Political theatre…
And the saddest part is the Tanzanian people are so desperate for change (understandably so considering the levels of poverty, injustice, disease, and corruption in the country), there is a tendency to side with anyone that appears to be sympathetic to their needs…
If the resignation is real and is accepted — I think it is fair to assume that whoever replaces him will be someone that does not endanger the interests of those whose main priority is to evade punishment for economic sabotage, money laundering, and for orchestrating the killings of 29/10/2025 (in addition to probably other murders committed before and after that date, even going as far back as decades).
I do not know who could be selected as the new VP but there could be two different directions CCM could take:
1) Select someone who appears neutral — not negatively perceived by the public to tone down tensions and appear to international bodies as beginning to adhere to requests for democratic reforms in Tanzania or…
2) CCM and the Government of Tanzania will make everything worse in the name of showing off their complete authority by selecting someone the public completely distrusts to prove that they can do whatever they want and there is nothing anyone can do about it…
I am curious to see which path they will take but also hope whatever choice they make, we, ordinary citizens, do not end up paying a heavy price for it.
A few words on the constructed Tanganyika/ Zanzibar divide we are seeing in online political discourse:
This drive for people online to refer to themselves as Tanganyikans trying to free Tanganyika from dominance by Zanzibar is harmful and inaccurate.
Just because activists disagree with the current Tanzanian President’s leadership style/ decisions and she also just so happens to be from Zanzibar does not mean that the Union has to be dissolved.
Most Zanzibaris, like people in the mainland, also live in poverty and suffer from the same economic, social, and political issues. Most Zanzibaris are not blindly loyal to the Government of Tanzania and even to the Government of Zanzibar for that matter. Most Zanzibaris are just as unhappy with the leadership we have as people on the mainland are.
Part of the issue may be the alleged use of Zanzibaris to come into the mainland to kill people during the events surrounding 29/10/2025, however, even if in the years to come all the evidence is laid out and we end up finding out it was indeed true, that killing squad does not represent the entire Zanzibari population.
The corruption within CCM and the Union Government is evident to both citizens in the mainland and in Zanzibar. Even though the Union in 1964 happened without a referendum and some people to this day question why it had to happen — we are one and we can question the need of having one/two/ three governments and the efficiency or lack there of of having such a system, but there is absolutely no reason to have any kind of enmity between Zanzibaris and mainlanders.
Historically, most of the slaves taken to Zanzibar during the Arab slave trade came from what is now mainland Tanzania and other parts of the interior of Africa. Even after the revolution that led to Zanzibar’s independence when the population began to grapple with questions on what it meant to be Zanzibari (especially under the ASP), it is clear that as individuals began to become culturally uniform in identification (even though in reality they were hybrid), the African origins of Zanzibari identity inarguably comes from mainland Tanzania/ Africa as a whole. So calls to separate the two on the grounds that we are so different erase the connections between the two spaces that predate the formal union of the two territories in 1964.
