Tanzania's President Samia Suluhu Hassan holds a spear and a shield during her swearing-in ceremony in Dodoma, Tanzania, November 3, 2025.
Tanzania’s descent into State-driven blood-letting is the most significant case of State collapse since the post-election violence in Kenya in 2007. It also caught many by surprise: Tanzanian society is first class material for democracy. The people are moderate, they love to debate, they are nationalistic and love their country and do everything possible to protect its image. This patina of politeness and civility papered over widespread, simmering discontent over how the country is governed and how its rulers are chosen.
Tanzanians might be democrats, CCM is not. It is a dictatorial party just like the Chinese Communist Party, after which it is fashioned, and considers it its duty to choose leaders as matter of duty and right. Just like the CCP, CCM takes it as its responsibility to identify, train, nurture and deploy leaders as it sees fit and it doesn’t really consider the public to have a significant role in any of that business. It is also a violent party which has traditionally and routinely rigged elections – sometimes to as ridiculous extents as NRM in Uganda – and assassinated, jailed and harassed its political opponents.
The leader of the main opposition party and the man who would be president if CCM was a democratic force and conducted even a modestly free election, Mr Tundu Lissu, was shot 16 times in an assassination attempt. He is in prison, to clear the runway for President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s election for her first full term.
Sham election
Tanzania has lived for 60 years in this uncomfortable halfway house where the people think they live in a democracy, they have rights, they can choose leaders while, on the other hand, the ruling party which conducts itself as an overlord, accountable only to itself and wielding power with such a primitive brutality, always couched in polite, eloquent civility, that it is laughable anyone has entertained the fiction that power belongs to the people and that it is exercised on their behalf by the leaders they choose.
The truth is that power belongs to the party and is exercised on its behalf by the leaders it chooses to achieve the party visions and ends, including its perpetuation in power. The tension between the people’s misconceptions about who is ruling the roost and the party’s exercise of what it sees as its rightful authority is what led to the violence and the slaughter of innocents.
For the record, the just concluded Tanzanian general election was a joke even by African standards. All the observers, the SADC team and the African Union, have said they were a sham, they did not meet the standards for a free and fair election. The IDs of voters were not checked before they were allowed to vote, others were allowed to vote many times, others were allowed to outrightly stuff ballot boxes. In many places, voters did not show up at all.
The level of impunity was such that the authorities allowed a declaration of a 98 per cent victory margin, a joke in itself, even without the boycott, the chaos and the fact that the material conditions for 31 million people to have cast their ballots or the electoral authorities – with an enforced national power blackout and internet switched off – to have counted and tallied them in record time. It was impunity stretched to astounding extents.
Killings in Tanzania
The violence by the government was, and continues to be, extreme. In Kenya we have lived most of this century under the spectre of police violence. The Kenya Police was formed, not to protect us, but to protect the government from us. From the colonial days, our officers are trained to control riots by identifying the ring leaders and shooting them dead.
But, even in the context of such barbaric tactics, the police will not chase people who are running away and kill them, nor will they come hunting for people in their homes and kill them. There are two possible exceptions: the sufuria protests where people were killed in Mlolongo and Ahero and the Gen Z marches where people are said to have been killed in Githurai in their homes in atrocities that are yet to be investigated and the truth laid bare.
From the videos that I have seen and the material I have read on social media, a lot of the killing in Tanzania was of the latter category. It was not during confrontation between protesters and the police in the streets, it was the police, or killer gangs, hunting down the people in their homes or the injured in the hospitals and killing them. In other words, as in Kenya on those two occasions, this extreme violence is used to subdue, intimidate and dominate the people. The same intimidation was meted on election observers and they couldn’t wait to get out of Dodge city and write their damning reports.
The election in Tanzania has set the new low standard for the region: jail opponents, steal the election and slaughter the people into submission. And who is to stop anyone? The Americans are busy with their domestic issues. The Europeans have a war next door, an immigration crisis and economic jitters. For Tanzania, the solution is not just the resignation of President Hassan, its proper investigations and prosecution of those responsible for crimes against humanity and root and branch constitutional reforms which will give rise to a new political culture. For Uganda, just lie low and leave matters to God. For us in Kenya, we do what we do best: resist.
Mr Mathiu is NMG former Editorial Director. [email protected]
