|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Africa’s post-colonial promise of democratization that began in the 1980s and 1990s with the “second independence” struggles now confronts a defining and painful reckoning. The optimism that accompanied the collapse of single-party states, military regimes, and personalized dictatorships has been replaced by disillusionment, repression, and renewed authoritarian resilience. What began as a continent-wide wave of popular agitation for constitutional reforms, multiparty elections, and civic freedoms has, four decades later, been followed by fatigue, disarray, and reversal.
Across much of the continent, the liberalizing impulses of the late twentieth century have faltered. The promise of democracy has collided with the persistence of insecurity, the resurgence of militarism, and the corrosion of civic trust. In West Africa, the return of coups has underscored the fragility of military-civilian transitions. In the Sahel, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, new and old wars have devastated states, destroyed livelihoods, and eroded regional security architectures painstakingly built since the 1990s.
Nowhere is this contradiction between democratic form and authoritarian substance clearer than in the recent elections that have unfolded across the continent. Elections, once celebrated as the crowning achievement of Africa’s democratization and the ultimate test of popular sovereignty, have in many cases become hollow rituals that dramatize rather than diminish authoritarian rule. Across the continent, they are held regularly, accompanied by the familiar fanfare of campaigns, manifestos, and international observers, yet they seldom produce genuine accountability, renewal, or transformation. Instead, they increasingly reveal the widening gulf between the performance of democracy and its lived reality.
In Cameroon, for instance, the October 2025 presidential election descended into tragic farce. The country’s ninety-two-year-old ruler, Paul Biya, who has been in power for more than four decades, was once again declared the winner in an election marred by intimidation, ballot manipulation, and a climate of fear. His victory, celebrated by a shrinking elite but rejected by much of the citizenry, epitomized the endurance of personalized autocracy under the thin veil of constitutionalism.
In Malawi, in September 2025, another octogenarian, Peter Mutharika, returned to power in a contest deemed largely free and fair. Yet his victory offered little reason for celebration. His administration promised continuity rather than change, recycling the ineptitude, corruption, and complacency that had characterized both his previous term and that of his predecessor. The Malawian case shows that even procedurally legitimate elections cannot by themselves guarantee effective governance, institutional integrity, or economic progress.
In Côte d’Ivoire, President Alassane Ouattara’s landslide reelection in October 2025 similarly underscored the hollowness of electoral form without substantive competition. His fourth term was secured in an election boycotted by the opposition, marked by low turnout and widespread disillusionment. The exercise affirmed power rather than tested it and deepened the sense that the country’s political future remained hostage to a narrow, aging elite.
These examples illuminate the steady normalization of what scholars call “electoral authoritarianism,” regimes that maintain the façade of democracy through periodic elections but hollow out its substance through manipulation and exclusion. Courts and electoral commissions are captured, the press is constrained, and civic actors are silenced. In such hybrid systems, alternation of power becomes nearly impossible, political competition degenerates into spectacle, and citizens are reduced to spectators in a drama whose outcome is predetermined. The promise of democracy thus persists in form but perishes in substance, leaving a residue of cynicism, fatigue, and disillusion, engendering a profound crisis of faith in the political project itself.
Yet amid this continental retreat, a handful of countries have sustained more credible democratic trajectories. Botswana demonstrated this in October 2024, when the ruling party that had governed since independence in 1966 lost power, conceded defeat, and enabled a peaceful transition, a reaffirmation of the value of institutional maturity and political restraint. in the same year, Senegal and Ghana likewise offered evidence that institutional endurance and civic vigilance can hold back the authoritarian tide. Senegal’s democratic tradition has survived repeated tests through a resilient civil society and a judiciary willing to uphold constitutional limits. Ghana, meanwhile, remains a continental benchmark for competitive elections, peaceful transfers of power, and a vibrant media landscape. Still, even these apparent success stories face mounting pressures from economic hardship, corruption, and generational impatience, revealing that democracy’s survival demands constant renewal rather than complacent pride.
Against this continental backdrop, Tanzania stands as a revealing and deeply symbolic case study. Its experience illuminates both the resilience and the fragility of Africa’s democratic experiment. For decades, it appeared to defy the fate of its neighbors, maintaining relative stability, unity, and modest progress. Under Julius Nyerere, it embodied the moral high ground of Africa’s decolonization, a country guided by a coherent vision of self-reliance, equality, and solidarity. It was admired for its absence of ethnic fragmentation, its consistent foreign policy in support of liberation movements, and its leadership’s orderly transfer of power. Yet this very stability came at a cost. The ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has preserved continuity not by deepening democracy but by constraining it. What once seemed a strength has become a burden, as political control hardened and pluralism stagnated.
Today, Tanzania finds itself at a crossroads. It reflects both the achievements and contradictions of Africa’s democratization journey. The country’s political endurance and social cohesion contrast sharply with the democratic decay visible elsewhere, but its elections, like those across much of the continent, increasingly illustrate the tension between legitimacy and control, aspiration and reality. In this sense, Tanzania mirrors Africa’s wider predicament: a continent in which democratic institutions have survived in name but often failed in substance, where the rhetoric of reform persists even as the practice of repression returns.
From the Nyerere Era to Multiparty Hope
For a time, Tanzania appeared the “exception” in a region beset by ethnically charged conflict, civil war, and abusive long-term rule. Its relative calm and continuity stood in marked contrast to the turbulence engulfing much of East and Central Africa. While countries such as Zambia in 1991, Malawi in 1994, and Kenya in 2002 underwent transitions that were often tumultuous, accompanied by fierce contests for power, political violence, and volatile shifts in alliances, others, including Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, entrenched authoritarian rule, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo descended into recurrent conflict. In Mozambique, the 2024 general election reaffirmed the dominance of FRELIMO, in power since independence in 1974, amid widespread allegations of fraud and violent repression that left hundreds dead and drew condemnation from the European Union and church leaders.
Tanzania’s CCM, by contrast, managed to retain control while projecting an aura of national consensus. The party’s deep roots in the independence struggle, its disciplined organization, and its control over the bureaucracy, media, and rural networks enabled it to navigate the pressures of multiparty politics without fracturing its authority.
This stability became the cornerstone of Tanzania’s national identity. Many citizens and external observers saw the country as a model of peaceful coexistence and pragmatic governance, especially when compared with its neighbors. Unlike Kenya, where multiparty politics in the 1990s and 2000s unleashed waves of ethnic mobilization and violence, or Malawi and Zambia, where the fall of one-party systems led to cycles of instability and economic dislocation, Tanzania preserved an appearance of unity. The absence of large-scale ethnic conflict was often credited to Nyerere’s legacy of ujamaa socialism, which promoted a collective sense of citizenship over ethnic belonging and helped consolidate Kiswahili as a unifying national language.
This combination of linguistic cohesion, ideological continuity, and institutional discipline allowed Tanzania to move cautiously through the post–Cold War wave of liberalization without experiencing the ruptures that marked other transitions. Yet this moderation came at a price. Behind the façade of harmony, the CCM’s political dominance stifled pluralism, muted dissent, and blurred the boundaries between state and party. Opposition parties operated under tight constraints, and electoral outcomes rarely threatened the ruling establishment. The system’s stability, therefore, was less the product of robust democratic consolidation than of a carefully managed equilibrium that prioritized order over openness.
The Slide into Democratic Recession
However, the apparent strength of Tanzania’s democratic credentials masks deeper structural vulnerabilities: a dominant party, weak opposition, limited media pluralism, and over time a drift toward aggressive consolidation of power by the political class. The Chama Cha Mapinduzi, once the custodian of radical egalitarian ideals, gradually transformed into a vehicle of elite accumulation and political control, anchored less in Nyerere’s vision than in patronage, enrichment, and intolerance of dissent. The moral capital accumulated during the decolonization and post-independence era eroded as the party merged state and party interests into one instrument of dominance.
By the 2010s, Tanzania, like many other African countries, had entered a phase of democratic backsliding. Civic space shrank; opposition parties were marginalized; media and regulatory institutions were captured. As the civic-rights organization ARTICLE 19 in May 2025 warned: “The criminalization of political speech, especially calls for electoral reform, is a direct threat to democratic governance.”
That warning proved prescient. In the months preceding the October 2025 election, government crackdowns intensified. In April 2025, the main opposition party, CHADEMA (Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo, meaning “Party for Democracy and Progress”) was barred by the Independent National Elections Commission from contesting the upcoming presidential election. Their candidates faced disqualification, arrests, and harassment; rallies were banned, and disappearances of opponents increased. Thus, Tanzania’s experience mirrors the broader recession of democracy across the continent: form without substance, participation without power, elections without change.
The 2025 Election: A Rubicon Moment
In October 2025, Tanzania held its general election, an event that will prove decisive for the country’s political future. The incumbent president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, who ascended to office in 2021 after the death of President John Magufuli, initially inspired widespread optimism. Celebrated as the first female head of state in East Africa, she was hailed as a symbol of moderation and reform after the repressive legacy of the Magufuli era. In her early months, she reopened civic space, eased media restrictions, and allowed exiled opposition leaders to return, gestures that seemed to herald a new political dawn.
But the optimism did not last. As the 2025 elections approached, Hassan’s reformist impulses collided with the entrenched interests of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi and the fear that a rejuvenated opposition could erode its long-standing dominance. Pressured by senior party figures and wary of the opposition’s growing appeal, she gradually retreated from liberalization. The old adage that the taste of power is intoxicating and ultimately corrupting proved true once again, as the instincts of control eclipsed the promise of reform. Civic space contracted, critical journalists faced harassment, and opposition activity was curtailed. Her early moderation proved tactical rather than transformative, aimed at consolidating legitimacy after a period of authoritarian rule rather than altering the balance of power. By the time of the election, Tanzania had reverted to the familiar pattern of managed democracy that has long defined its politics.
Election day was marred by protests, internet shutdowns, curfews, and widespread allegations of excessive force by the security services. For many, the election marked a Rubicon moment. Tanzania may never be the same again. The veneer of procedural democracy has worn thin, revealing the coercive foundations of the political order. The mechanisms of competition have been hollowed out; the façade of democracy has been unmasked as its substance evaporates.
The immediate aftermath of the vote laid bare the depth of the national crisis. Protests erupted in several cities, including Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Arusha, and Zanzibar, as citizens poured into the streets to denounce what they called a stolen election. Demonstrators carried placards demanding uhuru wa kweli, or “true freedom,” and called for the reinstatement of the disqualified opposition parties. The security forces responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition.
Unconfirmed reports circulating among civil-society networks and international human-rights monitors indicate that as many as 700 people may have been killed during the early days of the unrest, though official figures remain far lower and are difficult to verify due to restricted access and ongoing information blackouts (Aljazeera October 31, 2025; BBC, October 31, 2025; 1,; The Guardian October 31, 2025; Reuters October 31, 2025).
What began as spontaneous street protests soon evolved into a broader confrontation between an increasingly assertive citizenry and a state apparatus determined to preserve control. The government imposed curfews in major urban areas and temporarily shut down social-media platforms, claiming the measures were necessary to restore order. Yet the restrictions only deepened public anger and reinforced perceptions of a regime losing its moral legitimacy. Throughout the electoral period civil-society groups documented widespread abuses, including arbitrary detentions, beatings, and the intimidation of medical personnel treating injured protesters.
For many young Tanzanians, this was their first direct encounter with the violent underside of the state, and it transformed disillusionment into defiance. Opposition leaders, though silenced within formal politics, found new audiences on encrypted platforms, where discussions of reform, accountability, and generational change proliferated.
The European Union and the United Nations expressed deep concern over the violence, urging the Tanzanian authorities to launch an independent investigation into allegations of electoral irregularities and the excessive use of force by security agencies. UN human rights officials called for accountability for victims and transparency in the government’s response. The European Union delegation in Dar es Salaam echoed these calls, warning that continued repression would jeopardize Tanzania’s international standing and relations with key development partners. In contrast, regional organizations including the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, and the East African Community remained conspicuously silent, issuing no formal condemnation or collective statement. Their inaction underscored the persistent reluctance of Africa’s multilateral bodies to hold member states accountable for democratic backsliding, even in moments of profound national crisis.
Why Tanzania Matters and What’s at Stake
Tanzania’s significance in the African democratic narrative is manifold. First, its geostrategic position and relative stability compared with its neighbors mean that democratic retrenchment here carries implications far beyond its borders. Second, its post-independence heritage, represented by Nyerere’s vision of unity, African socialism, and a polity less fractured by ethnicity, once gave it moral standing and comparative legitimacy. The erosion of that heritage signals that even the continent’s “model” countries are not immune to decay.
Third, and perhaps most crucially, Tanzania’s youth demographic embodies the fault line of Africa’s future. According to United Nations data, 44 percent of the population are below the age of fifteen and 19 percent are aged between fifteen and twenty-four. This restless generation, better educated, digitally connected, and politically conscious, has begun to challenge the legitimacy of aging regimes. Their demands for jobs, transparency, and dignity clash with the inertia of an entrenched elite sustained by patronage and control.
Yet Tanzania matters for another reason that extends beyond demographics or heritage. Its political evolution has been more gradual and deliberate than that of most of its regional peers. While several countries in Southern and East Africa experimented early with liberal reforms, often followed by reversals or stagnation, others consolidated enduring authoritarian systems or descended into conflict. Tanzania’s more measured pace of political change places it at a crossroads between these divergent paths—offering a chance to draw lessons from both the limitations of early democratizers and the failures of entrenched autocracies. This delayed trajectory may yet prove an advantage, allowing Tanzania to chart a course toward a democracy that is not merely procedural but genuinely transformative.
If the country’s institutions, civil society, and emergent youth movements can harness the current discontent into a coherent reform agenda, Tanzania could become a new benchmark for post-transition democratization in Africa, a third wave grounded in inclusivity, accountability, and social justice rather than elite negotiation alone. Its late entry into competitive politics may thus yet become an advantage, providing the historical distance and regional perspective to imagine a more resilient and substantive democratic future.
Toward a Resurgence? The Struggle Ahead
It would be premature to declare democracy in Tanzania irredeemable. Moments of closure can also seed renewal. History shows that repression often incubates resistance, and disillusionment can awaken civic imagination. The rising generation cannot be indefinitely contained by the political hierarchies of the past. Tanzania’s digital infrastructure, its exposure to reform movements in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia, and its vibrant youth culture all carry regenerative potential. The discontent that simmers across universities, civil-society spaces, and online platforms reflects not apathy but a deep yearning for voice and accountability. If channelled constructively, these energies could form the foundation of a new civic movement capable of redefining Tanzanian democracy for the twenty-first century.
Resurgence, however, requires more than periodic elections. It demands rebuilding institutions, including an electoral commission that is independent, media that are plural and protected, civic spaces where dissent and organization are possible, and above all a political economy that creates opportunity rather than patronage. It also calls for an honest reckoning with the failures of earlier transitions across the region. Tanzania’s delayed liberalization offers a vantage point to avoid the pitfalls of earlier African experiments with multipartyism, which too often substituted procedure for transformation. A third democratic awakening in Tanzania would therefore have to be rooted in substance, comprising social justice, inclusive growth, and civic empowerment, rather than in the formal rituals of voting alone.
If these forces align, Tanzania could move beyond symbolic democracy toward a substantive model that bridges legitimacy and development. Its democratic renewal would not only revitalize its own polity but could offer a template for a new phase of African democratization grounded in accountability, inclusion, and shared purpose. The path forward will not be easy, but the currents of change are unmistakable. Tanzania’s future, like that of the continent itself, will depend on whether its youthful majority can transform despair into determination and reclaim the promise of a democracy worthy of their dreams.
Conclusion: A Mirror of Africa’s Democratic Journey
Tanzania’s story encapsulates the broader trajectory of Africa’s democratic journey: the hope of the 1980s and 1990s, the drift into democratic recession, and now the fragile possibility of renewal. Its experience reflects both the endurance and the vulnerability of Africa’s experiment with self-rule; how liberation’s moral capital can erode, yet civic faith can be reborn under pressure.
Whether Tanzania transforms its crisis into renewal will depend on the courage of its youthful majority, who demand voice, opportunity, and justice. If they succeed, they will not only reshape their nation but also offer Africa a renewed vision of democracy rooted in inclusion, accountability, and hope.
–
This article was first published on PT Zeleza’s Newsletter.
