Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu has survived an assassination attempt that left him riddled with bullets, multiple arrests, and long years in exile – all in pursuit of democracy in the east African nation.
But the 57-year-old lawyer may be facing his toughest challenge yet after he was charged with treason, a capital crime, just six months out from national elections.
“The treason case is a path to liberation,” a typically defiant Lissu told supporters in court following the charge on Thursday.
Having returned from exile in 2023, he expressed cautious optimism after President Samia Suluhu Hassan lifted some restrictions imposed by her predecessor John Magufuli, whose hardline rule stifled the opposition and free speech in Tanzania.
In the years since, however, such optimism has proven ill-founded.
Hassan’s government has increasingly moved to quash dissent, with police frequently breaking up rallies and arresting members of Lissu’s opposition Chadema party.
When her Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party swept local polls last year — a result decried by Chadema, who said they would petition the High Court to demand reforms ahead of national polls — Lissu went on the offensive.
“When we say no elections, we don’t mean we will boycott. We will block the elections through confrontation,” he told party members in December.
A month later, he took the party’s reins as chairman from longtime Chadema leader Freeman Mbowe.
Currently detained and awaiting his next court hearing, Lissu must now chart a difficult path: on Saturday, his party was barred from standing in the upcoming ballot after it refused to sign an electoral code of conduct.
– ‘Ripped apart’ by bullets –
Lissu walks with a slight limp after being shot 16 times in a 2017 attack he believes was politically motivated, requiring almost 20 surgeries.
He had already been arrested six times that year, and then, in September, as he pulled up outside his house in the capital Dodoma, gunmen sprayed his car with bullets.
“You have to be aware of the fact that… all my limbs, my legs, my waist, my arms, my stomach were basically ripped apart by 16 bullet shots and therefore to mend me, to put me back on my feet, took a long time,” Lissu told AFP before the 2020 election.
He contested that election against Magufuli, who died just five months after winning his second term.
Immediately after the polls, Lissu said he started receiving death threats and was arrested but sought refuge with foreign diplomats before he eventually fled the country.
After returning in 2023, he faced multiple detentions culminating in April’s arrest. Authorities have charged him with treason, one of the few crimes in Tanzania that carries the death penalty.
Lissu was born in 1968 in a small village called Mahambe in the central region of Singida, where he helped run his family farm and took care of his father’s cattle as a young boy, while attending primary school.
It was while listening to radio programmes on current affairs and reading voraciously that Lissu first got a taste for politics.
He studied law at the University of Dar es Salaam and quickly plunged into human rights and environmental law.
– Longstanding critic –
He worked from 1999-2009 for the Lawyers’ Environmental Action Team (LEAT), fighting for the rights of poor, rural communities, whether against industrial shrimp farming or foreign gold mining companies.
He also worked on environmental issues between 1999 and 2002 for the Washington DC-based World Resources Institute (WRI).
Lissu’s activism led him into politics and he was elected as a member of parliament in 2010, working his way up to Chadema’s number one.
While he had been arrested under the previous government over his mining activism, it was after Magufuli’s election that he became even more vocal, his actions crystalising his stature as one of the most prominent opposition Tanzanian politicians.
As online chatter roared after his arrest and charge, a prominent Tanzanian lawyer, Peter Madeleka, posted on X: “Tundu Lissu is the only person in the world who survived 16 bullets. Will the TREASON case succeed in ending his life?”
Activist Maria Sarungi said Hassan’s actions against Lissu had backfired.
“She hasn’t brought him down, she has elevated him,” she said.
“Tundu Lissu is like water -– if you don’t drink it, you’ll bathe in it.”
