deshola DAR ES SALAAM, the promise of the East African Community was always simple: a truck driver in Mombasa should be able to clear customs in an hour; a lawyer in Kampala should be able to work in Arusha without a visa.
That was the theory. The reality looked very different in May 2025, inside a holding cell in Dar es Salaam.
Boniface Mwangi, a Kenyan photographer who has spent a career antagonizing the powerful, and Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan lawyer, traveled to Tanzania to watch a court case. They weren’t protesting. They were sitting in a gallery, observing the trial of Tundu Lissu, an opposition leader who survived being shot 16 times in 2017 and still refuses to stay quiet.
For simply being there, Mwangi and Atuhaire were arrested. They were detained, interrogated, and, by their own accounts, treated brutally.
This wasn’t just a diplomatic blunder. It was a stress test for the entire region, and the region is failing.
The Paranoia in Dodoma
Tanzania used to be the boring neighbor. In a region famous for coups and ethnic violence, it was the “Switzerland of Africa”, socialist, sleepy, and stable. That version of the country is effectively gone.
Since the botched election in October 2025, the government in Dodoma has been operating in a defensive crouch. When the votes were counted and the protests started, the state didn’t negotiate; it cracked down. Amnesty International documented the aftermath: police firing live rounds into crowds, beatings in custody, and hospitals ordered not to treat the wounded.
The arrest of the two foreign activists in May wasn’t random. It was the logic of the crackdown extending outward. When a government becomes terrified of its own voters, it stops trusting its neighbors, too.
The diplomatic cleanup was messy. Kenyan President William Ruto had to publicly apologize to a group of Tanzanian MPs, a rare moment of a head of state walking on eggshells to appease a neighbor. He asked for calm, but the apology barely covered the cracks.
Trust is the Currency
The real cost here isn’t just political feeling; it’s hard cash. The East African economy runs on the assumption that rules matter.
Tanzania is a logistics hub. It connects the landlocked interior to the Indian Ocean. But trade routes rely on confidence. If a Ugandan lawyer isn’t safe in a Tanzanian courtroom, a Ugandan logistics firm starts worrying about its cargo on Tanzanian roads. The “stability” that investors buy into is evaporating.
No Easy Way Back
Diplomats like to talk about “dialogue” and “frameworks.” But fixing this requires more than another summit in a luxury hotel.
The East African Community (EAC) and the African Union are currently staring at their shoes. A serious response would force a confrontation: establishing a dedicated forum to investigate civic space violations. It would mean admitting that a member state is breaking the rules.
Inside Tanzania, the government has promised commissions of inquiry into the election violence. Historically, these commissions are where scandals go to die, buried under paperwork and endless delays. Unless these investigations have teeth, meaning international observers and zero government interference, they are just theater.
The same goes for the laws on the books. You cannot have a free trade zone with a country that criminalizes free assembly.
The Choice
Tanzania is at a fork in the road. It can keep tightening the screws, choosing regime security over regional trust. That path leads to isolation and a shrinking economy. Or it can do the hard, embarrassing work of reversing course, repealing the laws that jail critics and actually investigating the police officers who pulled the triggers in October.
The arrest of Mwangi and Atuhaire was a warning. The bonds holding East Africa together are older and stronger than the current administration in Dodoma, but they aren’t infinite. They are fraying. And if they snap, no amount of diplomatic apologies will tie them back together.
