Credit: Allafrica.com
Being an African president is a risky business. It can be fatal. We’re already three down this year alone, and critically-ill Meles Zenawi looks like he’ll make it four. Other continents, by and large, seem to do a better job of hanging on to their leaders. SIMON ALLISON examines Africa’s strangely high presidential mortality rate.

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.
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