Tanzania’s October 29 general election may have gone down as the country’s bloodiest since Tanganyika merged with Zanzibar to form Tanzania on April 26, 1964.
In three days of protests and clashes that followed, diplomats in Dar es Salaam estimated that between 700 and 1,000 people were killed. For a nation that had cultivated an image of calm, consensus, and order for nearly six decades, the violence shattered the myth completely. The region should not look away, least of all Uganda.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan was sworn in quietly at State House, without the public, in a ceremony that lacked the celebratory air that once accompanied Tanzanian inaugurations.
The event was televised but stripped of the music and colour that used to fill stadiums. This was not a triumphant return to power. Suluhu’s 98 percent victory, achieved after Opposition parties were barred, journalists arrested, and entire communities silenced, is too large to be credible and too neat to be democratic. It reduced her triumph to theatre.
For a president who entered office after John Magufuli’s sudden death in March 2021, this was meant to be her democratic coronation. Instead, it stripped away the legitimacy she had been building over the past four years.
Tanzania’s and East Africa’s first elected woman president (Burundi’s Sylvie Kinigi was Africa’s first female president from October 27, 1993, to February 5, 1994, after Burundi President Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated, but she wasn’t elected) was expected to soften the iron habits of the State that hardened under her predecessor.
Instead, she reinforced them. In doing so, she has rewritten the expectations that many African feminists once held, emerging not as the gentler face of power but as perhaps the most despotic woman leader of the post-independence era.
What just happened recalls the 2000 Zanzibar election, when the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi’s heavy hand sent dozens to their deaths, mainly in Pemba and Unguja, and drove more than 2,000 islanders fleeing by dhows to the Kenyan coast.
Some, in a desperate search for safety, sailed further north to Somalia, where a small Zanzibari community still resides in Mogadishu’s Hamarweyne district.
The illusion, which was quickly re-established that the country was immune to the contagion of electoral violence, has collapsed. The CCM’s uninterrupted rule since independence has become a liability, breeding complacency and arrogance.
Uganda, more than any other country in the neighbourhood, has reason to pay attention. The Uganda-Tanzania border stretches approximately 396 kilometres, which is shorter than Uganda’s 435-kilometre boundary with South Sudan and far less than the 877 kilometres it shares with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Yet its economic and strategic weight far outweighs its size. Along that narrow stretch runs a network of trade and kinship ties that have quietly underpinned Uganda’s economy and politics for decades.
At the heart of this relationship lies the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a 1,445-kilometre mega-project carrying Uganda’s oil from Hoima to the Tanzanian port of Tanga.
The pipeline has been promoted as a symbol of regional integration. Yet the recent unrest revealed that beneath the slogans of stability and brotherhood lies a fragility that could upend years of planning.
If Tanzania burns, Uganda’s dream of becoming a petroleum exporter could be extinguished along with it. For Uganda, whose trade flows still rely mainly on Mombasa but increasingly lean on the Dar port as a secondary artery, the violence was a jolt to its assumptions.
The comfort of thinking Tanzania was the region’s unshakable anchor is gone. Even cautious diplomats now admit that the ground beneath Dodoma’s calm exterior is shifting.
This should push Uganda toward a new kind of pragmatism. For decades, Kampala’s foreign policy has mirrored its domestic instincts: loyalty to incumbents, wrapped in the language of liberation. Its relationships have been with ruling parties or presidents, not nations.
That has worked in predictable times, but when power fragments, that loyalty turns into a liability. Tanzania’s crisis reminds us that Uganda needs a two-track strategy. The first is official diplomacy: strengthening trade, coordinating infrastructure, keeping the oil project on course, and maintaining cordial ties with Dodoma. The second, more discreet, must be hedging.
A landlocked State cannot afford to bet everything on a single political alliance. Kampala should quietly open informal channels with Tanzania’s Opposition, not to interfere but to protect its interests.
If the Uganda government-or more likely, the Museveni State House, contributes $250,000 (Shs866m) as a solidarity donation to the CCM for a “sisterly” cause, it should consider discreetly funnelling $100,000 (Shs346m) to CHADEMA and perhaps $50,000 (Shs173m) to ACT-Wazalendo through deniable vehicles and actors.
Should power shift unexpectedly or the ruling party lose influence, Uganda would still have allies who understand its economic stakes and the logic of the oil pipeline.
The crude oil pipeline might yet rise as a monument to East Africa’s ambition, but only if the politics surrounding it are anchored in realpolitik.