Eugenia Moche
The Independent Patriots for Change (IPC) has criticised President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah’s state visit to Tanzania, accusing her of remaining silent on human rights abuses while celebrating economic ties with a government accused of extrajudicial killings, political persecution, and mass detentions.
In a statement issued on Sunday, IPC shadow minister of international relations and trade, Rodney Cloete, said that while the three-day visit had produced “warm words on trade” and pledges to deepen economic cooperation, there had been “public silence” on the imprisonment of Tanzania’s main opposition leader, Tundu Lissu, and the killing of citizens in the wake of the country’s October 2025 elections.
Lissu, leader of the main opposition party CHADEMA, has been held on a treason charge that carries the death penalty and allows no bail since April 2025.
In February 2026, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention unlawful. In April 2026, the American Bar Association’s human rights centre described his prosecution as politically motivated.
“Lissu sits in a cell in the very city the President is visiting this weekend, barred, like his entire party, from the October election that returned President Samia Suluhu Hassan with 98% of the vote,” Cloete stated.
Cloete further highlighted that in the weeks following that election, UN human rights experts condemned hundreds of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and mass arbitrary detentions.
Amnesty International documented that security forces used disproportionate lethal force and shut down internet access.
CHADEMA claims thousands were killed, while the Tanzanian government has dismissed the figures as exaggerated but has produced no official count.
The Catholic Church in Tanzania lamented that the country had “lost its dignity.”
Cloete described the situation as “the liberation club at work,” referring to an unspoken arrangement in which former liberation movements, now in power, shield one another from the accountability they once demanded of colonial and apartheid regimes.
The Namibian Presidency’s own statement on the visit rested entirely on the sanctuary Tanzania provided to Namibian exiles during the liberation struggle, Cloete noted.
“That history is real, and it cuts the other way: a nation that knows what it is to need refuge has no business going quiet when the people next door are being shot for asking the questions we once asked.”
He drew attention to the Nandi-Ndaitwah’s itinerary and the ongoing crisis in Tanzania.
“This weekend the President will lay wreaths at the Namibian Freedom Fighters’ Cemetery in Kongwa, where Namibians who died for our freedom are buried. A few hundred kilometres away, Tanzanian families are still searching for relatives their own government refuses to account for,” Cloete said.
“We honour the Tanzania that sheltered our freedom fighters by standing with the Tanzanians now fighting for theirs, not by signing trade deals over their graves,” he added.
The IPC called on Nandi-Ndaitwah to publicly raise the immediate and unconditional release of Tundu Lissu, consistent with the UN Working Group’s finding.
The party also demanded that she report to the National Assembly on her return on what was raised regarding human rights, and table every Memorandum of Understanding signed during the visit.
