Tanzania - Free Tundu Lissu

TANZANIA - The Tundu Lissu case and the elections on 29 October

October 28, 2025:

OCTOBER 28, 2025 - TANZANIA. The Tundu Lissu case and the elections on 29 October

General elections will be held in Tanzania on Wednesday, 29 October. As is well known, the same party has been in power in that country since independence in 1961, and the only candidate who would have been able to challenge this power bloc, Tundu Lissu, was arrested in April and has been on death row ever since, accused of a very serious crime: TREASON.

Hands off Cain is following the events, and it seems that by “treason”, government magistrates mean that Lissu, 57, a lawyer in civilian life, in his rallies explicitly called for measures to prevent electoral fraud. Having explicitly expressed doubts about the fairness of the counting of the ballot papers is the reason why the current president of Tanzania, Samia Suluhu Hassan, of the Party of the Revolution, has issued a decree banning Lissu and his entire party from participating in the elections. Some “optimistic” observers, having noted the exhausting pre-trial delays and the lack of substance in the charges, believe that once the elections are over, Lissu will be sentenced not to death, as the charge of treason would require, but to a lesser penalty, essentially forcing him into exile or at least preventing him from continuing to engage in politics.

After all, Lissu has spent, or rather, has had to spend, much of the last few years abroad.

Tundu Lissu was seriously injured in an attack on 7 September 2017 in Dodoma, the administrative capital of Tanzania.

The attack took place while Lissu, then a member of parliament, was returning home after a parliamentary session. His car was hit by 36 bullets fired by unidentified men. Sixteen bullets hit Lissu. The attack sparked strong national and international outrage, and Lissu was subsequently transferred to Kenya for medical treatment before continuing his rehabilitation in Belgium.

The incident is considered one of the most dramatic moments in recent Tanzanian political history and has profoundly marked Lissu's career, who has continued to denounce political repression in the country. Despite his injuries and threats, he returned to Tanzania in 2020 to run for president against incumbent John Magufuli. In those elections, Lissu's party, Chadema, came second in the official results (official results whose accuracy has not been confirmed. Editor's note). Five years later, Lissu tried again to challenge Tanzania's power bloc, and once again he was stopped, this time with an arrest.

The facts.

The prosecution alleges that in a speech given by Tundu Lissu on 3 April 2025 in Dar es Salaam, and in “takes” posted on his party's social media, he incited rebellion and threatened the government.

The prosecution cited several social media posts in which he allegedly stated: “If this position is seen as incitement, it is true... because we say we will obstruct the elections, we will incite rebellion... we will really disrupt these elections... we will seriously sabotage them...”.

The trial is ongoing and the prosecution has presented video evidence of Lissu's speech. Lissu did not dispute the authenticity of the video, nor did he address the true meaning of his words, how they should be interpreted in light of the fact that Chadema is a liberal-democratic party, an active member of the leading African international forum, the DUA (Democracy Union of Africa), which in turn is affiliated with the International Democracy Union (IDU), which promotes democracy, individual freedom and the market economy.

Lissu, who was held in strict isolation during the pre-trial phase and was unable to meet with his party's lawyers, is defending himself. In an attempt to speed up the trial and force the High Court of Tanzania to issue a verdict before the election date, he has raised a number of technical objections at this stage, namely the inadmissibility of the video as evidence, the delay in attaching it to the case file, and the lack of guarantees regarding the chain of transmission of the evidence itself. If these objections had been upheld, the trial would have ended immediately. They were not upheld.

After keeping the list of witnesses that the prosecution intended to use in the trial secret for a long time, this short list was finally communicated to the Court: it consists of two people (probably undercover government agents) who would confirm that they heard Lissu utter some “threatening” phrases in public, and a government expert who would have examined a USB stick containing a video of Lissu, certifying that the video had not been tampered with.

Despite the efforts of Lissu's lawyer/defendant to speed up the trial, we have now reached 28 October, and tomorrow Tanzania, an important nation with 45 million inhabitants, will go to the polls. Lissu's name will not be on the ballot, nor will the Chedema Party.

On the Lissu case, see also HoC 19/06/2025; 28/06/2025; 15/07/2025; 30/07/2025; 03/09/2025; 04/09/2025.