To many, denying even a temporary injunction felt less like judicial restraint and more like disregard for how justice is perceived in politically sensitive cases.
Tanzania Trust on Trial: Why the Chande Commission Faces a Deepening Crisis of Credibility
By Adonis Byemelwa
The legal challenge brought by human rights activists against the Chande Commission was never going to be a quiet procedural dispute. It arrived in a country already bruised by the violence of 29 October 2025 and weary of official processes that promise clarity but often deliver carefully worded ambiguity.
When the High Court declined to halt the commission’s work, the ruling did more than clear a legal path for the inquiry. It reopened an older wound about trust, who holds it, who has lost it, and who is being asked, once again, to suspend disbelief.
In the days that followed, public reaction spilt far beyond court corridors, on social media, lawyers, journalists, students, and ordinary voters picked apart the decision line by line, not as legal technicians but as citizens reading it through lived experience.
The most common question was blunt: if the legality and independence of a commission are under active challenge, why allow it to continue as though nothing were at stake?
To many, the refusal to grant even a temporary injunction felt less like judicial restraint and more like indifference to how justice is perceived in politically charged cases.
That perception matters. Tanzania’s recent history is littered with inquiries that began with solemn promises and ended with reports quietly shelved. Families who lost relatives in past confrontations remember press conferences, not prosecutions.
Journalists recall commissions that listened politely and then dissolved into silence. Against that backdrop, Rosemary Mwakitwange’s decision to go to court resonated because it spoke to a familiar fear: that by the time a challenge is heard, the story will already have been written.
Mwakitwange’s critique was precise rather than rhetorical. She questioned the legal basis of the commission, its terms of reference, and the composition of its membership.
Her central argument was simple: an inquiry cannot credibly examine alleged State violence when several of its members have professional histories intertwined with the very institutions under scrutiny.
Conflicts of interest, she argued, do not require proof of bad faith; they arise from proximity, loyalty, and institutional memory. When the court declined to pause the commission’s work, activists warned that the challenge risked becoming academic, overtaken by events before a judge could examine its substance.
Outside the courtroom, the ruling fed a broader scepticism about judicial independence. Commentators were careful not to accuse individual judges of misconduct, but they questioned whether the courts, as institutions, are equipped to resist executive gravity in moments like this.
The tone online was less conspiratorial than resigned. People spoke of patterns rather than plots, noting how sensitive cases tend to move quickly past questions of power and linger instead on technicalities.
It was in this atmosphere that Godbless Lema’s anger cut through. The former Arusha Urban MP did not bother with legal nuance. For him, the commission symbolised a familiar choreography: violence, outrage, inquiry, closure without consequence.
“You cannot investigate yourself and call it justice,” he said. “This is a commission whose conclusion is already known. Victims are being invited to participate in their own erasure.”
His words circulated widely not because they were novel, but because they echoed what many were already saying in quieter tones.
Legal voices added weight to the critique. Peter Madeleka, a respected advocate, avoided political theatrics and focused instead on institutional design.
He pointed out that credible inquiries elsewhere often hinge on visible distance from power: independent appointments, transparent selection criteria, and, crucially, participation by those who mistrust the State.
“Independence is not a declaration,” he remarked. “It is a structure. When structure fails, confidence collapses.” His concern was not merely who sat on the commission, but who did not, civil society figures, international jurists, or experts with no prior ties to the security apparatus.
Those concerns intensified after remarks attributed to President Samia Suluhu Hassan, urging the commission to rigorously question opposition leaders accused of inciting unrest. Language matters in moments like this.
To critics, the call to “grill” opposition figures sounded less like a neutral search for facts and more like a signal of where responsibility should lie. Government allies then framed the opposition’s refusal to cooperate with the commission as evidence of guilt, rather than as a protest against a process they considered compromised.’
Chadema and ACT-Wazalendo have consistently denied allegations that they incited violence or encouraged mobs during the vote.
They point instead to blocked polling stations, arrests of party agents, disrupted tallying, and a digital shutdown that cut citizens off from information at the most critical moment.
For their supporters, the unrest was not manufactured chaos but the predictable result of a political process perceived as closed and coercive.
The government, for its part, has mounted a robust defence. Senior officials argue that experience within State institutions is precisely what qualifies commission members to understand complex security situations.
They reject the idea that past service equals present bias, warning that dismissing seasoned public servants’ risks weakening the State itself.
Religious leaders, particularly prominent Muslim sheikhs, have reinforced this message, urging the public to step back from heated debate and allow the commission to work.
Their calls for calm are rooted in genuine concern about further instability, but they have also drawn criticism for appearing to prioritise order over accountability.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mwigulu Nchemba has taken the government’s narrative directly to the public. Travelling across the country, he has spoken with striking certainty about the causes of the October violence.
Again and again, the Prime Minister has insisted that the unrest was engineered by foreign actors who funnelled vast sums of money into Tanzania to destabilise the State.
At various points, he has tied these claims to global competition over critical minerals, suggesting that the country’s natural resources made it a strategic target for external manipulation.
The issue is not that such scenarios are implausible. It is that they have been presented as settled conclusions rather than propositions requiring proof.
No detailed evidence has been placed in the public domain. No independent analysts, economists, or security experts have been invited to scrutinise or test the claims. Instead, assertions have hardened into narrative.
This has led critics to ask a pointed question: if senior government figures already know who is responsible, what, precisely, remains for the commission to investigate? Supporters of the government respond that matters of national security cannot be openly disclosed. Nevertheless, the absence of verifiable information has only widened public suspicion, not diminished it.
Lost in this exchange are the voices of those most directly affected. In quiet conversations, families speak of relatives who never returned home, of injuries treated discreetly to avoid attention, of fear that lingered long after the streets fell silent.
Traders recall days of shuttered businesses and empty markets. Students remember scrambling for information as mobile networks went dark, cut off from both news and reassurance.
These lived experiences resist simple explanation. They do not fit neatly into narratives of foreign plots or opposition provocation. They are fragmented, deeply personal, and unresolved.
That is why the commission’s credibility matters so profoundly. The polish of its final report does not judge an inquiry, but by whether those who suffered recognise their reality within it.
Without opposition participation, without visible independence, and without a judiciary willing to interrogate the process itself, the Chande Commission risks producing a document that is administratively complete yet morally thin.
The State has every right to maintain order and investigate violence. The question is whether it is prepared to submit itself to the same level of scrutiny it demands of others. History suggests that societies heal not when inquiries affirm official certainty, but when they are brave enough to unsettle it.
