Tanzanians are getting used to the strange accusations levelled at anyone who differs with the government on anything at all. There is a pattern that is becoming eerily familiar of people being charged with two main offences, “Treason” and “Terrorism.”
This phenomenon did not appear after the October 29 flare-up last year, when what had been planned as an election turned into an orgy of looting and killing; even before that dark episode in the history of the nation, the state had already shown a certain preference for those two charges.
Anyone following the Tanzania political scene will recall that former Chadema chair,Freeman Mbowe, was arrested on terrorism chargesin August 2021, under Samia’s presidency, and his successor as Chadema’s chair,Tundu Lissu, was arrested on treason chargesfour years later.
And now that preference for the two Ts has been put on steroids. Nearly everyone arrested for anything that can be perceived as being anti-government is slapped with one of those two Ts. It is hard to know whether it is the laziness of the Prosecutor’s office or a lack of imagination that has so limited the repertoire of their charges.
Most of the victims are, of course, members of the opposition Chadema party, which has consistently refused to recognise Samia Suluhu Hassan’s election in October, calling her government “illegitimate.” That stance alone has earned that party the distinction of being the most targeted group for those Ts, arrests and prosecutions.
There is a schizophrenic quality to the way the government has been treating Chadema’s public statements. A few weeks ago, a minister who grew up (politically) in Chadema’s ranks before he decamped and joined the ruling CCM, thought he had the power to order the police chief to stop Chadema’s public meetings , but was soon disabused of his erroneous notion by being told that he has no power to issue orders to the Inspector-General of Police. Since then it is not clear what the minister is doing, but Chadema continues with its meetings, with hard-hitting messages against Samia’s government.
As a result, arrests have been effected in several Tanzanian towns, and the charges are the same, the two Ts. The vice-chairman of Chadema, John Heche, who has been leading the party’s campaign since his chair, Tundu Lissu, was incarcerated more than a year ago on charges of treason, publicly wondered how a government slated to host the Afcon football tournament next year could at the same time be announcing to the world that the country is crawling with terrorists!
Such is the operation of the law of unintended consequences that the ministry in charge of sports will not see eye-to-eye with the minister in charge of police, and the two side of the mouth speak at variance, from both ends of the mouth.
Recently, our saga of the two Ts has been cranked a notch higher when a college lecturer in Dodoma was arrested after somebody reported that in one of his lectures he uttered words that amounted to “Treason,” and he is still in remand.
Now, this has provoked Issa Gulamhussein Shivji, emeritus professor of law and Tanzania’s foremost intellectual to cry foul. In an article published in Codesria Bulletin Online, Shivji condemned this gross violation of academic freedom, stating that whereas the lecturer was initially arrested for “inciting the public” the charge against him had evolved into a charge of “terrorism,” including an attempt to intimidate the public, a change of the accused’s intended crime. Shivji points to the fact that the accused stayed 21 days in custody, much longer than the 24 hours the police are allowed to keep a suspect before a court appearance.
In his article, Shivji states that there is apparently a template being followed by police in drafting the charges they slap on dissenting individuals, effectively intending to muzzle critics of the government, resorting to the least logical of charges being preferred.
While all this is going down, Samia’s CCM party is going through convulsions of its own, with matters not looking too good between herself and her vice-president, Emmanuel Nchimbi, whom she does not seem to like, and against whom accusations of disloyalty to the president have been uttered in public. A vice-president is a figure that is harder to jettison than the others, and a painstaking study of the constitution and a hard-nosed reading of the political tea-leaves will have to be undertaken before Nchimbi goes away. The VP comes through as running-mate to the president, and wanting to get rid of him could bring the whole edifice crumbling down.
Samia has to navigate all that while she contemplates the conditions imposed on the country by the Commonwealth of Nations regarding measures Tanzania must take to restore normalcy: releasing Lissu and other political prisoners; freeing up political spaces and open dialogues; relaxing restrictions on media spaces, including social media, looking for and/or accepting mediation capable of bringing the country back together again.
I will not say there is anything easy in that.
