The curse of the African president strikes again. This time, its victim was Ghana’s John Atta Mills, who complained of pains on Monday last week and was dead by Tuesday afternoon. Mills was the latest in a disturbingly long line of African presidents to be unexpectedly and unceremoniously despatched to the Great Presidential Palace in Sky while still firmly ensconced in a real one.
Mills is the third this year alone. Before him was Malawi’s Bingu wa Mutharika, who had a heart attack in April after over-exerting himself in an illicit sexual encounter with a female MP (according to this scandalous report, which, as much as I want it to be true, does strain the definition of credibility).
And in January, Guinea-Bissau’s Malam Bacai Sanha succumbed in Paris after spending most of his two years in office in hospitals. Not Guinea Bissau hospitals, of course. As a rule, African presidents don’t leave themselves at the mercy of their own health systems, not even in Guinea Bissau, which has the continent’s best drug supplies (a fringe benefit of being a narco-state).
Go back just a little bit further and the list of dead sitting African presidents gets alarmingly longer. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi last year, although his circumstances were rather unusual (as, of course, was he). In 2010, it was Nigeria’s Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. In 2009, Omar Bongo of Gabon. In 2008, Zambia’s Levy Mwanawasa and Guinea’s Lansana Conté.
Maybe it’s a presidential thing. It’s a stressful job. But other continents aren’t affected in the same way. Since 2008, Africa has lost eight heads of state. There are only 54 states. That’s a presidential mortality rate of nearly 15%; slightly higher than the infant mortality rate of Sierra Leone, which is the second highest in the world. In other words, a baby in Sierra Leone has more chance of surviving its first five years than African presidents do of getting through a few terms in office.
Contrast this with other continents. In the same time period, there was just the one presidential fatality each from Asia (the Dear Leader from North Korea), Europe (Poland’s Lech Kaczy?ski, in a plane crash), and North America (David Thomson of Barbados, from cancer). South America’s leaders all somehow managed to keep themselves alive, an impressive feat especially considering Hugo Chavez’s increasingly shaky public appearances. Same for Australasia.
So what’s happening in Africa – why do our presidents keep dying on us?
