Tanzania is an east African country with a population of more than 70m that has been run by the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) since independence from Britain in 1961—the longest tenure of any party in Africa. Under Julius Nyerere, the country's founding father, CCM forced millions onto collective farms. After Nyerere stepped down in 1985, it oversaw Tanzania's turn to flawed but competitive democracy. Tanzania has achieved annual GDP growth of 6% on average for the past two decades—one of the highest rates on the continent—but with the population growing at nearly 3% a year, poverty remains stubbornly high. Its president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, took office after the death of her predecessor, John Magufuli, in 2021.
The electoral commission, whose members are picked by the president, barred Chadema, the main opposition party, from taking part in the October 29th 2025 election. Its leader, Tundu Lissu, was jailed and had called for a boycott: "no reforms, no election" was his slogan. The leader of Tanzania's second-biggest opposition party, ACT-Wazalendo, was also disqualified on procedural grounds.
The drive to eliminate competition was accompanied by repression unlike anything the country had seen since the return of multiparty politics in the 1990s. Scores of young people and opposition figures disappeared. On October 6th 2025 a former CCM bigwig who had recently spoken out against the regime was abducted from his home. Chadema's deputy chairman was arrested on October 22nd when he arrived at court to attend Lissu's trial.
Mrs Samia claimed 98% of the vote. An observer mission from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), typically a meek body that has rubber-stamped dodgy ballots elsewhere, said that "in most areas, voters could not express their democratic will."
After the results demonstrators rose up in the largest protests Tanzania has ever seen. Rather than make concessions, the CCM unleashed terror on an unprecedented scale. Church groups and NGOs are still compiling death tolls, made harder by alleged efforts to hide bodies and remove CCTV footage. Early estimates suggest many hundreds, and perhaps thousands, were killed—among the bloodiest elections in recent African history.
Mrs Samia's inauguration on November 3rd was moved from a stadium in Dar es Salaam to a military parade ground in Dodoma, the sleepy capital. The public was banned. Only four other African leaders turned up. The event was brought forward, reflecting how a ceremony meant to show the CCM's strength revealed instead how it was rattled. Protesters call Mrs Samia "Idi Amin Mama" after the late Ugandan dictator. There is speculation that she will be elbowed aside by party bigwigs and security forces who see her as a liability.
The EU has frozen aid. America, which worries that Christian churches are under threat and that American investors are being unfairly treated, is reviewing bilateral relations.
Kabanga, in the far west of Tanzania, is home to one of the world's prime untapped sources of nickel, a metal used in batteries for electric vehicles. Though geologists first discovered its potential 50 years ago, it is only now being developed as a mine under the majority ownership of Lifezone Metals, an American-listed firm. The site has attracted the attention of the American government, which is keen to invest in critical minerals, and of several Chinese companies. The project has been made more viable by improvements in surrounding infrastructure—grid connections, tarmacked roads and a new railway—funded at least in part by African financial institutions. Nickel from Kabanga would be exported from the port of Dar es Salaam, whose operations were taken over by DP World, a Dubai-based ports firm, in 2023.
Journalists have been arrested for "treason" while covering the blatantly rigged October 2025 election. Samia Suluhu Hassan took over in 2021 promising liberal reforms, but press conditions have deteriorated under her rule. See press freedom.
Tanzania's security forces have been accused of colluding with Kenya and Uganda to stifle dissent. In May 2025 Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan lawyer and journalist, was arrested in Tanzania while attending Lissu's trial, held incommunicado, tortured and raped, according to her account. A Kenyan activist who accompanied her was also abducted and tortured. Tanzania's police denied mistreating them. In January 2025 Maria Sarungi Tsehai, a Tanzanian democracy activist, was kidnapped by masked men on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya's capital; she is sure at least one of her abductors was Tanzanian.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.