By Adonis Byemelwa
I first heard about the disappearances the way many Tanzanians do now: quietly, through WhatsApp voice notes and hushed phone calls, through a cousin in Morogoro or a church elder in Njombe who suddenly stopped answering messages. It never arrives as breaking news. It comes as an absence.
That is what makes the current moment in Tanzania so unsettling. On the surface, the country is moving. Roads are being paved, ports expanded, and foreign investors returning. Under President Samia Suluhu Hassan, GDP growth has hovered around 5–6 per cent annually since the pandemic.
Trade with China has climbed past $8 billion a year, boosted by duty-free access for Tanzanian exports including gold, coffee, cashews, and manufactured goods. Major infrastructure projects, from the Standard Gauge Railway to port upgrades in Dar es Salaam, are no longer PowerPoint dreams; they are concrete and steel.
However, alongside this visible progress runs a darker, quieter story: abductions, disappearances, and unresolved killings that have left families suspended in permanent uncertainty.
For years, officials denied the scale of the problem. That is why Prime Minister Mwigulu Nchemba’s public admission in Tanga on 16 February 2026 felt different.
Standing before local leaders, he acknowledged plainly that Tanzania has “a problem of this kind,” and ordered authorities to protect a village chairperson who had received death threats after exposing illegal logging. It was a rare moment of candour, and a meaningful departure from past opacity.
Words, of course, are not justice. But they matter. They signal that denial is no longer official policy. Critics, including writers at The Economist, have framed Tanzania as sliding back toward repression, arguing that economic reforms mask a hardening security state.
Their reporting draws on survivor testimony, opposition accounts, and UN expert findings citing more than 200 enforced disappearances since 2019. These numbers are alarming, and they deserve serious attention.
Still, the picture is more complicated than a single villain narrative allows. Tanzania is not a monolith. Power here is fragmented across ministries, regional commissioners, police units, and intelligence agencies, often operating with minimal coordination and even less oversight.
Collapsing this entire machinery into one presidential silhouette may make for sharper headlines, but it blurs responsibility. If accountability is ever going to land, it must be institutional, not symbolic.
The Economist also treats economic growth as a sideshow, as though prosperity and repression occupy separate universes. They do not. Growth changes expectations. It raises the stakes. It creates both pressure and possibility.
I have spoken with small-scale exporters in Kilimanjaro who are shipping coffee directly to Asian buyers for the first time. Cashew farmers in Mtwara now track global prices on their phones. Young engineers hired for railway projects talk about steady paychecks and also about fear when political conversations drift too far.
That contradiction is the story. Trade with China alone illustrates it. Bilateral commerce now exceeds $8 billion annually, up from roughly $5 billion just five years ago. Tanzanian exports, once dominated by raw materials, increasingly include processed agricultural goods and light manufacturing. Duty-free access has opened doors for small exporters who previously could not compete. These gains are real. They ripple through households.
However, so does insecurity. In the nine days before October’s general election last year, at least 13 opposition members vanished across Simiyu, Singida, Morogoro, Njombe, and Shinyanga. Families described forced entries and unmarked vehicles. A Catholic priest has been missing for over six months. Survivors recount beatings, blindfolds, and being left for dead.
This is not a rumour. It is documented trauma. What is missing, and where criticism of the government lands hardest, is a credible investigation. Police explanations invoking witchcraft or staged disappearances have eroded public trust.
Human rights lawyers say many victims are too afraid to file reports. No independent commission has yet mapped command responsibility or established prosecutorial timelines.
That vacuum feeds despair. Nonetheless, zoom out further. Tanzania continues to mediate regional conflicts involving the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda, a diplomacy that requires credibility and restraint.
Domestically, media restrictions imposed under the previous administration have been eased. Opposition rallies have resumed. Civil society groups operate more openly than they did five years ago.
These shifts do not erase abuses. However, they complicate the claim of a straightforward authoritarian slide. The Economist, published in London for a global investor audience, has a long record of diagnosing African transitions through tidy frameworks that do not always survive contact with local reality. That does not invalidate its reporting, but it does remind us that outside lenses come with assumptions.
What Tanzanians live every day is messier. We are a country trying to grow while healing from institutional scars. We are parents calculating school fees alongside bail money. We are church congregations praying for missing members while celebrating new roads. We are citizens who want stability without silence.
So, what now? Acknowledgement must become action. Independent investigations, witness protection, judicial oversight, and security-sector reform cannot remain talking points. Economic momentum offers leverage; it should also fund accountability. International partners who celebrate trade figures must press just as hard for rule-of-law benchmarks.
Most Tanzanians are not asking for upheaval. They are asking for safety. They are asking for answers. They are asking not to disappear. Progress measured only in exports is incomplete. Justice delayed corrodes trust. Moreover, development without dignity is fragile.
Tanzania does not need slogans from critics abroad or leaders at home. It needs institutions brave enough to confront abuse, and citizens empowered to speak without fear. That is the real crossroads. Furthermore, everyone, from the State House to village councils, is already standing in the middle of it.
