How Tanzania elections revealed that AU is an irrelevant white elephant

Last week’s election fiasco in Tanzania knocks you breathless. It leaves you asking hard questions, as a citizen of East Africa, and as a member of the African family. But it especially lifts the veil on the African Union (AU) to give its correct character as an ineffective elite self-protection club for African leaders. It is an irrelevant white elephant, disconnected from the aspirations of the peoples of Africa, especially the youth. 

The AU Commission was in a feverish rush to send a congratulatory message to Samia Suluhu Hassan for her ostensible election victory. The message went out even as Tanzanian police killed citizens in the streets in their hundreds, for protesting an election fraud that the AU calls a victory. While a later AU statement joined SADC and other observers to fault the election, the damage was already done. 

Buoyed up by, among others, the AU validation, Suluhu went on to be inaugurated from a military base in Dodoma. The irony was glaring. Here was a civilian President being inaugurated from an army barracks. The venue was informed by fear of potential disruption by civilians. These are the same citizens who are claimed to have given Suluhu 32 million votes, and a tally of 98 per cent. 

Where in the free world does this happen? We must ask uncomfortable questions. Who are we, we people who are called Africans? Are we the children of a lesser god? Why do we behave so strangely in the global assembly of humankind? Why is our bar of standards and expectations so low? That we would call electoral fraud a victory is worse than scandalous. Why does Africa live comfortably with theft as its universal definition? Electoral theft seems to be the ultimate sought-after robbery. 

Even then, the AU would usually be expected to hold its breath and its horses, just in case contestation among the contenders for power in the election should end up at its doorstep. Having jumped the gun by pouring praise on Suluhu and her putative victory, how does the union manage itself if there should be the need for external good Samaritans to arbitrate?

What should the world make of a continent whose topmost leadership organ behaves like the AU Commission? What, indeed,  is the African Union in the lives of the ordinary people of Africa? Does it belong to the people, or is it a dictator’s club? The AU has styled itself as a votary for justice for the people of Africa. It has travelled through the year 2025 under the banner of the “Year of Reparations: Justice for Africans and People of African Descent.” 

The question that lingers is where electoral justice sits in this quest for justice. Liberal democracy is founded on the fundamental principle of consent of the governed. A regime that does not enjoy the consent of the governed is, by this very fact, illegitimate. On this account, the AU claims not workto with regimes that ascend to power through unconstitutional means. 

At the time of this writing, the AU has suspended six countries from its forums and activities, because they came to power through such means. They include Burkina Faso, Sudan, Mali, Niger, and Gabon. While they remain members of the union, they are hamstrung. They cannot participate in AU meetings, nor in other decision-making forums. The AU’s African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance, speaks of  “zero tolerance” for unconstitutional governments. 

But when is power unconstitutionally taken? Coups d’état, mercenary interventions, and takeover by rebel groups have been identified as examples of unconstitutional access to government. But also on the list is refusal by an incumbent to relinquish power after an election loss. Yet, should a power grab through a shambolic election also qualify for inclusion on this list? 

When is the taking over of government by gunpower undemocratic, and when is it not? Put differently, why does the AUC rush to congratulate a leader who clings to power through electoral fraud, while it also ostracises military people who take over from a civilian regime through a putsch? Does the AU consider a power grab through electoral fiction to be democratic? What lessons does the Tanzanian fiasco of last week teach us? Is it constitutional for a sitting civilian regime to take an election through bullets? Where is the intersection between the ballot and the bullet?

Tanzania’s recent happenings will be recorded in Africa’s history as electoral fiction and fraud. From the very start, the elements were deliberately aligned to deliver victory to Suluhu. She was probably going to win, even in a proper democratic contest. Yet, for an abundance of caution, her strong opponents had to be locked away in police cells, denied the opportunity to run against her. Others were disqualified for spurious reasons. There was no choice for voters, except one between Suluhu and Suluhu. A frustrated electorate exploded in her face, as had been prognosed by East Africa’s leading pundits and political thinkers. 

Suluhu took over in March 2021 to complete what was John Pombe Magufuli’s second term, following his sudden and mysterious death during the COVID-19 pandemic. Magufuli was considered a despot of sorts. Suluhu initially packaged herself as a democrat and a reformist. Her country and East Africa heaved a sigh of relief at the arrival of this democrat, the region’s first woman head of state and government. 

She ticked just about every right box of democratic governance. She talked to the Opposition. She allowed the sound of alternative political drumbeats. She embraced the sorority of skilled diplomacy in the region. Then something happened. The rest has been a downward swivel to one of the most shambolic elections anywhere in world history. But the big shock was not the fatally flawed character of the elections. Nor was it the killing of hundreds – perhaps thousands – who succumbed to police bullets. It was the swiftness of the AU and African leaders to embrace one of their own. 

In the thick of the miasma, the African Union Commission, through its fledgling chairperson, Youssouf Ali Mahamoud, swiftly sent a congratulatory message. Others to congratulate Suluhu were President Xi Jinping of China, and of course, Presidents William Ruto of Kenya, and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. Museveni hailed what he called Suluhu’s victory. He attributed it to “the confidence the people of Tanzania have in Suluhu’s leadership.”

Africa can refer to a crown of blood as “victory and the confidence” by the citizens in the crowd. The rest of the world must think that Africa is a joke. Certainly, that was what David Lamb, an American journalist, made of Africa in the bygone age. In the volume titled The Africans, Lamb scoffed at the defunct Organisation of African Unity (OAU) as a dictators’ club. He lamented that an institution with so lofty dreams could fail so dismally. 

The OAU, and the AU after it, was at birth a grand dream. When it took over from the OAU at the turn of the millennium, the AU resonated with notions of grandeur. “Africa Rising” and “the African Renaissance” were the buzz phrases. The eloquence of aspirations by Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal was dizzying. The World Bank caught the flu. It declared the 21st Century a season that belonged to Africa. “Can Africa claim the 21st Century?” the World Bank asked in a premier publication in 2000. 

Those dreaming of an African Century recognised that the continent was coming from a succession of difficult centuries. For more than half a millennium, the continent had groaned under the weight of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. The Cold War years had made accountability by the State a distant pipe dream. The world looked on as dictators rode roughshod through their countries, with plunder of public resources, murder on massive scales, and sundry mayhem. 

But the turn of the century and the millennium opened up the doors of hope, even as the continent staggered between potential and crises, at the end of the Cold War. The rhetoric of liberation from external European predators was giving way to hope. This bombast could no longer explain why Africa lagged behind the world. We had to look for the reasons at home. The notion of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) was born. 

It is hard to believe that NEPAD still exists and that African countries still pick up its bills. NEPAD was, in 200,0, a public accountability mechanism for African leaders. It emphasised governance peer review by African leaders. It got off to a promising start, coordinated by Graca Machel. But, like all good things African, it petered out from the fringes of AU activities. It exists today as an inconspicuous entity, renamed African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD). Today, nobody speaks of accountability, good governance, and peer review. 

Hence, those who should be watchdogs over electoral democracy in Africa nervously rush to validate thoroughly flawed elections. But they will be found in global forums, thundering away about the world serving manure sandwiches to Africa. It is at this nexus that the world begins wondering about the mad continent that we must be. People who romp to power through democratic fraud and massacre will go to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to blubber in high-sounding liberalist idiom. 

They will peddle anachronistic grievances and pathetic lamentations about offshore offensives against Africa. They will clap for each other and give standing ovations to those who gabble with claptrap on the need for Africa to be treated as an equal. They will demand that Africo sit permanently on the UN Security Council, even when they should know that they are the foremost security risk to the continent. 

But has not the ideology of African victimhood been overtaken by time and space? The responsibility of creating credible institutions and cultivating integrity rests squarely with Africans themselves. If the dream of a thriving continent in the 21st century still exists, the AUC should wake up to the fact that centuries are not gifts to be granted to Africa by global well-wishers. 

The things that Africans dream of are earned through visionary leadership, courage, and discipline. They begin with democratic elections, as the expression of consent by the governed. But Africans use elections as opportunities to steal political power. The thief who steals political power is the most dangerous robber. To steal political power is to steal the government. 

When you have stolen the government, you are ready to steal everything else. You are essentially a gangster. You must surround yourself with other gangsters. To maintain the gang, you must give members the latitude to plunder public resources without being answerable to anybody. Together with them, you take full control of public finance, public procurement, and public audit. You rope in the public security apparatus, the investigative agencies and the court system. 

Your machinery for misrule is complete. This is why the AU has become a laughable entity, in its rush to validate stolen elections and brutality in Africa. Besides Tanzania, the AU has, in the recent past, failed to question electoral fraud in Cameroon, where 92-year-old Paul Biya was returned for the umpteenth time. Biya has been in office since 1982. 

That he is effectively in control is a matter of conjecture, best left to his country. But the defectiveness of the electoral process in Cameroon has astounded even Biya’s own daughter, Brenda Biya, who campaigned against her father, before being arm-twisted into surrender. Some candidates called out the results for themselves. Eventually, the usual thing happened: the AU and African leaders sent the usual validation messages. 

Hope has never been a matter of wishful thinking. It is vision turned into energy and action. Often, both the energy and action define themselves as defiance. In Africa, as elsewhere in the underdeveloped world, this vision and energy are finding expression in youth protests and uprisings. 

The generational divide in Africa is proving to be the most profound fault line. The continent’s ageing and self-serving ruling class is finding it difficult to contain a young and impatient populace. With a median age of under twenty, Africa is governed by men old enough to be grandfathers to the governed. And the governed are denying the dinosaurs the consent to govern by fiat. This is what President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania should know. It is what the rest of Africa should wake up to. 

The AU, especially, should know that Africa’s youth know that romanticising the past, recycling mediocrity, and glorifying grievance will not solve their countries’ challenges. Only democratic and accountable leadership will. Africa’s youth are not about to stop pushing for that –  in the streets, in hamlets, on the beaches, everywhere. President Suluhu should know this and stop blaming ghosts from “a neighbouring country” for the mess that Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) has fomented over the decades. 

Cross-border citizen activism is a warning shot to African leaders. Someday, this thing is going to run from coast to coast. It could swallow up everyone in leadership. The time to wake up and transform Africa is nowHopefullyyy the leaders and their AU are listening. 

Dr Barrack Muluka, PhD [Politics & International Relations, Leicester, UK]