I was in Nairobi on October 29, 2025, when Tanzania held its presidential election. Three days later, the Independent National Electoral Commission declared that Samia Suluhu Hassan had received 31,913,866 votes: 97.66% of the valid ballots.
The number has to be read together with the conditions that produced it. CHADEMA, the main opposition party, was out of the election after refusing to sign the mandatory electoral code; its chair, Tundu Lissu, was in custody facing treason charges. Luhaga Mpina, the presidential candidate of ACT-Wazalendo, was disqualified. The African Union observation mission concluded that these developments had diminished competition and described the election as uncompetitive.
Voting did not repair what had been removed before voting began. The African Union reported that an internet shutdown began during election day and lasted six days. Its observers documented ballot stuffing at several polling stations, including voters being issued multiple ballots. The AU concluded that the election did not comply with its democratic standards. The SADC observer mission separately concluded that voters in most areas could not express their democratic will and that the election fell short of SADC requirements.
The violence supplied the cost. In April 2026, a presidential commission of inquiry assessed that 518 people had died in election-related violence and cautioned that the count might not be final. That finding does not settle responsibility for every death. It does establish the magnitude acknowledged by the state itself.
The number
The 97.66% is not merely a number. It is a signal.
In a competitive election, a vote total is supposed to summarize public preference. But that meaning depends on conditions outside the arithmetic: credible alternatives must be permitted to compete; citizens must be able to obtain information; observers and party agents must be able to watch the count; and people must be able to reject the government without being treated as enemies of the state.
When a government controls who may compete, what information circulates, how the ballot is observed and how dissent is classified, an overwhelming vote total measures control over political expression more reliably than it measures public consent.
An election does not cease to function as administrative theater merely because ballot boxes, candidates and certificates remain. Those procedures may be useful precisely because they convert control into an official record. The decisive question is not whether voting occurred. It is whether the governing party could realistically lose and whether citizens could safely refuse it.
Read that way, 97.66% says: the system no longer requires you to agree. It will simply record that you did.
Stability and legitimacy
Tanzania had long carried a regional reputation for relative peace and political stability. Even before the 2025 election, official assessments described the country as unusually stable compared with its neighbors. The political lineage that became CCM has governed since independence: TANU led Tanganyika into independence, and in 1977 it merged with Zanzibar's ruling Afro-Shirazi Party to form Chama Cha Mapinduzi.
That history made quiet look like proof. Orderly succession, institutional continuity and the absence of national rupture could be treated as evidence that the political settlement remained legitimate. But stability and legitimacy are different achievements. Stability is the absence of breakdown. Legitimacy is the continuing presence of consent. A state can preserve the first long after it has stopped renewing the second.
The 2025 election did not reveal that Tanzania's earlier stability had been imaginary. It revealed that stability had never guaranteed accountability. A ruling party can govern for so long that it begins to confuse its own continuity with the continuity of the country. Opposition then ceases to appear as an alternative government and begins to appear as disorder. Scrutiny becomes sabotage. The possibility of electoral defeat becomes indistinguishable from institutional failure.
That is the mechanism of party-state fusion: the institutions still exist, but their operating purpose changes. Instead of managing competition, they manage its boundaries. Instead of measuring consent, they certify control.
The regional signal
Nearby, Kenya was undergoing its own argument over the classification of dissent. After the June 25, 2025 demonstrations, Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen publicly termed the unrest terrorism and an attempted coup. On July 8, Kenya's Directorate of Criminal Investigations announced that 37 suspects had been arraigned under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, alongside allegations including arson and property damage.
The point is not that every person in a protest crowd is peaceful, or that every criminal charge is necessarily invented. The institutional shift occurs when protest itself is moved into the conceptual territory of counterterrorism. Once that happens, a demand for accountability can be processed as a threat to national security. The government no longer has to answer the grievance before it answers the crowd.
The public record does not establish that East African governments coordinated these responses or copied particular tactics from one another. The stronger and more defensible inference is convergence: governments under accountability pressure are reaching for the same categories—candidate exclusion, information control, security language and the criminalization of dissent—because those categories convert political opposition into a problem of public order.
They do not need a conspiracy to learn from visible impunity. They need only to observe which methods preserve power.
Tanzania's 97.66% is the clearest expression of that logic. When the state controls the alternatives, the information, the count and the consequences of refusal, unanimity no longer describes what the public believes. It describes what the system is capable of recording.
Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series—twelve months in Nairobi, April 2025 to April 2026. Letters from the year of waiting are at My Dear Soldier.
Discussion