Tanzanian Opposition Leader Tundu Lissu Charged With Treason, Jailed Without Bail

Tanzanian opposition party leader Tundu Lissu was on Thursday charged with treason, a capital offence, for comments he made last week that prosecutors said called on the public to launch a rebellion and disrupt an election due this year.

The charges against Lissu, the chairman of the main opposition party CHADEMA and runner-up in the 2020 presidential election, will bring fresh scrutiny to President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s human rights record as she bids for re-election.

Lissu was arrested on Wednesday after a rally in the southwestern region of Ruvuma. At a court appearance in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam, he was not allowed to enter a plea on the treason charge and was remanded into custody.

He pleaded not guilty to a separate charge of publishing false information and is due back in court on April 24.

Lissu’s lawyer, Rugemeleza Nshala, said the charges against his client were politically driven.

“You cannot separate these charges from politics,” Nshala told Reuters. “He was doing campaigns to educate CHADEMA supporters, but they have turned it into charges.”

CHADEMA has vowed to boycott the presidential and parliamentary elections due in late October unless significant reforms are made to an electoral process it says favours the ruling party. No date has been set for the votes.

According to the charge sheet, Lissu, who survived being shot 16 times in an assassination attempt in 2017, made the comments in question in Dar es Salaam on April 3.

The charge sheet quoted him as saying: “It is true we say we will prevent the election. We will inspire rebellion. That is the way to get change.”

“So we are going to spoil this election. We are going to really disrupt … We are going to spoil it very badly,” he said, according to the charge sheet.

Hassan won plaudits after coming to power in 2021 for easing repression of political opponents and censorship of the media that proliferated under her predecessor, John Magufuli, who died in office.

But she has faced mounting criticism from human rights activists over a series of arrests and unexplained abductions and killings of political opponents.

Hassan has said the government is committed to respecting human rights and she ordered an investigation into reported abductions last year.

No one has been arrested or charged in connection with the attack on Lissu, which Magufuli condemned at the time.