When Samia Suluhu Hassan took office as Tanzania’s president in 2021, many in the east African country hailed what they hoped was a new dawn after the authoritarian and repressive rule of her predecessor John Magufuli.
The signs were positive in her first few years in office: Hassan ended bans on newspapers and political rallies, and legislation that kept pregnant girls and young mothers out of school, all policies that Magufuli had endorsed.
But opposition leaders say recent killings of officials, a spate of disappearances, and arrests of government critics and bans on opposition gatherings suggest the end of the reformist approach.
In late November the Chadema opposition party said three of its members were killed in incidents linked to local elections, which the governing Chama Cha Mapinduzi party won in a landslide. Chadema’s chair, Freeman Mbowe, said on X that one candidate was shot dead by police in Tanzania’s commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, as he attempted to stop “fake and invalid ballots” being delivered to a polling station.
Chadema said another candidate was shot dead at his home in Mkese in central Tanzania and that a party official was killed in a machete attack at his home in Tunduma near the border with Zambia.
On Monday 2 December, the ACT Wazalendo opposition party said the head of its youth wing had been found alive on a beach with serious injuries after an apparent abduction. The party claimed that Abdul Nondo was “kidnapped” on Sunday morning by individuals they believed were state security agents. Police said investigations were continuing to identify those responsible.
The deaths follow the killing in September of a member of the Chadema secretariat who was found beaten and with his face doused with acid. There is no evidence that Hassan has had any involvement in the deaths, which have been condemned by the government.
In an interview with the Guardian, Tundu Lissu, another Chadema leader, said that, with the benefit of hindsight, his party’s expectations about political freedoms under Hassan “were wildly, wildly unrealistic”.
Lissu, the party’s vice-chair, came second against Magufuli in the 2020 presidential election and is expected to take another stab at the presidency in polls slated for next year. Like Mbowe, he has been arrested twice in the past few months.
Lissu said the opposition was “naive” for thinking Hassan would bring change and they should have pressed harder to compel her to carry out comprehensive constitutional, legal and institutional reforms.
He said: “She inherited the state machinery which was created by Magufuli and which was responsible for the repression that we went through for six years. How could we have thought that, given all this baggage, this would be a reformist?”
An ardent campaigner for democracy, human rights and anti-corruption, Lissu was shot 16 times in an assassination attempt in 2017 that forced him to live largely in exile in Belgium for five years. No one has been charged with the attempt on Lissu’s life. In September, a former employee of the telecoms company Tigo told a London court that the firm secretly gave the Tanzanian government Lissu’s mobile phone data weeks before the shooting.
Hassan, who was vice-president under Magufuli and succeeded him after his death, made some reconciliatory moves with the stifled opposition in the months after she took office, dropping terrorism charges against Mbowe and releasing him after months in detention, and meeting Lissu in Brussels, where he was in exile. These steps gained her local and international support.
However, the events of the past few months have reignited fears of a return to intolerance. “She has done with a smile what Magufuli did with a snarl,” said Lissu. “He did it with relish. He had no pretence. Samia does the same things, but she does them with this motherly smile.”
Among the missing is Deusdedith Soka, a 30-year-old Chadema youth leader who disappeared in August after calling for a demonstration against abductions.
His uncle Didas Soka said the day Deusdedith disappeared, someone who identified herself as a police officer called him to ask him to go to a police station.
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Didas Soka said: “Deus was fighting for constitutional reform for a better country and for better governance systems. How can we have faith if he’s been disappeared when fighting for that?”
Some who disappeared have emerged alive, such as Edgar Mwakabela, a 27-year-old activist who was abducted in June and found abandoned four days later at a national park with gunshot wounds and signs of torture.
Mwakabela, popularly known as Sativa, said his abductors tortured him at a police station and questioned him about his role in organising a traders’ strike against what they deemed excessive taxes and fees.
Mwakabela said such incidents were meant to scare people before the presidential polls. “It’s part of letting people know she’s in charge and scaring those who’ll try to run against her in the election,” he said.
The Guardian has approached spokespeople for the police and the government for comment.
In response to a joint statement by western diplomatic missions in September condemning reports of violence and disappearances and deaths of political and human rights activists, Hassan warned against “meddling” in Tanzanian affairs. She said: “It is our own responsibility to find out why they are happening at this moment in time.”
Hassan’s party, CCM, has governed Tanzania since independence from Britain in 1961. The opposition and civil society have repeatedly called for reform of the constitution, which was created in favour of the authoritarian systems of a single-party state. But Hassan has said changes will take place after the presidential election.
Tito Magoti, a human rights lawyer, said Hassan missed a chance to build democratic institutions that would guard human rights and allow citizens to participate in government. “It was a missed opportunity that has ultimately made the regime look like a replica of what John Pombe [Magufuli] did,” he said.
Hassan first got into public office in 2000 when CCM nominated her for a special seat in Zanzibar’s house of representatives. As Magufuli’s former deputy and someone who had been brought up politically through the CCM system, her primary interest was “to ensure that CCM survives”, said Aikande Kwayu, a political analyst. “As elections are nearing, we’re seeing the real her, and we keep realising that whatever changes she was talking about were only cosmetic,” she said.
Despite recent developments, Lissu remains optimistic about change. “I remain hopeful that we will get the kind of Tanzania that we deserve,” he said. “However, I should add that it is not going to be easy. The Tanzanian regime has been in power without any interruption since independence 63 years ago. They are as entrenched as ‘entrenched’ can mean.”
