My letter to the UN Secretary General on this Report:
A Critical Response to the UN Representative’s Concluding Statement on Tanzania
The concluding statement issued by the United Nations Special Representative, Mr. Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, after his five-day visit to Tanzania is disappointing in both tone and substance. Although it presents itself as balanced diplomacy, it reads more like a cautious political courtesy than a serious moral and political engagement with the suffering, fear, and unresolved grievances that have marked Tanzania’s post-election period. The UN statement confirms that he concluded his visit on 12 March 2026 after consultations with President Samia Suluhu Hassan, senior government officials, political parties, civil society, and diplomats.
The statement says the discussions focused on political developments after the 29 October 2025 general elections, dialogue, national cohesion, and confidence-building. Yet precisely here lies the weakness of the report: it adopts the language of stability without first confronting the depth of injustice that has shattered public trust. It speaks of process, but not with sufficient seriousness about power, fear, bloodshed, and the silencing of dissent.
What is most troubling is the Special Representative’s apparent readiness to accept official state processes at face value. His report gives the impression of a mission that remained too close to the corridors of power and too far from the pain of ordinary citizens, especially those most directly affected by the violence. A fact-finding visit that does not visibly center victims, bereaved families, wounded protesters, intimidated citizens, and those living in fear cannot claim to have reached the heart of the crisis. It may have consulted stakeholders, but it does not seem to have listened deeply enough to the people who paid the highest price.
This concern is made even more serious by the background of the envoy himself. The fact that he once served as an assistant to Asha-Rose Migiro, who is now Secretary General of CCM, the ruling party, inevitably raises questions of political perception and impartiality. Even if one does not reduce the mission to that history alone, such a mission required extraordinary independence and critical distance. Instead, the final statement leaves the impression of diplomatic comfort with power rather than prophetic solidarity with the wounded nation.
The most objectionable part of the report is the paragraph in which Mr. Onanga-Anyanga
welcomes the government’s decision to establish a Commission of Inquiry. That endorsement is, at best, naïve and, at worst, politically damaging. In a context where the state itself stands accused by many citizens and observers of responsibility for grave abuses, an inquiry constituted under the same political authority cannot automatically be treated as a credible path to truth. Before praising such a mechanism, a responsible envoy should have asked whether its composition, independence, mandate, and moral legitimacy were sufficient to inspire public confidence. Instead, the report assumes credibility where credibility is precisely what is in question. The UN statement explicitly says he welcomed the government’s decision to establish such a commission.
A truly serious assessment would also have situated the October violence within the broader climate that preceded election day. This is where the UN report appears especially thin. The African Union Election Observation Mission did not describe the elections in the reassuring terms that the UN statement seems to imply. On the contrary, the AU mission called for
urgent constitutional reforms and inclusive politics, noted that important reforms had not been implemented before the elections, recorded that some stakeholders could not be met because of
restrictions imposed by the Government of Tanzania, and stated that it could not complete some election-day observations because of
deadly protests and the subsequent six-day internet shutdown. It also encouraged transparent investigations to ensure justice for those affected by the deadly protests.
The SADC Electoral Observation Mission likewise raised concerns that should have featured prominently in any honest UN concluding note. SADC recorded stakeholder concerns about the absence of comprehensive electoral reforms, reported allegations of intimidation, abductions, and a tense political atmosphere, expressly referred to the detention and trial of
Tundu Lissu on treason charges, noted incidents where police were reported firing arms, and concluded that the 2025 general election
fell short of the requirements of the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections. It also urged an
inclusive constitutional review process. These were not marginal observations. They went to the heart of the credibility crisis.
This omission is not a small technical gap. It is the central analytical failure of the report. The real question is not only what happened on 29 and 30 October 2025, but what political conditions, decisions, exclusions, threats, prosecutions, and acts of repression made such violence possible in the first place. A report that does not investigate the precipitating causes of a massacre cannot meaningfully contribute to truth, justice, or reconciliation.
In that broader context, the case of
Tundu Lissu, the CHADEMA leader, cannot be treated as peripheral. Reuters reported that he was charged with treason in April 2025 over remarks prosecutors said called on the public to rebel and disrupt the elections; he was later put on trial in October 2025, just weeks before the election, while CHADEMA had already been barred from contesting the polls after failing to sign the election code of conduct. Reuters also noted that the treason charge carried the death penalty. Whether one agrees with his politics or not, such a prosecution in an already tense and unequal political climate became part of the machinery through which opposition space was narrowed. Any contemporary reading of Tanzania’s crisis must therefore reckon not only with post-election killings, but also with the use of treason law against one of the country’s principal opposition figures.
The statement also leans heavily on familiar diplomatic vocabulary: dialogue, national cohesion, peaceful participation, stability, unity, and development. These are important values, but in a wounded society they become empty when detached from accountability. Peace without truth protects the powerful. Reconciliation without justice insults the victims. Cohesion without trust is only managed silence. If the United Nations wishes to retain moral authority, it must resist the temptation to treat institutional process as a substitute for credible accountability.
The reference to Tanzania’s “longstanding tradition of stability and unity” is especially inadequate in the present context. Stability cannot simply be invoked as a national virtue while regional observer missions were already documenting structural electoral deficiencies, intimidation, restrictions, deadly protests, and a political environment shaped by fear and exclusion. Sustainable peace is built not on the repetition of reassuring language, but on honest acknowledgment of wrongdoing, impartial investigation, and visible accountability.
For these reasons, Mr. Onanga-Anyanga’s concluding statement falls short of what Tanzania needs at this critical moment. It is brisk where it should have been probing, diplomatic where it should have been morally serious, and trusting where it should have been rigorously skeptical. Rather than challenging power with truth, it appears to accommodate power with polite language.
If the United Nations is to help Tanzania credibly, it must do more than encourage dialogue. It must take seriously what regional African bodies themselves already put on record. It must reckon with the concerns raised by the AU and SADC observer missions. It must recognize that the prosecution of Tundu Lissu was not an isolated courtroom matter, but part of the wider democratic crisis. And it must insist that any inquiry into the killings be genuinely independent, broadly trusted, and clearly separated from those whose roles or decisions are themselves under scrutiny.
It must also listen more attentively to victims than to official narratives. And it must recognize that democratic peace is not preserved by soft phrases, but by justice that is seen to be real.
As it stands, this report does not rise to that responsibility. It comforts procedure, but it does not confront the crisis.
