Burundi Expels WHO Officials Weeks Before Its 2020 Election

In the second week of May 2020, with Burundi’s presidential election just days away, the government in Bujumbura ordered four World Health Organization officials out of the country. The order named the WHO’s Burundi country representative, Dr. Walter Kazadi Mulombo, along with field epidemiologist Jean-Pierre Mulunda Nkata, health sector coordinator Ruhana Mirindi Bisimwa, and a fourth official, Daniel Tarzy. All four were declared persona non grata and told to leave by Friday, May 15, giving them barely a week’s notice. Burundi’s foreign affairs ministry offered no public explanation for the expulsions, though diplomats and journalists covering the story linked the decision directly to Mulombo’s public concern over the lack of social distancing at campaign rallies that had begun on April 27, drawing large, tightly packed crowds despite the global pandemic.

The timing made the message hard to miss. Burundi’s ruling party, the CNDD-FDD, was in the closing stretch of a campaign to hand power to its chosen successor, Évariste Ndayishimiye, after incumbent president Pierre Nkurunziza declined to seek a further term. Nkurunziza’s government had spent months publicly minimizing the coronavirus, with the president himself declaring that Burundi was under divine protection and that God had “cleared the coronavirus from Burundi’s skies.” Mass rallies, packed churches, and open-air markets continued to operate through the campaign season even as neighboring countries imposed lockdowns, and the WHO’s own regional and country-level warnings about the risk of large gatherings were increasingly at odds with the government’s public posture. Removing Mulombo, the WHO’s most senior official in the country, eliminated an inconvenient voice just as the election, and the crowds it required, entered their final days.

Alongside the expulsions, the government imposed a rule that effectively neutralized outside election monitoring altogether: any international observer arriving in Burundi would be subject to a mandatory 14-day quarantine, framed publicly as a COVID-19 precaution. Because the quarantine period began upon arrival and ran past the May 20 vote itself, observers reaching the country from that point onward would be released from isolation only after the election had already concluded. Coupled with pandemic-related travel restrictions already limiting international movement, the practical effect was that Burundi held its election with almost no independent international observers present, leaving domestic monitors, including roughly 2,716 observers fielded by the Catholic bishops’ conference, as the primary source of independent reporting. Those observers later described witnessing intimidation and expulsion of opposition-aligned monitors on election day itself.

Ndayishimiye was declared the winner with just over 71 percent of the vote against opposition leader Agathon Rwasa’s roughly 25 percent, a result the opposition CNL party challenged unsuccessfully at Burundi’s Constitutional Court, citing ballot-stuffing and fraud allegations. Nkurunziza did not live to see his successor inaugurated. On June 8, 2020, less than three weeks after the election, the government announced he had died suddenly of a cardiac arrest at age 55. Independent Burundian media and international outlets reported that he had in fact contracted COVID-19, a claim the government never confirmed, in an ironic postscript to a campaign season built around denying the virus existed at all and expelling the health officials who said otherwise.