It is difficult to speak about October 29 without first acknowledging a deeper wound: the sense that something fundamental broke in the soul of the nation. A government can lose an election and recover. It can lose a policy battle and adjust.
But when a government loses its moral centre, when it becomes willing to harm the very people from whom it derives its power, something far more dangerous begins—the slow corrosion of trust, dignity, and belonging. Tanzania, a country long defined by its peace, awoke to a violence that neither fits our history nor reflects our aspirations.
Tanzania’s general election of October 29, 2025, was marked by unprecedented violence, which resulted in an unaccounted loss of life, the destruction of property, and a total disregard by the government for its citizens. Even the number of losses remains indeterminate.
The shared images tell of the dark acts of the state when it untethered us from the rest of the world. We struggled even to comprehend what had happened in our darkest hour.
Despite the loss of life, the winner was declared to have garnered 97.3 per cent of the vote, a resounding victory. But it is not clear against whom exactly, since the credible opposition did not participate in the election, and their apex leaders were all locked up months before the election.
A victory won with such margins is not a sign of democracy but rather a convergence towards a totalitarian state like North Korea. Indeed, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) has fostered a culture of political unanimity within itself, locally referred to as uchawa, failing to realise that this only serves to distance it from the truth.
The CCM regime is mortgaging the future to save itself in the present, but at what cost?
Even those in CCM who believe it is their birthright to rule ought to keep in mind the Kantian categorical imperative principle—“that one should only act according to a maxim that they can also will to become a universal law”—for in the long arc of history, the law’s delays are not always prejudicial to the cause of justice.
Tanzania can either focus on protecting what it is or focus on reflecting what it ought to be. The concern is whether it even has such aspirations.
Neutrality is complicity
The political class of the leading party has forgotten a vital lesson: that their unfeeling complacency, just as everywhere else, is repeatedly pilloried. At last, they will have to contend with the grim calculus of the friends-enemies dynamics of politics.
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Even the public, lulled with promises of peace and security, forgot a crucial lesson of 1 Thessalonians 5:3 and took for granted the promises of the political class, which seems to love the very idea of democracy but loves more the grip of the cold hands of ukase.
Those who have taken a neutral position in politics need to know that this also amounts to being complicit. For such a stance inadvertently serves to aid those with ill intentions to fulfil their ends.
Carl Schmitt, in his book Political Theology, speaks of the high points of politics as “moments in which the enemy is in concrete clarity, recognised as the enemy.” He further emphasises that because of the nature of politics (enemies-friends permanence contention), one cannot unilaterally escape from all politics.
The enemy is the one whose very presence forces us to confront the foundational question of human nature anew. And those who try to do so are merely suffering from the moment of supreme delusion.
Illusion of peace
Since we are reflective beings, we can all recall the sense of pride most of us had when the President was sworn in peacefully after the death of the late Dr John Magufuli. The ululation and hope bestowed upon the incoming president were evident.
However, the October 29 election has exposed the extent to which we have fallen prey to hysterical optimism. Nations do not collapse in a single night. They erode slowly—through forgotten principles, tolerated injustices, and leaders who mistake silence for stability.
October 29 was not merely a violent election; it was a mirror held up to us all, revealing what we have allowed to decay and what we must now rebuild.
It must be said plainly: the tragedy of October 29 was not born out of a passive or indifferent public. Since independence, mainland Tanzania has never witnessed such horror—never before have ordinary citizens taken to the streets in numbers large enough to risk their lives, their livelihoods, and their long-defended peace.
Tanzanians do not protest for spectacle. They are famously patient, restrained, and committed to social harmony. If they stepped into danger, it was because something broke beyond the limits of endurance.
Our brothers and sisters in Unguja and Pemba know this pain too well—for decades, they have faced electoral violence as a recurrent feature of political life. But for mainland Tanzania, this was the first time such brutality struck the heart of the republic.
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That mainland Tanzanians rose up is not evidence of recklessness, but of the depth of the injury. No people who have safeguarded peace for sixty-four years abandon it lightly.
When they marched, they did so not out of rebellion, but out of necessity and desperation—because the state had crossed a line that no society can accept without losing itself.
Their presence in the streets was not an act of provocation, but of preservation. It was the moment the governed reminded the governors that legitimacy flows upward from the people, not downward from power.
Institutional imperative
The current major crisis in our society is a crisis of legitimacy: people no longer trust or believe in anything. For instance, people used to believe in experts, but now that is not the case. The only credible solution to legitimacy is measurement. But even that, the CCM has banned.
There is no competition within the CCM itself, never mind competing against others. It is not that the government or the CCM is void of sane men and women, but they are all silent about the situation for fear of retribution. One may call it the death of political diversity.
Politicians, just as other humans, are not innately civil or just. CCM moral appeals ring hollow in many parts of Tanzania. The events of October 29 did not aid in mending that legacy but rather reinforced it.
Swahili have their saying, mficha maradhi, kifo humuumbua, he who hides a disease, death will expose him. The high points of preference falsification, as argued by Kuran in “Chameleon voters and public choice,” are the mode of operation of those insiders—the adoption of a praise and worship narrative is not inspired by credible love for the leader, but rather as a smokescreen to stay alive. They have dual views – private truths and public lies.
Even those who detested the ongoing maiming of democracy within CCM ranks have adopted the “institutional imperative”—just watch CCM members of all ranks mindlessly imitate one another in their practices in an effort to impress the apex.
Just as Chesterton observed, “Whenever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.”
After all, the advantages that the CCM currently enjoys are mainly prospective, and its main claim on our gratitude is based on the fact that the TAA founders of 1929 provided the precedents on which the TANU party in 1961 based its resistance against the caricature of German and British despotism.
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However, the current CCM is in self-denial of that fact and considers public dissent to be inspired by foreign elements and to have nothing to say about its political tyranny.
Yes, it is true that a political party’s objective is to seek and acquire power to rule, but that objective must be grounded on that party’s ability to earn public trust. And that trust is earned through fulfilling the pressing demands of the public with limited resources.
This fact is abstract to most CCM folks, who have cut the mooring strings to reality and have succumbed to the delusions that the public is inept of their doing.
The CCM aspires to be like the Communist Party of China (CCP); however, it lacks every characteristic of the CCP. The CCP hierarchy is full of engineers and highly technical people in their field.
The CCM is full of imbeciles, political opportunists, and old men of the zidumu fikira za mwenyekiti era. Such are the divergences. Chama cha Mapinduzi’s collapse of institutional memory and kicking out those who do not toe the party line only fast-tracks its collapse.
The aspiration for a competent polity in the modern day is also emphasised by Karp and Zamiska (2025) in The Technological Republic as central to the defence of the democratic project.
They highlight the fact that – “Even at the very days of the state, John Adams was more focused on steering the young republic away from unprofitable science, identifiable in its focus on objects of vain curiosity—towards more practical forms of inquiry.”
Yet the CCM’s moral rot, coupled with its long series of abdications, has exposed it to the same psychological pitfalls that have peppered the rest of the continent—parent political parties.
Culture of paternalism
We must add, we have a responsibility too as citizens. One of the most troubling expressions of this drift toward statism is our own language of paternalism. We have taken to calling the President Mama, as though she were a benevolent parent and we her wayward children.
But she is not our mother; she is a public office-holder, accountable to adult citizens, not a guardian licensed to scold us.
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The tone with which she often addresses the nation—anatupasha, anatushushua—is that of someone “telling off” dependants, not reporting to those whose taxes and labour sustain the state and her party.
Tanzanians are not children. They rise before dawn, work long hours, and underwrite, through their effort and their taxes, the very system that now dares to infantilise them.
It is time we retire the language of paternalism and recover the language of citizenship, of accountability and respect. And perhaps, if we do, our lives and our peace will be better protected as well.
Another lesson of ours is that many assumed that because the presidency was held by a woman—the exercise of power would be gentler, more humane, more restrained. But this is the oldest political illusion.
Power does not bend to the virtues we project onto the one who holds it. It corrupts men and women with equal speed, blinds Christians and Muslims with equal force, and tempts the principled and the unprincipled alike.
In the hands of those who do not fear accountability, power becomes a solvent of conscience, stripping away the very qualities people hoped gender, faith, or personality would preserve. For power respects no gender and no creed; it only respects the limits we place upon it.
Corruption is high
Is our society corrupt, one may ask? The answer is again a resounding yes. Looking at history, do a head count of security personnel around a political leader in the past. Fast forward to today and compare. Are the numbers high or low?
We bet the numbers are bigger now. Our theory is that in a highly corrupt society, corrupt leaders start fearing their own shadows and tend to crowd themselves with security.
On October 29, these folks shirked behind the bulwark they built to protect themselves and instructed the police to shoot to kill the citizens. It took 14 days for the state to reluctantly admit that it took a wrong turn on October 29, just as copious images and memorial services mounted.
To quote Henry Kissinger, “university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” The same can be said of the current violence in our politics.
READ MORE: Tanzania After October 29, 2025: Will Reconciliation Without Empathy Work?
In a free market, one would expect and embrace competition, but in the realm of single-party politics, fierce competition often signals the absence of freedom.
Hence, members compete vigorously for small sets of things, be it party positions, government appointments, and the like. But freedom consists in the ability not to compete, and the freedom to do other things that other people are not doing in different contexts.
It is also true that if one competes, one gets better at what they are competing in, invariably at the high cost of losing a broader perspective, and with such knowledge, we all need to reflect on the profligate competition of corruption in politics.
Words, just as ideas, have consequences (Weaver, 1948), especially when they are uttered by the leaders. For a society where the president’s pronouncement equates to something close to the law—“maelekezo ya rais ni maagizo”—every statement from such an office ought to be measured and timely.
For those who receive such statements, implement them as the law, without contestation or bearing of their consequences. Since scarcity is a powerful driver of price, there is also a price to pay when one fails to appreciate the primacy of ideas or words.
Yet, if we “seek the monument to our folly, look about you!” At this moment in time, we can all draw some lessons from Weaver.
The President’s address to Parliament lacked any poignant reflection on the corruption that marred election day. The victors of the day in suits cheered in jubilation by thumping the tables.
The minutes of silence observed to remember the fallen of October 29 appeared to be disingenuous. Even the aura of the men and women in suits signals no optimism; it feels more like slick packaging for the same old status quo.
The axis of power in Dodoma resembles brittle maples—symbolic at best, but far from the solid ground where national sanity might take root.
Moral authority collapses
The public trust in institutions has always been excessive. Tanzanians have long placed immense faith in church leaders, mosque leaders, traditional elders, and political figureheads. These were the voices people turned to in moments of uncertainty.
READ MORE: Tanzania After October 29, 2025: Reclaiming the Island of Peace
Yet on the darkest days—especially on October 29 —most of these institutions opted out of the crisis by going silent, not knowing that doing so is tantamount to being complicit. The society’s delegation of the political question to these institutions exposed them to an untimely danger they did not foresee.
We focused so much on Armageddon that we forgot the totalitarian one-man state.
The Tanzanian public on October 29 woke up to the dual cankers of our time: the total corruption of the Church and the utter lawlessness of the State. Sadly, the public is cultured in the Nyerere wisdom of the past—which, like the Sophists, believed in the omnipotence of speeches—and therefore remained blind to the sternness of politics.
Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) provides clarity on the principal task of the Church: “to teach the truth handed down to it and further deepen the revelation through its light.” He further warns that “ignorance and error are not virtues; however prevalent they might be. Errors of mind are not neutral and need clearly to be identified and counteracted.”
These are precisely the principles that both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the political leadership in Tanzania failed to uphold.
Yet the crisis was not limited to the Christian institutions alone. Certain Islamic organisations, too—including some of the very bodies Tanzanians once relied on for moral guidance—urged the youth to “go home,” “calm down,” or “leave politics alone,” chastising the youth, even as bodies filled our morgues and family members remained missing.
In moments when injustice demanded clarity, many adopted the language of the state rather than the language of conscience.
But both faith traditions are unambiguous. From the Islamic tradition, Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “Whoever sees an injustice, let him change it with his hand; if he cannot, then with his tongue; and if he cannot, then with his heart— and that is the weakest of faith.” (Sahih Muslim)
This hadith states plainly that silence in the face of wrongdoing is the weakest form of moral life. It does not ask religious leaders to incite violence. It asks them to name injustice as injustice.
And on the Christian side, Ratzinger’s admonition against error mirrors that same moral duty: truth must be spoken, even when it is inconvenient, even when it is dangerous.
But on October 29, too many religious institutions retreated instead of refusing propaganda, comforting families, or insisting that human life is sacred. Their silence deprived citizens of the moral shield they expected—and deserved.
The wheel of history tells us that faith and politics were once intertwined, and even after the formation of the modern state, the bonds retained similarities. Today, those ties often reinforce the ills of the superstructure rather than restrain it.
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As Mark Twain quipped, “history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The echoes of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler—the suppression of dissent, the machinery of intimidation, the manipulation of institutions—rhymed in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Arusha, and Mbeya.
And because cities are networks, the funerals went national.
The internet shutdown, the gagging of journalists, and the repression of information were mere renditions of the book-burnings described in Fahrenheit 451. As that novel warned: a culture that prohibits knowledge breeds totalitarianism.
TCRA officials proved to be poor students of both technology and history.
In the end, the crisis revealed something deeper and more painful: that our moral authorities—in churches, mosques, and traditional institutions—are no longer independent custodians of conscience, but often extensions of the political order.
And when moral authority collapses, the public stands alone before the state.
The judiciary is dead
In our previous article titled The Demise of Tanzania Judiciary, we cautioned about the danger ahead. The judiciary’s main function, among others, is to restrain the state when it gets out of line. However, it is currently subservient to the state and even aids the state in hurting the sovereign.
With the judiciary dead, the pseudo-experts under the garb of external splendour and a factitious code of honour failed to conceal their ingrained lust and cruelty and reckless contempt for the rights and feelings of all those who were not admitted within the charm of their circles.
Currently, if an aggrieved person appeals to the law, they might find that no counsel would venture to act for him/her, and that no one in the country would dare say a good word for a man or woman who is known to be out of favour in high quarters.
The dead hand of the judiciary is the root cause of Tanzania’s injustice ills.
The universities and other institutions of higher learning in Tanzania have sucked up to the state; the students, of course, rely on the state to finance their education, therefore remaining mute on state atrocities for fear of missing such privileges.
The intellectuals have long learned that standing up to the state engenders one’s prospect of a nice retirement as a board member or a state appointee.
Cognizant of such, they have learned to keep quiet or join the choir of praise and worship. The intellectual life atrophies when the “one who declares publicly”—declares that the ivory towers where he comes from are the dustbin. This is the talk of the painful decline of the aristocracy of the intellect!
One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.
Thus, there have been and will continue to be men and women who, after having submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle of authority, will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from its influence.
Consequently, they try to keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience. Such is the posture of much of our political elite.
State’s failure
Failure comes from failure to imagine failure. The cumulative turn of events which resulted in riots on election day were there to be seen by everyone, just not those in power.
Our political elite, untethered from the realities of daily life, unashamedly engaged in low-grade politics of buying political stooges at less than US$5 a day to silence those who echo opposing views online or on the ground, not knowing that legitimacy has no price.
Talk of political expediency and sowing a venal society. And even if it has, the stooge approach won’t equilibrate. Even the US$5 folks for hire are easily swayed by the whims of price change. Someone missed the lesson of The Prince on mercenaries’ disloyalties.
There is also a risk that after failing to contain violence, the state will turn to a scapegoat for the revolution. But it is worth remembering that a revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children.
Our view is that the state needs to return the swords to the rack and lean towards the lesson that there is no shame in learning from one’s enemies.
After all, the statement that the government contains violence carries a double meaning; one, it serves to protect the sovereign, and two, it can use violence against the same public. The latter is an orphan reality we are currently trying to reconcile with.
The worthy question is whether such violence was within the constitutional perimeters, or was it deployed to protect a certain group interest?
The cascading effect of unforced errors continued even after the election. The government made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions.
The first was the killing, then came the efforts to hide, followed by the efforts to deny, and lastly the search for a convenient scapegoat to affix the problems. The CCM apex does not want to consider the possibility of decadence, and those who try to highlight such are often met with incredulity and resentment or outright violence.
READ MORE: Post-Election Crackdown Deepens in Tanzania with More Arrests as Treason Charges Mount
The assertion that the protest was financed by foreign entities aims to divorce all other potential causes and therefore strains credulity.
Once the internet was restored, the torrent of images and videos from October 29 —showing the dead, the wounded, and the morgues filled beyond dignity—saturated the public consciousness.
Such evidence cannot be neutralised by official denials or intimidation; the pain, devastation, and anger it provoked are now rooted in our collective memory.
Forget the deaths
And even in the face of this grief, some politicians—even those in the highest offices—have urged us ‘not to care about the numbers,’ as if the dead were abstractions.
But these numbers that the citizens care for are the numbers of our people taken by the injustices of October 29. They are our brothers, sisters, neighbours, and friends.
It could have been us. It could have been you. To tell us not to care is to tell us we do not matter. Those of us alive are merely the lucky ones; others paid with their lives.
How dare anyone ask us to look away and not care? How did we get here? Is this truly Tanzania? Can this continue? How dare they do this to us?
To enumerate the loss of lives carries more value than a man’s own making, for those we can rebuild. However, human life is sacrosanct—we must protect and account for its loss, always.
Howard Marks reminds us that “good times lead to complacency, risk tolerance and carelessness,” but soon enough, just like the market, bad times expose the results of that carelessness, and again, just like bad investments, hollow plans by the government with no credible safety rails fail to hold in a hostile environment.
The overconfidence, self-assurance, and inattentiveness of the security apparatus gave a fertile soil that yielded violence that caused so much loss of life on October 29.
READ MORE: Tragic October 29: Tanzania’s Turning Point?
The growing populism at home is not a disease, but rather a symptom. Populism does not create grievances; it capitalises on those that have long been ignored.
Leadership too high
The political elite’s misreading of the risk in Tanzania is quite compelling. Let us show you how.
First, either intentionally or mistakenly, they fail to understand the nature of risk confronting us, namely that risk can either be “systemic,” about/affecting the system, or risk can be idiosyncratic, in that it does not say anything about the system.
The memes and self-assurance jokes projected to those who cried wolf reflect the insouciance of those in power: the risk is idiosyncratic and says nothing about them, and they are ready to meet it with sure equanimity.
But even a few in government aided in accentuating the risk by paying the so-called influencers to clash with the aggrieved public. Not realising that such an approach only serves to undermine the very idea of a nation, and when a nation loses its highest meaning or sense of mission, it degenerates into a meaningless and anarchic system.
With growing discontent among the masses, a few have set forth to use such conditions to promote identity politics. Uzanzibari, Ukristo, Uislamu, Utanganyika tribalism come forth.
Yes, tribalism is natural, but these are often manufactured and form the very essence of identity politics at home. But just as Goldberg (2018) argued, “identity politics may be a modern term, but it is an ancient idea. Embracing it is not a step forward but a retreat to the past.”
Yet, we do not expect a cordial welcome for highlighting our state of complacency and decay. On the contrary, these views are less welcome today, because the past 50 years of CCM ascendancy have produced rigid minds, which are highly unreceptive to unsettling thoughts and lack the humility needed for self-criticism.
A society which abandons its responsibility of identifying and managing risk will collapse. We all need to have a permanent analysis of what possible risks we are exposed to, or likely to be exposed to, and form strategies on how we are going to mitigate them.
Risk is one of the hardest problems one must keep in mind, so long as we are alive. Risk can be internal or external, but the management of it is central to our survival as a society.
Technology and public
Just as the saying goes, the government lags in technology adoption. For Tanzania, one can say the government loathes technology, and its effort to ban it tells the tale.
The technological dinosaurs within the state, failing to understand technology, spent so much time fighting it instead of learning how it works and leveraging it to address public grievances.
New technologies need new institutions, said Carlota Perez in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. The government’s effort to track down those it deems bad actors and silence them makes a fundamental error, as technology has a network effect behaviour (read The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson).
Such networks tend to form something called self-organising criticality (SOC), and once it reaches the critical points, there is no going back.
The state assumes that by removing one point in such a system, it can stop such a formation. But it doesn’t. Technology is a variance-amplifying institution; the State is a variance-dampening institution. And when the two clash, the superior one wins.
And we all saw which side proved superior on 29 October. Technology amplified voices that the State had long attempted to suppress.
Solidarity
Interestingly, it also amplified something the regime did not anticipate—unity. This vacuum of moral leadership, combined with a government that no longer hears its citizens, and self-mobilised activists and opposition leaders eager to weaponise anger, could easily have fractured the country. In many places, it would have.
In some countries, the divide is racial; in others, tribal. For us, it became Christian against Muslim, and Tanganyika against Zanzibar.
Then came the very ‘problematic’ youth, who this time also used the very technologies the State feared to reclaim identity as a force for cohesion rather than fracture—Christians adopting Islamic expressions, Muslim youth dancing to gospel music, and the term wakrislam circulating as a quiet declaration that we are one people, not rival enclaves.
Humour, creativity, and solidarity became the citizens’ antidote to hate. Where institutions failed, ordinary Tanzanians used technology to fill the moral vacuum.
We all know which one was victorious on October 29. The religious leaders and other guns for hire were greased to discourage the dissenters either by inducing the fear of God into them or by throwing colourful jests at them. Neither of those worked.
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The state, failing to understand technology, has brought us to Genesis 4:10. Interestingly, Mundie, Schmidt, and Kissinger in their book titled Genesis allude to the fact that “others might adopt the opposite view: a kind of humanity-centred subjectivism that sweepingly rejects the potential for machines to achieve any degree of objective truth and seeks to outlaw AI-enabled activity.”
The chasm between the technological understanding of the state and the public was evident, with the state forced to shut it down.
However, the state suffers from structural amnesia, that “when you have technological parity, but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.” October 29 was a revelation day!
Blame the foreigners
Having failed to silence the public by the barrel of the gun in the dark, the state decided to affix the blame for the carnage to foreign elements. However, the state has not laboured to provide the public with any evidence of such. At the very least, they deserve that, wouldn’t you agree?
The state needs to embrace the moral imperative of judging through evidence. One of our friends has previously cautioned that “the moral rot is inescapable if we are inconsiderate of the evidence when we judge.”
On a lighter note, David Deutsch (2011) offers a humorous way to distinguish truth from wizardry. He argues that whenever someone claims something ‘will continue’ without giving a hard-to-vary explanation for why it is true, you are not hearing knowledge—you are hearing wizardry.”
In Swahili, simply unadaganywa. If one tells you carrots have human rights because they share half of our genes, but not how the gene percentage confers rights, then that is also wizardry. Deusch warns that untestable and explanationless theories blight progress.
The ordeals of October 29 are the result of the state’s refusal to seek and use evidence. For the miscarriage of justice, more often than not is midwifed by the fault in the non-existence of evidence.
Humanity is a network, and technology complements it. Efforts to untether humanity from technology historically have failed. Tanzania won’t be the exception.
Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, in their book Abundance, contrast the technological competence of a Maasai on the Serengeti plains to that of past US presidents, and they conclude that the rapidly growing technologies will enable unimaginable gains. As such, that same technology today served to expose both the state’s technological incompetence and its dark deeds.
Economic cost
Since there is no such thing as a free lunch, the economy now must give in to the exigencies of our political incompetence.
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A few weeks earlier, the government’s inability to sort out the transport logistics in the biggest city in the country only showed that even with excess demand, if it is governed by the state, market failure is guaranteed.
This is not a truism—Japan, and probably the rest of Europe, have solved the logistics problem. It is worth noting that economics is logistics, and if one fails at it, they have no economy.
Just as argued by Jürgen Habermas, “a failure by the leaders to deliver on implied or explicit promises to the public has the potential to provoke a crisis of legitimacy for a government.”
The violence collapsed the little over-capacity infrastructure which was in place, leaving the public with a debt balance with no assets to show.
The government didn’t only fail to protect lives, it also failed to protect the economy, and sooner or later, the public will have to pay again for such failures from price spikes and debt burdens. With income expected to shrink, the debt burden is likely to be accentuated.
And the truth the state chooses to ignore, or take too lightly, is that it is the majority of the people who suffer.
Just as Carlo Cipolla warned, we need to guard against stupidity, for humanity’s most underestimated force is not malice or greed, but stupidity—the consistent capacity of people to harm themselves and others without gain.
Josh Wolfe also warned that the most dangerous people aren’t the villains seeking exploitation at others’ expense, but rather the ones blundering confidently into ruins, taking the economy down with them.
Back to economics, if one lives in a world of low or zero economic growth, politics becomes a zero-sum game. But one may ask, what happens when the zero-sum game is fierce, but the economic data suggests that the economy is growing?
Economic growth is rooted in a constitution, said Hayek. In The Constitution of Liberty, he uses the term ‘constitution’ to mean the basic principles and practices required for innovation and prosperity—not the shallow ‘katiba ni kitabu tuu!’ misreading we hear so often.
Our politicians are corrupt not simply because of personal failings, but because they do not believe in the conditions that make economic growth possible. Without growth, they scramble for a non-growing pie—and some are willing to kill for their slice.
Chinoy et al. (2025) discuss at length the zero-sum thinking phenomenon in US politics. Their findings map the recent events in Tanzanian politics.
It is very hard for the current regime to register the potential risk of secular economic decline, because for most of their life, they have enjoyed the upward trajectory of economic growth like the “trente glorieuses.”
Tanzania has come to treat stability and growth as a birthright, even when the historic message on both topics is unambiguous.
Just as argued by Keynes (1922), “very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which our country has lived for the last half a century.”
Economic growth won’t be a panacea for the regime’s ills, but the lack of it going forward is a sure precondition for the end of the regime.
The boon of commodities is volatile and often transient. The growing number of unemployed youth and inflationary pressures in property, education, and health care will be unbearable to many in our country. At a certain juncture, soon, we will have to face such realities.
We all need to recognise these realities and prepare to meet them, even though our temptation might be to recoil from this sort of grim calculus. The air of austerity is a more likely visitor to our shores.
The twin perils of inflation and recession won’t be an exaggeration to assume and prepare for. Again, it is worth remembering that the decadence of the ruling class will only be forgiven if they are capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.
Public not passive
Even the self-assurance of the state elite, closer to the election, that nothing will happen was predicated on the nirvana fallacies of the past—that we have been safe, and the public is passive in their doing.
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But did they ever consider that if the level of literacy is rising, but economic opportunities are not, how to contend with literate-unemployed youth? Or how the literacy rate affects political participation? Political consciousness?
That the more literate the population becomes, the more it demands—rights, accountability, and dignity.
The fruits of investment in education are elevated levels of literacy. Although the intention might not be to enable citizens to think for themselves, that has been its effect. These are unforeseen consequences of any initiative.
In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes, 1922), Keynes argued that Germany could repair its post-war collapse in productivity within a reasonable period—but only if the country mobilised its enterprise and organisation toward the task at hand.
Like Germany, Tanzania is endowed with an institutional memory of peace and a hard-working culture. Such should be the incentive and encouragement of the reconstruction project.
The buy-in of the 1976 projects of nation-building should be awakened anew! In doing so, let us remember the geographical privilege we find ourselves in. Besides, for Tanzania, nature has omitted none of the elements upon which a man can build up happiness.
Yet all these will amount to nothing, just as in other parts of the world, unless peace and stability are guaranteed, both locally and in our neighbourhood.
Peace is the ground under our feet—the soil from which prosperity grows. Without it, even the richest land yields nothing. Peace is not merely the absence of conflict; it is the foundation on which every other form of progress rests.
Tanzania was once a city on a hill for peace and stability in the region. We must work, deliberately and urgently, to rebuild that city.
That requires embracing free enterprise, protecting property rights, and upholding the rule of law—the essential ingredients of a society that aspires to genuine prosperity.
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It also demands that we accept the necessity of limited government. For no nation has ever achieved lasting freedom or growth under a state that overwhelms its citizens rather than empowers them.
If we are to rebuild, these commitments are non-negotiable. To ensure that future generations inherit a country more prosperous and more free than the one we found, we need both technological progress and sustained economic growth—and these flourish only where peace, liberty, and the rule of law are secure.
Democracy is dead
On October 29, as the death toll piled up, another death preceded it. Freedom of the press, information, expression, and the right to live met their ultimate death in Tanzanian society a month earlier. Although the nature of those earlier scourges was sporadic.
Even though the cracks of democracy’s demise became visible earlier, the good times of the past still gripped the minds of the public, and the possibility of loss receded from consciousness.
On October 15, one of us had a rare interview with Masoud Kipanya, a cartoonist and a barred journalist, to mull over Tanzania’s current affairs, spanning from education, the subject of resources, and individual urgency.
He told us the very reason why he decided to choose to do what he is currently doing is because he was banned from being a journalist since he lacks the right qualification, “not skills” but rather a qualification, which simply means a piece of paper the state can use to control one from what he can say or not say for fear of losing that freedom.
It is not new for the government to ban media houses it deems unlawful or not toeing to their propaganda.
But the silence of the fourth estate on October 29, when we needed it the most, was heartbreaking. Yet it was not an accident of history, but rather the consequence of our choice, especially in all of us being complicit and letting the rogue part of those in government kill the instruments of the judiciary, the media, and use the security apparatus to meet their own ends.
Just as Weaver (1948) warned, “the past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for.”
“That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not accompanied by a willingness to resist, and reject favours, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will no longer be found at all.”
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Yes, we must start a peace project, but even more, we must accelerate the search for economic growth. For Tanzania, economic growth is existential. It is a precondition for every other political goal we may have, including our very survival.
To quote Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber (1969) in The American Challenge book—“The degree of autonomy, prosperity, and social justice that a country aspires to depends upon its growth rate. A society enjoying rapid growth is free to define its own form of civilisation because it can establish its order of priorities. A stagnant society cannot really exercise the right of self-determination.”
Thus, the right of self-determination for Tanzania is predicated on its ability to build a strong economy, which will aid it in attaining the power to defend itself from both internal and external enemies.
To defend Tanzanian interests, we need both hard power strategies (a strong military, timely diplomatic response) and soft power (cultural norms, strong institutions, and markets). For neither is singly sufficient to secure our interests as a nation.
The future
Life must go on—as it must, yet we all owe it to begin the good work of purgation, with considerations of true contrition, while meditating on man’s last day, on God’s judgement of sinners, and man’s need of amendment as counselled by Thomas Kempis in The Imitation of Christ.
As we move forward, we should labour to draw lessons from the past, both internally and externally. These lessons won’t be palatable to the tongue or consoling to the hearts, yet we must search, nevertheless.
For in this impermanent place, a tragedy is not the imperfection of its injustice, but rather a tragedy is one not make use of the inevitable injuries of this place for spiritual growth and character building.
We must remember that hope and restoration, as argued by Weaver (1948), lie upon the recovery of the “ceremony of innocence,” of that clearness of vision and knowledge of the form which enables us to sense what is alien or destructive. And more importantly, what does not comport with our moral ambition.
The time to seek this is now, before we have acquired the perfect position of those who prefer perdition.
Lastly and most importantly, even as we speak of peace, growth, and reconstruction, we must confront one final truth: a nation cannot rebuild without a moral compass.
Tanzania must decide, with clarity and conviction, the values upon which it will stand. At the heart of any new constitutional order must lie a Declaration of Human Rights—Tanzanian human rights—that no president, no minister, no party, and no security apparatus may violate.
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Rights that are not dependent on the mood of the state, that do not bend to political expediency, and that no citizen must fear invoking. Such a declaration must be the inviolable centre of our civic life.
Equally essential is a constitution that limits power—that prevents any single person, any office, any party, from becoming the state. Our peace depends on this. Our future depends on this.
Chesterton warned that when a society does not know what it stands for, it will “worship the strongest thing in the world.” (Or in our country!) That is how nations lose themselves—not through sudden catastrophe, but through the slow surrender of principle.
Therefore, we must decide who we are. We must anchor Tanzania in values that cannot be suspended, in rights that cannot be withdrawn, and in institutions that cannot be bent to the will of one.
If we fail to define ourselves, others will do it for us. If we do not set the boundaries of power, tyranny will set them instead.
But if we seize this moment to choose a moral foundation, to limit authority, and to enshrine the dignity of every citizen, then the next generation may inherit not fear but freedom; not silence but dignity; not despair but a Tanzania worthy of its promise.
A Tanzania that knows itself—and will defend itself, even when the threat comes from within itself.
For only a society that binds its rulers with law can claim to be free, and only a society that protects its citizens from arbitrary power can hope to remain peaceful.
As we look toward rebuilding, we return to the prayer that has always been ours:
Mungu Ibariki Tanzania,
Dumisha Uhuru na Umoja,
Wake kwa Waume na Watoto,
Mungu Ibariki, Tanzania na Watu Wake.
Ibariki Tanzania
Tubariki, Watoto wa Tanzania.
Ezekiel Lengaram is a Research Economist at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). His work leverages computational mathematics to explore macroeconomic theory, developing models that address complex economic phenomena. H Zahir is an East African writer examining the intersections of law, governance, and social behaviour. They’re available at Ezekiel.Lengaram@wits.ac.za and hzahir2025@outlook.com, respectively. These are the writer’s own opinions, and they do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of The Chanzo. Do you want to publish in this space? Contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com for further inquiries.
