days from 17th to
19th April to pray to God to help us evade this
disease”.
“When he landed in Tanzania for Magufuli’s
inauguration ceremony in 2015, Joshua was
treated like royalty, and welcomed into the country
by the outgoing president, the incoming president,
and the head of opposition at the time,” the article
continues, revealing the extent of the Nigerian
Pastor’s relationship with the ‘Bulldozer’.
“Joshua is widely popular in certain parts of
Africa, including among southern African leaders,
and over in Latin America. On Magufuli’s election,
several news sites claimed it was the preacher
who had encouraged his presidential ambitions as
early as 2011,” it continued.
They also referenced the video on Emmanuel TV
in which Magufuli’s eldest son explained how “the
Nigerian preacher had healed him of a respiratory
disease in 2013 when modern medicine had
failed”.
Magufuli visited Joshua’s popular church in
Lagos several times prior to his ascendancy to
power and his wife Janeth was among the
thousands in attendance at the cleric’s crusade in
Nazareth, Israel in June 2019.
Whilst maintaining scepticism over the test-kits,
Magufuli is also one of the first African leaders to
order a consignment of the Madagascar-made
herbal treatment for coronavirus.
TB Joshua recently made headlines when pictures
surfaced of his time at an undisclosed ‘Prayer
Mountain’.
Upon his return, the cleric warned of impending
hardship that would accompany the aftermath of
COVID-19, advising citizens to “be ready to start
little, cut your coat according to your cloth and
endure temporary pain”.