The first instinct of an authoritarian system is rarely to kill. It is to rename reality. A massacre becomes a security operation. Protesters become insurrectionists. Citizens demanding accountability are recast as agents of foreign destabilisation. Language is bent until truth itself becomes suspect.
That, more than the violence alone, is the deeper significance of Tanzania’s crisis following the disputed elections of October 29th 2025. Last weekend, ACT Wazalendo organised a national discussion on the state of the nation. At its centre was a stark warning from the party’s national chairman, Othman Masoud Othman, about the political crossroads at which Tanzania now stands.
During the forum, a report was launched under a deliberately provocative title: The Grief: Blood on the Hands of the Protectors. I was invited to offer closing remarks and a vote of thanks. Time, however, was too short for what needed to be said. These reflections are therefore an attempt to continue that conversation in public.
Burying memory
This is not merely a rebuttal to the official Chande Commission inquiry into the post-election violence. It is also an attempt to resist the burial of national memory. The signs are already visible.
The state wishes Tanzanians not only to forget what happened, but to remember it only through the state’s preferred narrative: that the country faced an attempted coup rather than a popular outcry against a disputed election.
What happened on October 29th and in the days that followed was among the darkest episodes in Tanzania’s modern history. Even the government’s own figures are startling.
According to the Chande Commission, 518 people died during the unrest; 758 were reported as wamepotea (disappeared) whilst a further 448 remain unaccounted for.
In total, 1,724 people were lost during three days of killings. Among the dead were 21 children. Nearly 2,400 people were injured.
Yet perhaps the most striking feature of the official response has not been the scale of the violence, but the complete absence of remorse. The state insists that what occurred was not a public revolt against a manipulated political process, but a coordinated attempt to destabilise the country.
That distinction matters. Governments that portray dissent as an existential threat inevitably conclude that extraordinary force is justified. Once politics is securitised, compromise itself begins to resemble treason.
Uncomfortable lessons
History offers uncomfortable precedents. Forty-nine years ago, on May 27, 1977, Angola’s ruling MPLA confronted a small demonstration by citizens dissatisfied with their government.
The unrest was swiftly labelled a “foiled coup.” What followed was not the restoration of order, but a massacre. Estimates of the dead range from 20,000 upwards. Thousands more were arrested, tortured, executed, or disappeared.
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Nito Alves, a former minister and rising figure within the MPLA, became the official scapegoat. Yet many of the victims were ordinary citizens: teachers, students, workers, people whose real offence was to question power.
The event was deliberately reframed and pushed into the shadows of national memory. For decades, speaking openly about it inside Angola carried danger. It became known simply as “the forgotten massacre.”
The episode survives less as a historical event than as a warning: authoritarian systems fear uncontrolled public anger more than they fear bloodshed itself. The Tanzanian state’s framing of the October 29th killings sounds uncomfortably familiar.
The intention appears not merely to control the narrative, but to erase the massacre from national consciousness altogether. That must not be allowed.
Unsettling parallels
In both Angola in 1977 and Tanzania in 2025, a ruling party that once spoke the language of liberation confronted legitimate public discontent. In both cases, the state reached instinctively for the language of a “foiled coup” to justify disproportionate violence.
Accountability gave way to denial, cover-up and the rewriting of events. And in both cases, the objective was the same: to make the massacre forgettable, to teach citizens that questioning power carries mortal consequences, and that memory itself is dangerous.
READ MORE: Our Tiananmen Moment: Tanzania’s Cry for Justice Amid the October Massacres
Yet perhaps the more revealing comparison lies elsewhere: China after Tiananmen Square in 1989. Two months after the crackdown, a delegation from the Chinese Communist Party reportedly travelled to Tanzania to explain the “correct” interpretation of events to CCM.
According to records discussed in writings by Issa Shivji and others, CCM’s National Executive Committee expressed regret over the bloodshed.
The party concluded that the Chinese tragedy carried two lessons: first, ruling parties collapse when they lose touch with the people; second, unresolved grievances eventually become unmanageable crises. The historical irony now hangs heavily over Tanzania.
Following the October 29th massacre, CCM’s National Executive Committee again convened to discuss events. This time, however, the party publicly congratulated the police and intelligence services for the crackdown. Security forces were praised for killing Tanzanians. The contrast between the CCM of 1989 and the CCM of 2026 could scarcely be sharper.
A fading reputation
For decades, CCM cultivated an image distinct from many of the continent’s harsher liberation-era parties. Under Julius Nyerere, Tanzania projected moral seriousness, political moderation and national cohesion.
Even critics often acknowledged that the Tanzanian state generally avoided the extremes of repression witnessed elsewhere in post-colonial Africa. That reputation is now fading.
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The violence of 2025 revealed a state increasingly dependent on the coercive instincts of its security apparatus. Curfews, internet shutdowns, treason charges and the deployment of lethal force suggested a government that no longer sees opposition as legitimate political competition, but as a security threat to be neutralised. The implications reach far beyond human rights.
Modern economies rely not only on roads, ports and electricity, but on institutional trust. Investors can tolerate noisy politics; they struggle far more with uncertainty over the rule of law. Countries that blur the line between party and state ultimately weaken the very institutions required for long-term stability and growth.
This is why perhaps the most consequential demand in ACT Wazalendo’s report concerns the security services themselves. Tanzania’s intelligence agencies, police and military have become too closely aligned with CCM.
The report, therefore, calls for an international investigation into the killings, the release of political detainees, accountability along the chain of command and, most significantly, the separation of national security institutions from partisan politics. Tanzania must step back from the path of securocracy and return to genuine democratic governance.
Threshold approaches
That demand goes to the heart of Tanzania’s political future. Across much of Africa, states retain the outward architecture of democracy—parliaments, courts, election commissions—whilst real authority increasingly resides within informal alliances between ruling parties and security establishments.
Elections continue, but increasingly as rituals of legitimacy rather than instruments of accountability. The danger is not merely repression. It is stagnation. Political systems incapable of accommodating dissent eventually lose the capacity to correct their own mistakes.
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Tanzania now stands dangerously close to that threshold. The country still possesses formidable strengths: social cohesion, strategic geography, vast energy potential and a historically moderate political culture. But such advantages erode faster than nations imagine when governments cease listening and begin fearing their own citizens.
The lesson from Tiananmen, Angola and countless other crises is not that states survive through force. Many do, at least for a time. The deeper lesson is that governments which rely too heavily on coercion eventually become prisoners of it. And nations that suppress grief rarely escape it.
Zitto Ruyagwa Z. Kabwe is a Tanzanian politician and the former Party Leader of ACT Wazalendo. He served as a Member of Parliament and Shadow Finance Minister, and Chairperson of the Public Accounts Committee of the Tanzanian National Assembly (Bunge). He is available at zitto_kabwe@outlook.com. These are the writer’s own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of The Chanzo. Do you want to publish in this space? Contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com for further enquiries.
