Statement on President Netumbo’s State Visit to Tanzania

Statement by the Shadow Minister of International Relations and Trade

1. President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah is in Dar es Salaam on a three-day State Visit that has so far produced warm words on trade, a pledge to deepen economic ties, and a pilgrimage to the liberation sites where Namibia’s freedom was once nursed.

2. On the one subject that tests whether any of those words carry weight, the jailing of Tanzania’s opposition leader and the killing of its citizens, there has been public silence.

3. Tundu Lissu, leader of the main opposition party CHADEMA, has been held since April 2025 on a treason charge that carries the death penalty and allows no bail. In February 2026 the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention unlawful.

4. In April 2026 the American Bar Association’s human-rights centre found his prosecution politically motivated. He sits in a cell in the very city the President is visiting this weekend, barred, like his entire party, from the October election that returned President Samia Suluhu Hassan with 98 percent of the vote.

5. In the weeks after that election, United Nations human-rights experts condemned hundreds of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and mass arbitrary detentions. Amnesty International found that security forces used disproportionate lethal force and shut down the internet. CHADEMA puts the dead in the thousands; the government calls these figures exaggerated but has produced no count of its own. The Catholic Church in Tanzania said the country had lost its dignity.

6. This is the liberation club at work: the unspoken arrangement in which yesterday’s freedom movements, now holding power, shield one another from the accountability they once demanded of empires.

7. The Namibian Presidency’s own statement rests entirely on the sanctuary Tanzania gave our exiles in the 1960s and 1970s. That history is real, and it cuts the other way: a nation that knows what it is to need refuge has no business going quiet when the people next door are being shot for asking the questions we once asked.

8. This weekend the President will lay wreaths at the Namibian Freedom Fighters’ Cemetery in Kongwa, where Namibians who died for our freedom are buried. A few hundred kilometres away, Tanzanian families are still searching for relatives their own government refuses to account for.

9. We honour the Tanzania that sheltered our freedom fighters by standing with the Tanzanians now fighting for theirs, not by signing trade deals over their graves.

10. IPC therefore calls on President Nandi-Ndaitwah to publicly raise the immediate and unconditional release of Tundu Lissu, consistent with the UN Working Group’s finding; and to report to the National Assembly on her return on what was raised on these matters, and table every MOU signed during the visit.

Namibia is all we have
Namibia is not for sale
We must and can save it!

Back to rodneycloete.com.na · Earlier on this site: An Embassy Is Not a Consolation Prize (31 August 2026)