WHEN violence erupted on election day yesterday and police resorted to live ammunition to quell protests, Tanzania’s democratic mask slipped.
The pattern was unmistakable: silencing dissent, shrinking civic space and manipulation of electoral processes to preserve incumbency.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who rose to power in 2021 following the death of John Magufuli, initially projected herself as a reformer.
Yet she has quickly mastered the art of authoritarian consolidation — jailing opponents, intimidating critics and narrowing the space for alternative voices.
Her transformation is emblematic of a broader regional problem: leaders who come to power promising renewal, only to entrench the same old habits of repression once they taste authority.
A day before the election, Blessing Vava, director for Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, was deported from the East African country.
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His deportation is more than an isolated act of repression.
It is a symptom of a deeper democratic decay afflicting the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) region — a crisis driven by obsessive love of power among its leaders.
Vava had travelled to Tanzania on a solidarity mission to meet civic society organisations and social movements facing growing repression under Suluhu’s administration.
Instead, he was detained, interrogated, labelled a “security risk” and deported.
His ordeal occurred just a day before that country’s presidential and parliamentary elections — polls already condemned as “a sham, a one-horse-race electoral ritual”.
But Tanzania is not alone in this descent.
Across Sadc — Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Eswatini and beyond — the pattern is depressingly familiar.
In Zimbabwe, six unarmed civilians were gunned down in August 2018 when protests broke out over delayed election results.
As of now, the ruling Zanu PF party has since resolved that President Emmerson Mnangagwa must remain in power until 2030 — a move that mocks both the Constitution and the spirit of the liberation struggle.
The story is no different in Mozambique, where deadly clashes erupted last year after supporters of opposition leader Venancio Mondlane rejected the victory of Frelimo’s Daniel Chapo in disputed local elections.
In each case, the ruling elite manipulates electoral institutions and State power to secure outcomes favourable to itself, while citizens are left disillusioned and fearful.
The Sadc region, once a beacon of liberation and solidarity, has morphed into a fraternity of rulers clinging to power under the guise of “stability” and “sovereignty”.
Liberation politics has hardened into entitlement politics — the belief that those who fought for independence are eternally entitled to rule, no matter the cost.
Power, once pursued as a means to serve, has become an end in itself.
It is addictive — a drug that dulls moral judgement and corrodes institutions.
The longer leaders stay in office, the more intolerant they become to accountability and the more ruthless they grow in defending their thrones.
The tragedy is that citizens, not rulers, bear the brunt of this addiction — through lost freedoms, economic stagnation and the normalisation of fear.
Sadc’s failure to confront this culture of power addiction has eroded its credibility.
The organisation routinely endorses flawed elections, turns a blind eye to human rights abuses and preaches “non-interference” even as member States descend into authoritarianism. It has become a club of incumbents, not a community of democrats.
If the region is to break this vicious cycle, it must begin by reclaiming its founding values — accountability, justice and respect for human dignity.
Citizens must reject the narrative that leaders are indispensable.
True liberation lies not in who holds power, but in how that power is used.
Until Sadc leaders rediscover the love of service and dispense with the love of power, the region will remain trapped in a familiar tragedy: a democracy in name, but authoritarian in practice.