Nine months after Tanzania’s general elections, the regime is still using prosecution to try and neutralize those it claims to have defeated at the polls. On July 25, opposition party Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (CHADEMA) said 51 of its officials had been arrested and charged with terrorism in connection with demonstrations planned for earlier in the month. The protest did not materialize after authorities banned political rallies and deployed soldiers and police across major cities. On July 9, 130 people were detained for “inciting criminal acts.”
These charges are not an isolated crackdown; they are the political afterlife of a flawed October 2025 election. They reveal a legitimacy crisis that the election did not resolve, because the election itself was engineered to exclude meaningful competition. The purported 97.66% landslide may have conferred office, but it was not broadly accepted as free and fair. Less than a year later, the regime is defending that hollow “mandate” by prosecuting its opponents as terrorists.
From “Reform” to Repression
When Samia Suluhu became Tanzania’s president in March 2021, following the unexpected death of John Magufuli, many dared to hope for a new direction. Suluhu was perceived as moderate compared to Magufuli, and presented herself as a reformer eager to repair Tanzania’s reputation and reopen the political space that her autocratic predecessor had shut tight. She lifted bans on political rallies, reinstated media outlets, re-engaged the opposition — including a high-profile meeting with exiled opposition leader Tundu Lissu in Brussels — and promised political dialogue, security, and reconciliation. Suluhu also oversaw the release of opposition leader Freeman Mbowe, who had been imprisoned on bogus terrorism charges.
For a brief moment, it seemed Tanzania might turn a page.
However, intensified repressive tactics against the opposition and regime critics soon replaced the early dashing of reforms. Leading up to the 2025 general election, a “wave of terror” swept across Tanzania through arbitrary arrests and detention, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture, and lawfare targeting opposition members and supporters, regime critics, human rights defenders, journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens. What began as reforms rapidly evolved into a calculated display of control, and the climate of fear that defined rule under Suluhu’s predecessor was institutionalized anew.
At this point, there is little need to compare her to Magufuli; she has already stepped into his shoes.
On October 29, 2025, Tanzanians cast their votes in a political environment that systematically barred the mainstream opposition party, CHADEMA, from participating, silenced dissent, and bent legal rules in favor of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). The regime-controlled electoral body approved 17 presidential aspirants, including the incumbent and a slate of nominal contenders, to project an illusion of pluralism while concealing the absence of real competition. The ruling party choreographed the familiar rituals of democracy — campaigns, colorful party regalia and slogans, posters, speeches, and ballots — yet the performance masked a predetermined script.
Even as social media platforms like X remain banned in Tanzania, the incumbent regularly tweeted into the silence she imposed — a privilege of power in a nation where dissent is rationed and words cost freedom. Ultimately, she ran virtually unopposed.
Crackdown on Political Opposition
The machinery of power spared no effort to remove real challengers in the 2025 general election. Tundu Lissu, who had survived being shot 16 times during an assassination attempt in 2017, was arrested at a rally in Mbinga District, southern Tanzania, on April 9, 2025, after he called for electoral reforms ahead of the elections. The next day, he was charged with a bogus, non-bailable offense — treason, punishable by death — and with publishing false information. Once the leader of CHADEMA, the mainstream opposition party, was locked up, the party’s campaign collapsed. On April 12, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) disqualified CHADEMA. The party had refused to sign a new code of conduct until electoral reforms were guaranteed, and INEC retaliated by barring all its candidates.
Using the same playbook, INEC also went after Tanzania’s second largest opposition party, the Alliance for Change and Transparency – Wazalendo (ACT Wazalendo), barring it from contesting in the October polls. ACT Wazalendo’s presidential nominee, Luhaga Mpina, who had defected from the ruling party, was twice disqualified by the electoral commission despite an initial court ruling in his favor. Hopes for his reinstatement on the ballot were extinguished in October, when the High Court issued a final rejection of his constitutional challenge. In so doing, the trinity of the ruling party, the electoral commission, and the courts ensured that Suluhu would face only fringe parties, widely seen as CCM stooges, on the ballot.
As part of a wave against opposition officials, on October 22, CHADEMA Deputy Chairperson John Heche was arbitrarily arrested outside the courthouse during Tundu Lissu’s trial, and kept incommunicado for three days. He was charged, together with three other party leaders and three members, on trumped-up charges of organizing an unlawful demonstration. Their arrest was not an isolated incident, but part of a calculated and systematic strategy to cripple the opposition leadership ahead of the election, fracture its ranks, drain its energy, and warn others that the space for lawful opposition had been deliberately extinguished.
Civil Society and Media under Siege
The repression did not stop at silencing opposition leaders. It spread to the very institutions meant to hold power to account. The crackdown extended beyond politics and into every corner of civic life as the regime continued its crackdown on the media, imposing sweeping restrictions on free expression. Eight journalists had been arrested between August and September 2024, on flimsy pretexts, for covering an opposition protest. In the build-up to the 2025 election, the regime shut down leading radio stations and newspapers to cut off dissenting voices. In May 2025, officials blocked more than 80,000 online platforms in an extensive digital purge.
Social media platforms also experienced suppression with the banning of X and the suspension of popular sites like Jamii Forums, Tanzania’s leading online platform for civic debate, over false allegations of “misleading and insulting” content. By suspending Jamii Forums for 90 days before the election, the authorities all but eliminated meaningful public debate over the election. Thus, the last open space for Tanzanians to question, debate, or dream of a fair vote was suppressed.
Furthermore, at least 83 cases of enforced disappearances of activists, opposition supporters, and civil society figures were reported in August 2024. Among them was Humphrey Polepole, a former spokesperson for the ruling party and an ambassador turned critic. He was forcibly abducted from his house in Dar es Salaam in October 2025, which was later discovered to be soaked in blood, with signs of forced entry. Authorities have offered no credible investigation.
The crackdown also did not spare the pulpit. Outspoken religious leaders urging reforms found themselves harassed, threatened, or attacked. In April 2025, outspoken Catholic priest and government critic Father Charles Kitima was brutally attacked hours after calling for electoral reform. Two gunmen, posing as police officers, violently abducted televangelist Stephen Gumbo from his home in Arusha. Gumbo was dumped 200 kilometers away, having been badly injured, tortured, and brutalized by the assailants, who had accused him of defaming national leaders in his sermons.
In June 2025, through the regime-controlled civil society regulatory authority, the Glory of Christ Church, with more than 70,000 worshippers, was deregistered just days after its founder, Josephat Gwajima, publicly condemned state-sponsored abductions and disappearances. Institutions that were once regarded as safe spaces for community and moral guidance now find themselves under siege, with their voices stifled, their premises threatened, and their leaders targeted for speaking out.
A Preordained Election
The regime trampled on the freedom and fairness that form the foundation of any credible election. With all serious challengers neutralized, the outcome of the general election was never in doubt. President Suluhu Hassan was officially declared the winner with 97.66 percent of the vote, while her party claimed a majority in parliament. The official narrative hailed this as confirmation of popular support. But democracy is more than an organized voting day, and voting is more than a one-day event. Both are processes that breathe only when citizens stay engaged. The entire general election was a hollow exercise engineered to preordain results. It may have looked like an election on paper, but in reality, it was a performance of choice, with none truly existing. A coronation, in fact. To project legitimacy, the CCM regime orchestrated elections that looked democratic in form but hollow in substance.
By design and in practice, the general election of October 2025 offered only the illusion of choice. Using its available apparatus, the regime employed mechanisms of disqualification, prosecution, and censorship to preordain an outcome, and the aesthetics of campaigning and polling transformed that foregone conclusion into an illusion. Counting ballots does not, in itself, confer legitimacy. A functioning election requires competitive contestants. Citizens were presented with a ballot lacking real alternatives, because charismatic, nationally recognized options had been excluded from politics not through voters’ decisions at the polls, but through a regime-controlled electoral commission and judiciary.
Elections do not happen in a vacuum. They operate under laws and institutions that determine who may appear on a ballot. In Tanzania, the regime co-opted those frameworks to narrow competition, manipulating the very rules of the game to exclude any real challenge. The general election reflected Tanzania’s one-party history, but 2025 marked the first time since the introduction of multi-party democracy that the ruling party, CCM, has faced such minimal opposition.
Citizens have defiantly called the whole spectacle “maigizo” (drama) — not a real election. Indeed, the very measures the regime used to guarantee a landslide are sowing post-election instability and political implosion. In April this year, a government-appointed commission acknowledged that at least 518 people had died, more than 2,300 had been injured, more than 800 had sustained gunshot wounds, and 245 remained missing. Voters knew the outcome was predetermined, and sought alternative channels to challenge the election result. If anything, the choreographed election has exposed the system’s fear of genuine choice and its unwillingness to risk the verdict of a free people.
Ultimately, history will not be deceived. The October 2025 general election was a charade, an empty gesture, and an illusion of choice. People will remember not who won, but what was lost. Beneath the ruling party’s campaign and a choreographed election was a quiet funeral for democracy in this once-renowned East African nation. For all its theatre, Tanzania’s general election is a mirror that reflects a more profound truth: Legitimacy cannot be decreed, freedom cannot be managed, and no regime can script the will of its people.
The continued crackdown on opposition and dissidents, most recently in July’s terrorism charges, shows that 2025 did not settle Tanzania’s political contest. It merely drove that contest away from the ballot box and into prisons and courtrooms. The election is over, but Tanzania’s legitimacy crisis is not.
The Human Rights Foundation’s Tyranny Tracker classifies Tanzania as a fully authoritarian regime.
