Samia Suluhu Hassan’s 97.6 per cent triumph in Tanzania’s election — won amid reports of over a thousand deaths — is an ominous signal of democratic collapse in one of the East African Community’s founding members and moral anchors.
For decades, Tanzania has been the region’s moderating conscience — the country that chose diplomacy over brinkmanship, and mediation over belligerence. Julius Nyerere’s moral clarity, his insistence that power must serve and not subdue, lent the Community its gravitas. When neighbours were convulsed by coups and chaos, Tanzania’s hand held steady.
A democratic breakdown now undercuts that heritage and strips the EAC of its only relatively neutral voice in moments of crisis.
The EAC Treaty speaks the language of democracy, good governance, and the rule of law. Yet when one of its largest members turns away from those ideals, the silence of its partners speaks volumes. Uganda’s managed elections, Kenya’s extra-legal power games, and Burundi’s repressive continuity all find comfort in Tanzania’s retreat. When violation goes unpunished, imitation becomes policy.
The dream of integration — of one people, one destiny — only makes sense if it rests on shared freedoms. Strip that away and the Community is reduced to a customs union with delusions of grandeur. As flags flutter in Arusha, without democracy, the EAC’s federation project becomes a hollow ritual.
Tanzania did not arrive at this point overnight. The Tanzania Elections Watch report, Neither Free nor Fair, described the 2020 election as a “non-election” — a carefully choreographed performance of power, staged by a state that had stopped pretending to believe in democratic ritual. It was not merely flawed or stolen. It was an administrative event designed to cancel the very idea of an election and deliver a predetermined outcome. That script has been perfected for this year’s vote.
John Magufuli’s genius in the 2020 election was his bluntness: he promised to extinguish the opposition — and he did. The toll on the population was heavy. People were killed, arrested, tortured, or disappeared. Yet citizens still turned up at meetings, still whispered about freedom, and still found ways to resist. Magufuli did not invent repression; he stripped it of ceremony.
Nyerere’s one-party State had already normalised coercion in the name of unity. Ujamaa’s promise of equality was enforced through compulsory villagisation and political conformity. The brutality of 2020 was therefore not a rupture but a continuation — polished, digitised, and justified as efficiency.
Samia Suluhu Hassan inherited Magufuli’s machinery — and his ghosts. She has been unable, or unwilling, to disentangle Tanzania from its authoritarian habits, falling back to type.
In the days ahead, Suluhu faces three paths. She can consolidate control within Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), keeping the State machinery intact while offering token reforms to appease donors and soften criticism. That will deliver a controlled equilibrium — steady on the surface but brittle underneath.
Or she can use her second term as a reset moment, beginning a gradual but deliberate opening of political space: reviving the stalled constitutional review, pushing electoral and judicial reforms, and allowing independent media and civil society to breathe again. Working with opposition and civic groups, she could restore Tanzania’s legitimacy and reputation as East Africa’s democratic exemplar.
A third path is the tightening of the authoritarian grip. That would sharpen civic defiance, risking internal fractures between the military and the political elite — or provoke an uncontrollable uprising. In such a scenario, the system either collapses under its contradictions or rebrands itself under yet another ‘reformer’.
Tanzania’s crisis poses an existential question to the East African Community: does it stand for governments or for citizens? Is integration about economies or values, regimes or peoples?
The EAC has long sold itself as the kernel of an African federation — a community transcending colonial frontiers through shared values and markets. Tanzania’s democratic collapse exposes that fiction. The bloc can no longer claim to incubate democratic norms; it has become a mirror of its members’ domestic insecurities, characterised by cross-border abductions and the detention of activists.
Without Tanzania’s stabilising influence — and with Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda each in governance flux — the bloc risks degenerating into a confederacy of regimes bound by trade and convenience, and not by shared political norms.
The EAC’s democratic clause is comatose; its institutions hollowed out like those of the African Union before it. Integration proceeds on authoritarian logic: elite-to-elite compacts, not people-centred progress.
A politically unstable Tanzania — riven by protests, repression, or paralysis — would reverberate across the region. Yet the courage East Africans have shown in challenging rigged elections is also knitting new forms of cross-border solidarity. Civil society, journalists, and citizens are forging a modern Pan-Africanism born not of governments, but of people confronting power. This may yet be the region’s last insurance policy — the stubborn hope of its citizens. If the state collapses inward, the people must look outward to each other for salvation.
The writer is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected]
