A prominent regime insider-turned-critic of Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan disappeared from his Dar es Salaam home this month, leaving only a pool of blood on the doorstep.
The country’s main opposition leader, Tundu Lissu, has been jailed and is facing treason charges that carry the death penalty.
Lissu’s Chadema party, the main opposition, has in effect been barred.
Dozens of other critics of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi party, Tanzania’s long-ruling behemoth, have either exiled themselves or vanished in a chilling spate of abductions blamed by human rights groups on state security services.
On October 29, when Tanzanians go to the polls, there will be little standing in the way of the bid by Suluhu Hassan — known to her supporters as “Mama Samia” — for a second term as president and of the CCM extending its seventh decade in power.
Observers fear that whatever gains in civil liberties have been made in the east African country, which abandoned a long-standing experiment with socialism in the 1990s, are fast eroding.
“They are using elections to legitimise authoritarian rule,” said a senior former member of the CCM and top Tanzanian official who asked not to be named. “The elections are a rubber stamp.”
The CCM has been in power since Tanzania gained independence from Britain in 1961. Unlike other African independence and liberation movements, it has ceded little ground since, even though one-party rule technically came to an end in 1992. The pace of political opening up in Tanzania has been slow even by regional standards.
But while elections have been marred by rigging and intimidation in the past, the CCM has retained a strong popular following, especially in rural areas.
Tanzania, which is one of Africa’s top gold producers and tourism destinations, has also sustained strong economic growth over the past two decades and is notable for the absence of ethnic strife that has plagued some of its neighbours.
But as elsewhere in Africa, demographic pressure is beginning to stretch the patience of the 68mn population. Social media has opened up debate among its restive younger generation, who have been incensed by recent allegations of high-level corruption.
Suluhu Hassan, in a recent post on X, welcomed the enthusiasm she said she had been greeted with on the campaign trail, calling it “proof that you have reflected and seen that only CCM can sustain the pace of development that you desire”.
But her government does not seem to be taking any chances. The run-up to the polls this month has been accompanied by an apparent intensification of widespread state repression, amid fears among human rights activists and regime opponents that the CCM will stop at nothing to retain its hegemony.
“It’s going to be ugly because they don’t feel like they have anyone stopping them,” said Maria Sarungi Tsehai, a prominent campaigner for political reform who was herself briefly abducted by armed assailants in neighbouring Kenya earlier this year. Her kidnappers manhandled her and attempted to unlock her phone during the ordeal, she said.
“Every time they cross a red line it gets worse and worse. But right now, there is no red line,” she said.
Suluhu Hassan, the former vice-president, assumed office when her predecessor John Magufuli, whose own rule marked a bruising return to repression, died in 2021. Magufuli, who had the nickname “the bulldozer”, was rumoured to have died of Covid, after becoming one of the pandemic’s most prominent sceptics on the continent.
Tanzania’s first female president won plaudits for opening the political space, consolidating a reputation as a moderate. This proved short lived.
Tsehai said she and a colleague, also now missing, had documented 200 “enforced disappearances” in the four years since Suluhu Hassan rose to power, 50 of them since June this year.
What marked out the latest alleged victim, Humphrey Polepole, was his insider credentials — a warning, human rights activists believe, of the regime’s intention to stamp out dissent even within its own ranks.
Polepole served as Secretary of Ideology and publicity to the CCM under Magafuli, later becoming a member of parliament and then a diplomat. He stood down from his post as ambassador to Cuba in September, saying that he could no longer serve a government that had “turned against its people”.
The Tanzanian police have said they are investigating his disappearance.
Earlier in the year, the authorities deported human rights activists, lawyers and politicians from Kenya who had come to observe the trial of opposition leader Lissu. Suluhu Hassan warned foreign activists at the time “not to come here to meddle”.
“They have already created chaos in their own country,” she said.
In an emotional press conference Boniface Mwangi, a Kenyan politician, said he and Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan human rights advocate — who was among those deported — were held for several days, sexually assaulted and tortured before being dumped back across the border.
The Tanzanian police described the allegations as “hearsay”.
Government officials did not respond to questions about Polepole or other disappearances. But in a statement last month, government spokesperson Gerson Msigwa said the abductions were a “major concern”.
“The government of Tanzania is committed to upholding human rights in the lead-up to the 2025 general elections and beyond, as it has always done,” he said.
Western donor countries have tiptoed around Suluhu Hassan’s government. One official acknowledged that things had got so tetchy that his country stuck to issues where it still holds some sway, such as climate change or women’s health.
Lissu, in court last week, said even the British had allowed observers at trials during colonial times. “We are doing more foolish things than the Europeans who ruled us here,” he cried out from the dock.
