Both Uganda and Tanzania are gripped by election campaigns, but Tanzania goes to the vote first today, with Uganda following in January 2026. Both countries’ campaigns are similar in that the opposition is being brutalised.
In Tanzania, unmarked vans (“drones” in Uganda-speak) are abducting opposition supporters. Both countries also torture. They also arrest East African activists who show solidarity with the opposition. Two Kenyan human rights activists, Bob Njagi (chairman of the Free Kenya Movement) and Nicholas Oyoo (the movement’s secretary general), were abducted in Uganda on October 1, 2025, shortly after attending Bobi Wine’s rally.
Uganda pulled a page straight out of the Tanzanian playbook of repression. Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi and Ugandan journalist and lawyer Agather Atuhaire were abducted in Dar es Salaam in May 2025 while observing opposition leader Tundu Lissu’s trial. They were tortured, and Atuhaire was sexually assaulted, before being driven and dumped near their countries’ borders with Tanzania-Atuhaire near Mutukula. I never thought I would ever say this, but here we are: in their violence and madness, Uganda seems “better” than Tanzania, or the latter is worse.
Consider this: in the months leading to the vote in Tanzania, over 80 opposition members have disappeared, more than 600 have been jailed, and at least five have been killed. No 600 opposition supporters have been detained in Uganda, and the number reported to have disappeared so far this year-mostly foot soldiers of Bobi Wine (Robert Kyagulanyi) ‘s National Unity Platform-is about 12. Leading candidates like Chadema’s party’s Lissu were arrested on April 9, 2025, and charged with treason for social media posts alleging election rigging. His trial drags on.
ACT-Wazalendo’s presidential candidate, Luhaga Mpina, was also arrested in April. With that, Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan effectively became unopposed, having neutralised her primary challengers. In Uganda, they will tear-gas the candidate and his supporters on nomination day. In the end, though, you will get nominated-unless you are Kizza Besigye, of course. There is also an unwritten rule in Uganda: you don’t touch pastors, priests and bishops who criticise election malpractices and abuses. You can rebut or even insult them, but you don’t lay a hand on them.
Not so in Tanzania. Father Charles Kitima, a Catholic priest and outspoken critic of state repression, was brutally attacked in his Dar es Salaam office, his jaw broken after he denounced electoral injustices. Days later, Father Emmanuel Mshana met the same fate, beaten by unidentified assailants believed to be tied to the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) for his fiery anti-corruption sermons. In Arusha, Pastor Mchungaji Steve, known for fiery prophecies against the ruling party, was abducted, beaten, and dumped in Kilimanjaro, barely alive.
These events took me five years back, during the Covid-19 lockdown. I was involved in an Africa trend-tracking exercise for an international organisation, following patterns of infection and vaccination across the continent, minus Tanzania, which refused to acknowledge the virus and stopped releasing data after about a month. We would plot the rise or fall of infections and vaccinations. We also tracked the pandemic’s effect on education, the economy and society in general-for example, a sharp rise in cybercrime, gangs, and transnational crimes like human trafficking as fewer security forces patrolled borders.
We also tracked lockdown enforcement. There was a considerable increase in abuses by police and military, and a rise in the killing of journalists across Africa.
There was one exception in East Africa: Uganda. Excluding journalists shot, injured or beaten while covering Bobi Wine’s campaigns, the rest were not molested. Uganda had the lowest figures for abuse and obstruction. I was struck by that and looked back 10 years, finding that far more journalists and activists had been killed in other African countries-including those that are demonstrably more democratic than Uganda, such as South Africa.
That is when I began to suspect that Uganda must have a manual for brutalising journalists and opposition supporters-probably one approved by the Commander-in-Chief himself. The likelihood of this first became apparent in how Museveni spoke about Bobi Wine’s detention and torture in Arua in August 2018, and later what we learnt about the abduction and torture of the acid-tongued writer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija in early 2022.
It seems the manual says things like: “break only one leg and arm, not both”; “hit the head and face, but don’t pluck out the eyes”; “lash the back with wire, don’t slice with a blade”; “for women, beat and then humiliate by exposing their intimate parts”; “break no more than half the ribs”; and “but whatever you do, don’t kill.” Cruelty in East Africa has become both a language and a craft. Tanzania’s version is raw and total. Uganda’s is methodical, selective and coldly bureaucratic. The difference is not moral; it is only tactical. And that might be the most terrifying part.