Polls open in Tanzania’s election as key opponents barred

The government has been brutally retaliating against dissention before the election, so polls have started in Tanzania for presidential and parliamentary elections that are taking place without the main opposition party.

More than 37 million registered voters will cast their ballots between 7 a.m. (local time (4:00 GMT) and 4 p.m. (13:00 GMT). Within three days of the election day, the election commission promises to release the results.

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After the two main opposition parties were prohibited from standing, Samia Suluhu Hassan, 65, is anticipated to win.

The opposition party’s Tundu Lissu, the leader of Tanzania’s main opposition party, is facing treason charges. He denies this. Chadema was disqualified in April for rejecting an electoral code of conduct.

After the attorney general’s objection, the commission also disqualified Luhaga Mpina, the candidate for ACT-Wazalendo, leaving only candidates from smaller parties competing against Hassan.

Voters will also elect the country’s 400-member parliament, president, and politicians from the semi-autonomous Zanzibar archipelago.

Since its founding in 1977, Hassan’s ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), whose predecessor party led the fight for mainland Tanzania’s independence in the 1950s, has ruled the country’s politics.

After taking office in 2021, Hassan, one of only two female heads of state in Africa, won praise for easing the growing censorship and repression of political opponents under John Magufuli’s death.

Rights activists and candidates for the opposition have accused the government of unexplained abductions of its critics over the past two years.

She maintains that her country has a policy of respecting human rights and that it has ordered an investigation into reported abductions last year. No official findings have been made public.

halting opposition

UN human rights experts have demanded that Hassan’s administration immediately put an end to the “additional disappearances of political opponents, human rights defenders, and journalists as a tool of repression in the electoral context.”

Since 2019, they claim more than 200 cases of forced disappearance have been found in Tanzania.

A recent Amnesty International report described a “wave of terror” that included “enforced disappearances and torture… and extrajudicial killings of opposition figures and activists.”

According to Human Rights Watch, “the authorities have suppressed the political opposition and opposition leaders, stifled the media, and failed to grant the electoral commission’s independence.”

The ruling CCM was reportedly trying to avoid the recent electoral pressures that counterparts in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe experienced. The US crisis-monitoring organization Armed Conflict Location &amp, Event Data (ACLED) claimed.

Ali Mohamed Kibao, a member of the opposition’s Chadema party’s secretariat, was abducted from a bus leaving Dar-es-Salaam to Tanga, a port city in the northeast of the country, in September 2024.

Even CCM members are feared to be targeted, according to some. After resigning and voicing his grievances with Hassan, Humphrey Polepole, a former CCM spokesman and ambassador to Cuba, vanished from his home this month. His home had blood stains, according to his family.

Since Hassan’s rule, the Tanganyika Law Society has reported 83 abductions, with 20 more reported in recent weeks, according to the organization.

The World Bank attributes this to Tanzania’s relatively healthy economy, which increased by 5.5 percent last year on the back of strong agriculture, tourism, and mining sectors.