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CHRISTINE MUNGAI* [caption id="attachment_13551" align="alignleft" width="633"] Soldiers salute coffin with the body of Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi who died in 2012.There are some curious coincidences in the passage of African leaders.Photo PK/Flickr[/caption] THERE has been a wave of presidential demises in Africa over the past few years; since 2008, eleven African leaders have died in office, including this week’s death of Zambian president Michael Sata. 2012 was the worst, with four sitting African leaders dying in that year alone. By contrast, in that same time frame, just five heads of state or government have died in office in the rest of the world combined –Lech Kaczynski of Poland and David Thomson of Barbados in 2010, Kim Jong-Il of North Korea in 2011, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Zillur Rahman of Bangladesh last year. This article by the BBC tried to figure out why African leaders were dying with such alarming frequency, postulating that maybe African presidents were older than average, or that the life expectancy in Africa is generally low – 60 years or less, compared to the world average of 70 - so by the time a leader becomes president he is basically on his last leg. That poverty background One interesting explanation was that even though African presidents live in luxury compared to their fellow citizens, they are likely to have had a poor and disadvantaged childhood, which inevitably catches up with them as they grow older. Still, one good thing is that the old stereotype of African presidents clinging to power till they drop is becoming a rarity. Of the eleven recent deaths, just two were long-ruling autocratic types: Omar Bongo of Gabon, who died in 2009 after 41 years in office, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya who was killed in 2011 after ruling for 42 years. In fact, seven of the eleven leaders died after eight years or less, and four of them - Malam Bacai Sanhá of Guinea-Bissau, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua of Nigeria, John Atta Mills of Ghana and Zambia’s Sata – died after just three years in office. Is there any common thread among the presidents who have died so far? One obvious one is that African leaders tend to die away from home – a hospital bed in a rich Western country is usually where they take their last breath. Of the eleven, nine have died either away from home, or very shortly after returning home from getting medical treatment abroad, in what critics see as an indictment of the shambolic health care systems in most African countries, that leaders are content to side-step because they have the resources to go to “proper” hospitals anywhere in the world.
Country | Name of president | Year/ Place of death | Number of years in office |
Zambia | Levy Mwanawasa | 2008/ Paris | 6 |
Guinea | Lasana Conté | 2008/ Conakry* | 24 |
Guinea- Bissau | João Bernardo Vieira | 2009/ Bissau | 23 |
Gabon | Omar Bongo | 2009/ Barcelona | 41 |
Nigeria | Umaru Yar’Adua | 2010/ Abuja* | 3 |
Libya | Muammar Gaddafi | 2011/ Sirte | 42 |
Malawi | Bingu wa Mutharika | 2012/ Lilongwe* | 8 |
Guinea- Bissau | Malam Bacai Sanhá | 2012/ Paris | 3 |
Ghana | John Atta Mills | 2012/ Accra* | 3 |
Ethiopia | Meles Zenawi | 2012/ Brussels | 17 |
Zambia | Michael Sata | 2014/ London | 3 |