Tanzania: opposition leader convicted of incitement to unrest, acquitted of treason

According to the BBC, a 58-year-old Tanzanian opposition leader has been found guilty of incitement to unrest but acquitted of treason. He has been in detention since April last year and claims the charges are politically motivated. That, for now, is the essence of what we know.

What we do not yet know is considerable: the report does not specify the sentence, the precise facts the court relied on, or the response of the government or the defence. We will therefore not pronounce on the merits of the case. A conviction is not, in itself, proof of persecution, and an accusation of persecution is not, in itself, proof of innocence. The judges did, however, set aside the most serious charge, treason, which is worth noting.

The structural question remains, and this is where our reading begins, not from an established fact. More than a year in detention before a verdict, for an opposition leader, poses a problem that many countries of the Global South know well: the courts become an instrument for managing political competition. Broadly drafted offences, such as "incitement to unrest", give any government a comfortable latitude. This is not peculiar to Tanzania, nor to Africa for that matter, but history offers a useful light here.

The state apparatus bequeathed by colonialism was designed to contain populations, not to represent them. Sedition laws, political policing, courts in the service of order: many of these tools survived independence. Anticolonial thinkers, Fanon and Cabral foremost among them, warned that without real social transformation, a local elite inherits the colonial machine: independence changes the flag, not the structure. Walter Rodney likewise argued that narrow nationalism, content to seize power, is incapable of offering the people genuine democratic participation. Applied to our case, this framework invites us to ask whether the trial of an opponent serves public security or the protection of a position already secured.

It also invites us not to stop there. The capitals that lecture African governments on human rights are often the same ones that take a keen interest in minerals, gas and infrastructure contracts. The stability of a commercial partner sometimes weighs more heavily than the quality of its democracy, and economic dependence narrows the room for manoeuvre of everyone, governors and governed alike. To denounce repression without seeing this is to look at only half the picture.

For the moment, the useful questions are simple. What sentence? On what evidence? What avenues of appeal? And what conditions of detention over nineteen months? We will return to these once documented sources allow us to answer them. In the meantime, a partial acquittal does not make a fair trial, and a conviction does not undo one: only the transparency of the proceedings will allow judgement to be passed.