Tanzania Wants to Hang Tundu Lissu for Demanding Honest Elections

Friday, 6 November. The High Court in Dar es Salaam must decide whether a Tanzanian politician will die for asking for fair elections. Tundu Lissu, chairman of Chadema, the country's main opposition party, is accused of treason. For speaking about electoral reform, he faces the death penalty. This is what Samia Suluhu Hassan's regime calls a trial.

Let us ask what the word "treason" really means when it is used against an opponent who demands a level playing field. Betraying a people means selling it, starving it, or handing it over to violence. Tundu Lissu did none of those things. He organised a rally, he asked that the vote be credible, and he was arrested on 9 April 2025, the very next day. For more than eighteen months he has been rotting in detention while his judges wait for instructions from those in power.

Let us recall the context, because the regime would like us to forget it. As the general elections of October 2025 approached, the presidential candidates of the two main opposition parties were removed from the race. Tanzanians took to the streets. The repression answered, and it was deadly. Families buried young people killed during peaceful protests. The message from those in power was crystal clear: you may vote, provided you choose only the people the state has approved.

This trial does not look like a judicial inquiry. It looks like a punishment announced in advance. Hussein Khalid, director general of Vocal Africa, denounced a procedure with no foundation, which he says is designed to silence dissenting voices. When a state needs the death penalty to silence an opposition leader, it has already lost the battle of ideas. It has no arguments left, only prison bars.

What is at stake in Dar es Salaam goes far beyond the person of Tundu Lissu. The question is whether, in 2026, an opposition leader can still speak in East Africa without risking the noose. Tanzania has long been presented as a stable country, a showcase of national unity. That stability has a price: the imposed silence. When stability rests on locking up adversaries, it is only a facade hiding fear.

At the same moment, on the same continent, Congolese are facing another kind of disaster. On Wednesday 4 November, the World Health Organization announced that the Democratic Republic of Congo is experiencing "its worst cholera epidemic in decades," with more than 60,000 cases and 1,800 deaths since the beginning of the year. This crisis comes as Ebola has already claimed more than 5,300 lives in five months. Epidemics do not choose sides, but states do choose whom to protect.

Cholera strikes first where the state is absent: in North Kivu and South Kivu, where hospitals lack clean water, medicine and staff, and where the authority of Kinshasa has lost control since the M23 group occupied Goma and Bukavu. This group is not a spontaneous rebellion. Successive reports of the UN Group of Experts, the latest published under reference S/2025/446, document the presence of several thousand Rwandan RDF soldiers integrated into operations, with heavy equipment and command structures. When a foreign army occupies a Congolese province, it is not a humanitarian actor. It is an occupying army, and the cholera dead are also its victims.

We must say it without hesitation: Kigali's war against Congo is destroying the health system that was meant to fight these epidemics. Every closed hospital, every cut road, every blocked humanitarian convoy turns a curable disease into a death sentence. Mothers lose their children because there are no rehydration salts at the nearest hospital. Ebola survivors, according to Médecins Sans Frontières, are rejected by their families and villages after they recover. In a country at war, stigma becomes a second disease, one that eats away at trust and destroys what remains of the social fabric.

And what is the international community doing? It holds conferences, issues communiqués and waits. It declares its attachment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It repeats these words in Kinshasa, in Kigali and in Dar es Salaam. Yet it signs mining contracts, sells weapons, trains officers and looks away when these same principles are trampled. We are not fooled. When Washington, Paris or London invoke political freedom while buying the silence of regimes that imprison their opponents, Africans can see clearly the gap between the speech and the practice.

Yet there is another path, and Africa has already proven it. Botswana built its prosperity on solid institutions, regular elections and rigorous management of its resources. Mauritius built a parliamentary democracy where alternation of power is the rule, not the exception. Senegal experienced a peaceful transfer of power in 2024 after years of tension, proving that a people can remove those in power through the ballot box without tearing the nation apart. Ghana has done the same. These countries are not perfect, but they show that a democracy that keeps its promises attracts investment, protects property and strengthens trust.

These are the solutions we demand. First, the immediate and unconditional release of Tundu Lissu, and the dropping of all proceedings linked to his political activity. A judge who sentences an political opponent to death for speaking does not deliver justice: he betrays the Constitution he swore to serve. Second, an independent Tanzanian judiciary, appointed under transparent rules and protected from the influence of the head of state. Third, genuinely open elections, in which no serious candidate can be removed by decree or administrative manoeuvre.

We also call on the East African Community and SADC to break their diplomatic silence. These organisations have protocols on democracy and good governance. Let them apply them. The African Commission and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights must take up the case, even though Tanzania withdrew in 2019 the right of its citizens to bring cases directly before the Court. The silence of neighbours is complicity. And at the UN Security Council, we demand that Rwanda end its occupation of eastern Congo, that its troops withdraw, and that those responsible for war crimes be held to account.

To you, African readers, we pose the question that matters: how long will we accept that our leaders treat criticism as a crime and misery as a natural fact? Demand the release of Tundu Lissu, wherever you are, in your groups, your newspapers, your embassies. Hold your parliamentarians to account on freedom of expression and electoral justice. Support the journalists, lawyers and observers who document these abuses at risk to their lives. Demand that your governments publicly condemn arbitrary detention, support the hospitals of Congo, and refuse to endorse a war of aggression on our own continent.

Tanzania can still choose the path of dignity. Friday's verdict is an opportunity. It can acquit Tundu Lissu and open a real dialogue on electoral reform. Or it can confirm that fear has become its policy. Either way, Africa is watching, and Africa will remember.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL