#When Constitutions Promise Rights#The Paradoxy:Lipi Jema? A Question Without a Comfortable Answer
In Kiswahili, one might ask: "Lipi jema — kuwa na katiba inayokidhi misingi ya kidemokrasia, au kutokuwa nayo, yote ni sawa?" (Which is better — having a constitution that meets democratic standards, or not having one at all, if the outcome is the same?) Across Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya in 2025 and 2026, the question is no longer rhetorical. It is the lived experience of activists abducted from buses, opposition leaders charged with treason, and families laying flowers at barricaded parliaments walls. The paradox is this: constitutional text and lived political reality have come unmoored from each other, and the gap between the two is where East Africa's human rights crisis lives.
Tanzania: A Constitution Without Teeth
Tanzania's 1977 constitution, twice amended, guarantees freedom of expression, assembly, and association. In practice, 2025 told a different story. CHADEMA chairman Tundu Lissu was arrested on April 9, 2025, during a rally and charged with treason — a non-bailable, capital offence — after he called for an electoral boycott over the government's failure to deliver promised reforms. Days later, the electoral commission barred CHADEMA from the October 29, 2025 general election outright, while Luhaga Mpina of ACT-Wazalendo, the second-largest opposition party, was disqualified as well, leaving President Samia Suluhu Hassan to face only minor challengers.
The killings predate the vote. Ali Mohamed Kibao, a senior CHADEMA secretariat member, was abducted from a bus in Dar es Salaam on September 6, 2024, by men in unmarked police vehicles; his body was found a day later, severely beaten and doused in acid. CHADEMA youth activists Deusdedith Soka and Jacob Godwin Mlay, and a motorcycle-taxi driver, Frank Mbise, were abducted on August 18, 2024. Party official Dioniz Kipanya disappeared on July 26, 2024. The Legal and Human Rights Centre documented roughly 100 cases of abduction and enforced disappearance between 2015 and February 2025 alone.
Election day itself turned lethal. When protesters took to the streets of Dar es Salaam and other cities on October 29, 2025, police responded with beatings, live fire, and tear gas, enforcing a five-day nationwide lockdown. Human Rights Watch, after interviewing 48 people across six regions between October 2025 and February 2026, said the toll may run into the hundreds; opposition figures and rights groups put the number killed above 1,000. Tanzania's Minister for Constitution and Legal Affairs, Dr. Juma Homera, confirmed on November 26, 2025 that 2,045 people had been rounded up during and after the demonstrations.
The crisis acquired a regional, cross-border character in May 2025, when Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi and Ugandan journalist-activist Agather Atuhaire travelled to Dar es Salaam to observe Lissu's trial. Both were abducted by Tanzanian authorities; Atuhaire has said she was sexually tortured before being dumped at the border. "The three countries are engaging in cross-border abductions, illegal renditions, and torture," she later told The New Humanitarian — naming Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya in the same breath.
Uganda: Forty Years, One Constitution, No Power Transfer
Uganda's 1995 constitution likewise enshrines multiparty democracy and fundamental freedoms. Yet on January 15, 2026, Yoweri Museveni — in power since 1986 — was declared winner of a seventh presidential term with roughly 73–74 percent of the vote, against Robert Kyagulanyi ("Bobi Wine") of the National Unity Platform (NUP), who took about 23–25 percent. The government imposed a blanket internet shutdown beginning two days before the vote, a measure authorities described as a security necessity and which the opposition called a tool of information control. The United Nations described the election as marred by "widespread repression and intimidation."
Violence broke out in Butambala, roughly 55km southwest of Kampala, where at least seven people were killed; NUP disputes the official account and claims at least ten died when police fired on the home of a party official. After the vote, the military laid siege to Bobi Wine's residence, restricting movement, assaulting his wife and staff, and damaging property; NUP said its leader was forcibly removed by army helicopter, a claim the military's spokesperson Chris Magezi denied as "baseless." Two senior NUP leaders were forcibly disappeared and remained missing as Human Rights Watch reported on January 28, 2026. At least 118 NUP supporters were charged on January 19, 2026 with election-related offences. Catholic priest Father Deusdedit Ssekabira was detained incommunicado for over two weeks for alleged association with Bobi Wine. Most chillingly, Museveni's son and army chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba posted on X on January 19, 2026 that the government had killed 22 NUP "terrorists," adding he was "praying the 23rd is Kabobi."
Kenya: The "Best Constitution in Africa" and Its Broken Promise
Kenya's 2010 constitution is widely regarded — including by its own citizens — as among the most progressive on the continent: a Bill of Rights, devolution, and judicial independence baked into its architecture. Yet the gap between that text and police conduct has now produced two consecutive anniversaries of state violence against the very people the constitution was written to protect.
The Gen Z anti-Finance Bill protests of June 2024 left, by KNCHR's own count, at least 63 dead, 610 injured, and 74 enforced disappearances, with 26 people still missing as of the Human Rights Watch World Report 2026. The Missing Voices Coalition recorded 104 police killings in 2024 and 125 in 2025. On June 25, 2024, six individuals were forced into unmarked vehicles, shuttled through nine police stations, held by masked men for roughly 48 hours, tortured, warned against speaking to journalists, and dumped across Nairobi — a pattern echoed in numerous accounts of plain-clothed men in unmarked cars, sometimes identified by witnesses as Subarus, seizing people off the street.
Two years on, little has resolved:
The second anniversary, June 25, 2026, saw families attempt to lay wreaths at Parliament only to find the building cordoned off, forcing them to leave flowers on barbed wire. Activist Bob Njagi was in detention around the commemorations. The government's compensation programme — KSh 2 billion set aside in the 2025/2026 supplementary budget, with guidelines from KNCHR offering a minimum of KSh 2 million for abduction and enforced-disappearance victims — has itself become a flashpoint: victims' coalitions say that of 35 documented enforced-disappearance cases and 135 torture cases, none appear on the published phase-one payout list, and lawyer Abna Mango has announced plans to sue under Article 47 of the constitution — the same constitution whose fair-administrative-action guarantee the victims say is being violated by the very process meant to remedy earlier violations. Denzel Omondi, 23, arrested at a relative's house days after the #OccupyParliament protests, remains among the missing; his father James Otieno says he avoids public conversation about it because the grief is too raw.
Where the Problem Actually Lies
Three countries, three constitutions of varying quality, one outcome: a security and political class that treats constitutional text as a ceiling on rhetoric rather than a floor under conduct. A few patterns emerge.
First, the instrument is not the safeguard — enforcement is. Kenya's constitution is more liberal on paper than Tanzania's or Uganda's, yet Kenyan police abduct, torture, and dump dissidents using methods nearly identical to those documented in Dar es Salaam. A good constitution constrains a state only when courts, prosecutors, and oversight bodies are willing and able to enforce it against the executive that funds them.
Second, impunity is the connective tissue. In Tanzania, President Hassan ordered an investigation into abductions in 2024; no findings have ever been published. In Kenya, despite KNCHR documentation and court proceedings since 2024, no officer has yet been convicted for protest-related deaths or disappearances. In Uganda, the 2026 pattern of disappearances explicitly echoes unresolved abuses from the 2021 election, despite Museveni's 2022 pledge to rein in security agencies. Without prosecutions, each election cycle simply repeats the last one's abuses.
Third, regional collusion has emerged as an aggravating factor:
Multiple witnesses and reporting point to plainclothed Ugandan security personnel operating inside Tanzania during the 2025 crackdown, under what sources describe to The New Humanitarian as an informal arrangement between Hassan and Museveni; similarly, claims of Ugandan units assisting Kenyan police during the 2024 protests have circulated, alongside the cross-border abduction of Mwangi and Atuhaire. East Africa's autocrats appear to be exporting their repression toolkits to one another faster than the region's citizens can export accountability mechanisms.
Fourth, electoral exclusion functions as a pressure valve removed:
In Tanzania, disqualifying Lissu and Mpina left Hassan facing token opposition; in Uganda, internet shutdowns and the siege of Bobi Wine's home served the same function of denying the opposition oxygen at the moment it mattered most. When the ballot box is foreclosed, protest becomes the only remaining constitutional avenue — and it is the one met with the most lethal response.
Who Is to Blame, and What Should Be Done
Blame is distributed but not equal. Primary responsibility sits with the executives and security commanders who order or tolerate abductions — Hassan's government in Tanzania, Museveni's military-political apparatus in Uganda, and Kenya's police command structure under President Ruto's administration. But responsibility also extends to electoral commissions that disqualify candidates on procedural pretexts, to compensation panels that quietly narrow the scope of victims they will recognize, and to regional bodies — the African Union, SADC, the East African Community — that have so far issued statements of concern rather than binding consequences.
What would change the pattern is neither mysterious nor original:
independent, resourced prosecutions of named officers rather than institutional apologies; publication of full victim lists and compensation criteria rather than opaque "phase one" disbursements; an end to disqualifying opposition candidates through compliant electoral commissions; protection — not surveillance — of witnesses willing to testify against security personnel; and a regional human rights mechanism with actual enforcement teeth, given that abuses are now visibly crossing borders. None of this requires rewriting a single constitution. Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya already have, on paper, enough law to prosecute every abduction described above. What is missing is the will to apply it to the people who give the orders.
The Kiswahili question answers itself once the comparison is made plainly:
a good constitution is not "the same" as a bad one — but only if it is enforced. An unenforced good constitution and a bad one converge on the same outcome: citizens taken off the street in unmarked cars, families denied funerals, and rulers who mistake the absence of prosecution for the presence of legitimacy.