Tanzania court jails opposition leader for incitement, lifts treason charge

A Tanzanian court has jailed opposition leader Tundu Lissu for four years on a charge of incitement.

But the three-judge panel in Dar-es-Salaam dismissed a charge of treason that carried the threat of a death sentence. The ruling was handed down on Friday, in a trial closely watched internationally.

“We are satisfied that through his statements, the accused intended to disrupt elections and instigate violence,” one judge told a courtroom packed with Lissu’s supporters.

“We sentence you to four years in prison, but the doors are open for appeal,” the judge added.

Lissu, who heads the main opposition party, Chadema, responded that the trial was “political persecution”, accusing the judges of following orders from the government of President Samia Suluhu Hassan.

“Excuses were created to imprison me,” he told the court.

“I was not charged with incitement but you judges are convicting me with it just to impress the person who gives you the titles. I believe these were directives,” he said.

Tito Magoti, a Tanzanian human rights lawyer based in Oxford, UK, said the fact that the treason charge – which is the capital crime in Tanzania’s penal code – was dismissed for Lissu is “a major blow” for the state. “It shows that there wasn’t any intention to charge him with treason, but rather to put him behind bars,” he told Al Jazeera.

Lissu was arrested before the October 2025 presidential vote, as the government carried out a wave of detentions and abductions targeting opponents and critics.

The clampdown sparked huge protests during the election, which President Hassan was declared to have won with 98 percent of the vote.

Security forces responded by killing thousands of demonstrators , according to the opposition and rights groups. The government put the death toll at 518.

“A lot of people in Tanzania will tell you that they are afraid to speak out, especially in the last two years,” said Al Jazeera’s Catherine Soi, reporting from Nairobi in neighbouring Kenya on Friday.

“Leading up to that election they said that if someone like Tundu Lissu can be convicted and put to to jail, what will happen to ordinary citizens?”

Soi said that in the past two years in Tanzania, “we have seen critics put to jail, others silenced, others have left the country, media freedoms have been curtailed, and just last week a figure from Lissu’s party was arrested and charged for treason – so there’s a lot of fear”.

“Off camera people said that many of the charges are politically motivated,” she added.

Security was heightened across Dar-es-Salaam – Tanzania’s commercial capital – and around the court before Friday’s verdict, as Lissu’s supporters gathered for the hearing.

This was the first time that Lissu, 58, faced such serious charges, despite repeated arrests.

In 2017, he survived an assassination attempt in which he was shot 16 times, an attack he believes was politically motivated and which required him to undergo nearly 20 surgeries.

The treason case drew criticism from British and European Union lawmakers, who described it as politically motivated and called for Lissu’s immediate release.

It marked the third high-profile treason trial in mainland Tanzania’s history.

The first two, in the 1970s and 1980s, involved defendants accused of plotting to overthrow and assassinate the country’s founding president, Julius Nyerere.