Samia Suluhu Hassan Won 98 Percent of the Vote by Locking Out Her Rivals

Ask a Tanzanian who lived through the days after October 29, 2025, what they remember, and watch what happens to their face. They will not talk about the ballot count. They will talk about the sound of gunfire in streets where children were walking home from school, the blackout that cut them off from their families, and the friend who was taken from his home and not seen again for weeks. A year later, the trauma has not faded. It has settled into ordinary life, into the way people lower their voices in a taxi and check who is standing behind them at a bank queue.

Samia Suluhu Hassan was declared the winner with 98 percent of the vote. Read that figure again. In a functioning democracy, a number like that would be a scandal that brought down the electoral commission. In Tanzania, it was presented as a mandate. It was produced after most of the opposition had been stripped from the ballot, its leaders disqualified, jailed, or silenced. You cannot win 98 percent in a contest where your serious challengers are not allowed to stand. You can only win a coronation.

The Evidence

Start with who was missing. The main opposition party, Chadema, was shut out of the race in its most important form, and its chairman, Tundu Lissu, was locked behind bars facing treason charges that many observers, including international human rights groups, regarded as political. A candidate who cannot campaign, cannot speak freely, and cannot be seen on state broadcasters is not a candidate. He is a prisoner with a party name.

When the people finally spoke, in the streets rather than at the ballot box, the state answered with force. Protests erupted across major cities in the days after the vote, and security forces responded with live ammunition, tear gas, and mass arrests. A nighttime curfew was imposed. Internet access was disrupted, a tactic that has become the favourite weapon of regimes that fear their own citizens. The ability to film a killing, to send a photograph to the outside world, to warn a neighbour, was deliberately taken away.

Casualty figures remain contested, and that dispute is itself a damning indictment. The opposition has put the death toll in the hundreds, while the government has offered far lower numbers and resisted independent verification. When a state refuses to count its dead, it is telling you something. It is saying that the lives lost were not worth the accounting. International bodies, including UN human rights officials, called for an independent and transparent investigation. Tanzania's response has been to demand that the story be closed.

Then came the quieter phase, which many Tanzanians say is more frightening than the gunfire. Government critics describe being picked up by unidentified men, held without charge, and released days later with bruises and silence. Others speak of being summoned, charged, and prosecuted in cases that seem designed to exhaust them financially and emotionally rather than to deliver justice. Fear does not need to kill everyone. It only needs to make enough people afraid to speak.

The Context

Tanzania was once held up as a model of African stability, the country of Julius Nyerere, of the Arusha Declaration, and of a long tradition of peaceful power transfers. That reputation was built on the fact that Tanzanians could vote, argue, and, in principle, change their government. October 2025 showed how fragile that inheritance became when it was not defended. It also showed a pattern that stretches across the continent: a leader who inherits power through a constitutional succession, then uses the machinery of the state to ensure that no one can ever challenge the succession again.

We must be honest that this is not only a Tanzanian story. Across Africa, incumbents have learned to hollow out elections from the inside. They disqualify rivals on technicalities, control the electoral commission, capture the courts, and present a landslide as proof of popularity. Meanwhile, foreign partners who lecture us about democracy in speeches are often the same ones who quietly keep the trade deals, security cooperation, and diplomatic courtesies flowing. The message this sends to every tyrant on the continent is simple: you can crush your people and still be invited to the summit.

The people who bleed in this arrangement are never the elites. They are the market women who lost their stalls during the unrest, the students whose education was interrupted, the families still waiting to learn where their sons were buried. The people who benefit are those who sit comfortably inside the system and count the votes that were never really in doubt.

The Solutions

Democracy is not a ceremony. It is a set of institutions that must be built, protected, and enforced. Tanzania needs an electoral commission whose members are chosen through a transparent, cross-party process and who answer to the courts rather than to the presidency. It needs candidate eligibility rules that cannot be weaponised to exclude opposition leaders. It needs an independent judiciary willing to rule against the state, and a police force trained to protect citizens rather than to terrorise them.

Africa already has proof that this works. Botswana has seen peaceful alternations of power, including the 2024 election that ended the long rule of the ruling party, with the outgoing government accepting defeat. Ghana transferred power through the ballot in 2024 after a contested campaign. Senegal in 2024 showed that citizens, courts, and civil society can force a leader back from the brink when he tries to manipulate the calendar. Mauritius has demonstrated that a country can maintain open markets, property rights, and competitive politics at the same time. These are not foreign inventions. They are African achievements, and they should be the standard we demand of every government on the continent.

Economic freedom belongs in this picture too. Investors, both domestic and foreign, flee arbitrary arrest and unpredictable courts. Property rights mean nothing if the state can seize a business after its owner criticises the government. A Tanzania that wants prosperity must guarantee the rule of law that makes prosperity possible.

The Call to Action

So here is what must happen, and no one should be allowed to pretend otherwise. The Tanzanian government must release political prisoners held on charges linked to the election and the protests, and it must allow an independent, credible investigation into every death, every disappearance, and every case of torture. Internet access must be guaranteed, and no future crisis may be used as an excuse to switch off a nation. The African Union must stop hiding behind diplomatic language and send a clear message that a coup by ballot is still a coup. Regional bodies in East Africa must put Tanzania's conduct on the agenda, not in the footnotes.

And you, reading this on your phone, have a role. Share the names of the detained. Ask your MP, your journalist, your church leader, and your university lecturer what they are doing about it. Demand that your own government stop treating authoritarian partners as allies of convenience. Tanzanians cannot win this fight alone, and they should not have to. The question is not whether Africa can be governed by consent. We have already proved it can. The question is whether we will accept anything less.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24