Cry the beloved Tanzania!!
For elections to be credible, the electoral procedures and processes need to be certain while the result or outcome needs to be uncertain.
In #Tanzania the opposite is true. Everyone knows the electoral outcome that the incumbent Mama Samia Suluhu Hassan will be announced winner after elections. However, no one knows the rules with certainty. Regrettably, violence, including use of lethal arms against unarmed civilians, torture, abductions, enforced disappearances, imprisonment and sometimes death, is assured.
Pan-Africanists regret this turnaround of Tanzania from being a leader of the Frontline States and paragon of liberation and freedom into a formidable leader of authoritarian practices. It is time for the leadership of Tanzania to self-introspect and stop becoming a net exporter of repressive practices in the region.
One would have expected Tanzania, as the de facto leader of the Frontline States, to defend the gains of the liberation struggle and to be a leader in democratic practices – especially with a woman president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, following the sudden demise of John Magufuli. But alas, Tanzania has projected the worst of practices that are undemocratic in post-independent African states.
The demise of democracy in Tanzania is best symbolised by the fact that this week, on 29 October 2025, Tanzania went into an election with no contest for the presidency. The main opposition party, Chadema, objected to elections without reforms, adopting the slogan "no reforms, no elections".
Unbelievably, for this stance, the opposition leader, human rights lawyer Tundu Lissu, was arrested, imprisoned and tried, charged with treason! Despite being acquitted, he remains in prison, in solitary confinement.
His trial was a façade. He was deprived of his right to legal representation. The trial was not fully accessible to the public. Trial observers and human rights activists were abducted, disappeared or deported when they tried to observe Lissu's trial to assess if it accorded with the right to a fair trial as provided for in the African Charter on Human and People's Rights and other international standards binding on Tanzania.
I express quick views about this decline in democracy in this article below
#Freeandfairelections
Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/g_VAtvgA