Karua demands Lissu’s release as Tanzania court conviction draws regional condemnation

The acquittal on treason charges has done nothing to free Tanzania’s most prominent opposition leader — and Kenya’s Martha Karua says that tells you everything you need to know

By Jacinta Njambi

People’s Liberation Party leader Martha Karua yesterday demanded the immediate release of Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu after a High Court in Dar es Salaam acquitted him of treason but handed him a four-year prison sentence for incitement, in a ruling that has drawn sharp criticism from democracy advocates across East Africa.

The three-judge panel delivered its verdict on Friday, 6 November 2026, in a case that has kept the chairman of Tanzania’s main opposition party, CHADEMA, behind bars since April 2025. The court found that prosecutors had failed to prove a key element of the treason charge, acquitting Lissu on that count. It then convicted him of incitement, ruling that his campaign slogan — “No Reforms, No Election” — was sufficient to establish the offence. “By uttering those words with the intention of disseminating them to the public, the accused incited the public to disrupt the 2025 elections,” the court ruled.

Lissu rejected the conviction with contempt. “The offence of incitement is one that you, honourable judges, have manufactured,” he told the court. “You have created an offence that did not exist, and you have done so on political directives.” He indicated his intention to apply for bail and confirmed he had been granted leave to appeal to Tanzania’s Court of Appeal.

For Karua, the former Kenyan Justice Minister, the verdict confirmed what she described as a politically motivated prosecution dressed in judicial clothing. “The acquittal confirms that there was no case to warrant Mr Lissu’s incarceration for over a year or to justify barring him and his party from participating in elections,” she said. “He should be set at liberty forthwith.” She went further, condemning the incitement sentence as a deliberate mechanism to achieve through a lesser charge what the treason charge had failed to accomplish. “An acquittal should not become a change of charge designed to achieve the same outcome: keeping an opposition leader behind bars,” Karua stated.

Her intervention carries weight beyond the symbolic. Karua is positioning herself as a presidential candidate in Kenya’s August 2027 general election, and her vocal defence of democratic principles in Tanzania is consistent with a political identity built on institutional accountability and rule of law. That she speaks out at a moment when Kenya’s own political temperature is rising adds a layer of domestic resonance to what might otherwise read as regional commentary.

The context in Tanzania is sobering. President Samia Suluhu Hassan won the October 2025 general election with 98 per cent of the vote, after CHADEMA and other opposition challengers, including Lissu, were excluded from the contest. The elections were followed by widespread protests and a security crackdown that an official inquiry found left at least 500 people dead. The treason charges against Lissu were filed in that environment and have attracted sustained international concern about the state of political pluralism in a country that once maintained a more stable, if imperfect, democratic tradition.

“Democracy cannot exist where opposition leaders are imprisoned, political parties are intimidated, and citizens are denied a meaningful choice at the ballot,” Karua said. “Political competition is not a crime; it is an essential pillar of democracy.” She closed with a demand that left no room for diplomatic ambiguity: “Let Lissu walk free. Democracy must be won through the ballot, not enforced through prison walls.”

For now, Lissu remains in custody, pursuing an appeal against a conviction his supporters say was constructed to serve the same purpose as the charge the court just dismissed. The acquittal on treason is, in that reading, not a victory — it is a legal manoeuvre that swaps one instrument of detention for another while the outcome stays the same.

A man walks free of treason. He stays in prison anyway. Martha Karua is right to call that what it is.

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