Pierre Nkurunziza
Pierre Nkurunziza came out of the bush as a Hutu rebel commander to lead Burundi's post-war peace, and ended by breaking it himself over a third term he had promised not to seek. He was a physical education teacher at the University of Burundi in 1993 when the country's first Hutu president was assassinated by Tutsi officers and the civil war began. He escaped a massacre at the university, went into the hills, and rose to lead the CNDD-FDD, the largest of the Hutu militias, through a decade of war that killed some three hundred thousand people. The Arusha accords and a ceasefire in 2003 brought him into government, and in 2005 the new parliament elected him president under a constitution that shared power between the ethnic groups and limited the presidency to two terms. He was a born-again Christian who played football with the villagers, a president who was seen planting trees and building schools with his hands, and his first years were quieter than the country had known in a generation. The second term, from 2010, was won unopposed after the opposition boycotted, and it hardened: journalists and human-rights lawyers were jailed or shot, and the ruling party's youth wing, the Imbonerakure, became a militia. In April 2015 he announced he would run again, arguing that his first term did not count because parliament and not the people had elected him. The capital rose, a coup failed in May while he was in Tanzania, and the repression that followed killed hundreds and drove four hundred thousand Burundians across the borders; the International Criminal Court opened an investigation and Burundi became the first state to withdraw from it. He won the third term in July 2015, and then, unexpectedly, kept his word about the fourth: he stood down in 2020 for a hand-picked successor, was given the title of Supreme Guide, and died of a heart attack in June, days after the election, at fifty-five. The government said heart attack; the country assumed the pandemic he had said God would protect Burundi from.
- Lived: 1964 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Burundian
- Roles: head_of_state, rebel_leader
