Africa’s ‘Big Men’ and their mystery illnesses

31 Oct 2014

When dying Zambian President Michael Sata flew to London last week he was following a long line of African leaders who have sought emergency — and secret — medical treatment in foreign hospitals most of their citizens can only dream of.

With Ebola exposing the poor state of the continent’s healthcare systems, and mobile phones and social media undermining official attempts to control and suppress information, many Africans were unimpressed.

Medical tourism

After Sata’s death on Tuesday evening, websites lit up with angry comments about another ailing African head of state jumping on a plane rather than risking being patched up in one of his own hospitals.

“Sadly, his death has added to the long list of rich and influential Africans to die while on medical tourism in Europe and America,” a commentator called Striker wrote on the website of Nigerian newspaper Punch.

For those in Zambia, a vibrant and relatively stable nation of 13 million people that has recently enjoyed annual growth around seven per cent, the sense of hypocrisy is particularly acute.

Sata’s predecessor-but-one, Levy Mwanawasa, died in office in Paris six years ago after suffering a stroke in Egypt, and one of Sata’s many 2011 election promises was to improve public infrastructure, including healthcare.

“What if we had a situation where the children of our politicians were obliged to receive their care in Zambian hospitals?” Zambia Reports, an anti-government news website, asked in an editorial at the time.

“No doubt we would begin to see immediate improvements to the training, equipment, funding, and innovation of healthcare facilities throughout the country.”

With the exception of South Africa — home to top-notch hospitals and the world’s first human heart transplant in 1967 — few sub-Saharan governments are willing to let their leaders get much more than a cough sweet on home soil.

They are also loathe to tell their citizens, frequently playing down the seriousness of medical problems or denying them altogether — one reason for the “mystery” or “undisclosed illness” that claims so many of Africa’s ‘Big Men’.

Besides the health benefits, parking an ailing leader abroad far from prying eyes lets first families and the inner circle control the flow of vital information, an important weapon in the succession battles that inevitably follow in a continent of fragile democracies.