Tanzania is the fifth most populous African country. It is visited by many Americans who go to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, the world’s tallest free-standing mountain (that is, not part of a larger mountain range. Mount Kilimanjaro is 19,341 feet high).
Tanzania used to hold fraudulent and unfair, but basically peaceful, elections. Now, the elections are very violent as well as fraudulent. The government killed over 1,000 people on election day and continued killing people on the following day. But it won’t release the bodies to their loved ones.
The Washington Post reports that families are searching “for bodies in Tanzania after mass political killings”:
When polls closed in Tanzania last week, the dead were strewn on streets across the country. By the time the president’s victory was announced, relatives were searching in vain for the bodies of their loved ones.
Tensions had been building for months in the lead-up to the election — widely viewed as a coronation for President Samia Suluhu Hassan. Months earlier, she had ordered her main challenger, Tundu Lissu of the Chadema party, be jailed on treason charges. Chadema and the other main opposition party were barred from fielding candidates. More than 100 government critics had been abducted by state security forces, activists had recorded, including a former ambassador.
But few foresaw the chaos on election day, or the bloody repression that followed…both targeted and indiscriminate killings — carried out by men in plainclothes and in uniform.
Protesters stormed the streets of major cities on Oct. 29, ripping down posters of Hassan…Within hours, soldiers were on the streets. Police were filmed firing at protesters from white Toyota Land Cruisers. Victims were followed into their homes and shot as friends and families watched…More than 1,000 people were killed [on election day].
….Tanzania’s electoral commission said Hassan received more than 97 percent of the 31 million votes cast across the country. An observation team from the Southern African Development community said in a statement that voters in most areas could not express their democratic will. An African Union mission said the country failed to comply with “international obligations and standards.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on X Monday that the elections were “fraudulent” and called for a review of the American relationship with Tanzania, a longtime U.S. ally in East Africa.
The government likely has the bodies of hundreds of people it killed, but won’t release their bodies, because then people would take pictures of the bullet wounds.
The election was blatantly fraudulent, and stuffing of ballot boxes was observed by observers from the African Union. Tanzania’s president did not receive 97% of the vote, or anything close to that, even though her main challengers were barred from the election.
In a fair election, Tanzania’s president would have lost to Chadema in Tanzania’s largest cities and regions like Arusha. But she probably would have carried the Zanzibar archipelago and many rural areas. There is so much popular opposition to Tanzania’s government that it had to deploy the military in response to massive demonstrations.
The vote total in this year’s Tanzanian election is obviously fake, because it is more than twice as big as the number of votes cast in the prior, 2020 presidential election. In that election, lines at polling places were longer, because it was a less obviously fake election — because the main challenger was allowed to run in that election, unlike this year, giving people a reason to vote.
Although Tanzania’s president is very intolerant of opposition, her economic policies are less bad than those of the typical African ruler. African nations tend to have bad governance, so even an oppressive ruler can be less economically destructive than the average African ruler. As the Heritage Foundation notes, “Tanzania is ranked 6th out of 47 countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa region” in economic freedom; “The country’s economic freedom score is lower than the world average [but] higher than the regional average.”
Tanzania’s ruling party used to have horrible, socialist economic policies until the late 1980s, so even today, Tanzania is a bit poorer than average for an African country. It still has not fully recovered from socialism. It is poorer than neighboring Kenya, but richer than neighboring Uganda, Malawi, and Mozambique. Mozambique used to be governed by Marxists.
