How Samia Suluhu Hassan and Yoweri Museveni Are Running the Same Playbook#THE PLAYBOOK They sit on opposite sides of Lake Victoria, wear different party colours, and came to power through very different doors — one through a constitutional death-bed succession, the other through the barrel of a gun in the bush of 1986. Yet strip away the geography and President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania and President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda are, in 2026, governing from the same script: family enthroned around the presidency, courts and police weaponised against rivals, and elections that exist mainly to produce a number large enough to be called a mandate. This is not a coincidence of style. It is what happens when power is treated as inheritance rather than trust.
The family as state apparatus
In Kampala, the Museveni household is not a family — it is a parallel government. Janet Museveni, the president's wife since 1973, has run the Ministry of Education and Sports since 6 June 2016, controlling the second best-funded ministry in the country after Defence. Their son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, commands the Uganda People's Defence Forces as Chief of Defence Forces, having previously headed Land Forces — and has openly positioned himself as heir apparent, a role the president has done nothing to discourage. The president's brother, General Salim Saleh, sits as a senior presidential adviser on defence. In-laws such as Sam Kutesa, father-in-law to Muhoozi, held the Foreign Affairs docket for two decades. Cousins occupy ministries, ambassadorial posts, police command, and lucrative import licences. When Museveni unveiled his new Cabinet in late May 2026, Janet kept Education and Muhoozi kept his military perch — continuity dressed up as stability.
In Dar es Salaam, the pattern is younger but moving faster. Samia's daughter, Wanu Hafidh Ameir, has sat in the Zanzibar House of Representatives since 2005 and in the National Assembly on special seats since 2016; she is married to Mohamed Mchengerwa, a sitting CCM minister — an in-law relationship that places the president's own household inside two arms of government at once. Far more consequential is her son, Abdul Halim Hafidh Ameir. Since roughly 2024, Tanzanian journalists, exiled officials and regional press — including a July 2025 public resignation statement from former CCM minister and ambassador Humphrey Polepole — have alleged that Abdul operates as a shadow chief of the Tanzania Intelligence and Security Service (TISS), working alongside the officially appointed director-general, Suleiman Abubakar Mombo, whom Samia installed on 11 July 2024. Abdul has been named in Africa Confidential reporting as widely accused of coordinating attacks on opposition activists and politicians in tandem with police, and as untouchable within the security establishment. Polepole himself was reported to have gone missing on 6 October 2025, a month before the general election, after making these claims. In June 2026, activist Maria Sarungi-Tsehai publicly alleged Abdul led a delegation to Qatar to broker the sale of Bank of Tanzania gold reserves — a claim officials have not fully addressed.
Then there is the optics that speak louder than any statement. When Samia made Tanzania's first presidential visit to Russia in more than fifty years — a three-day state visit that began on 3 June 2026, only the second Tanzanian presidential trip to Moscow since Julius Nyerere's in October 1969 — the delegation that mattered was not built around her husband, Hafidh Ameir, the country's low-profile "First Gentleman" since 2021. It was Abdul who was positioned as a fixture of her inner travelling circle, at a moment when Washington was reviewing relations with Dar es Salaam and had just sanctioned a senior Tanzanian police officer over the torture of two activists. A head of state choosing to travel flanked by a son accused of running a shadow terror apparatus, rather than the spouse who nominally occupies the ceremonial "first family" role, is not incidental. It is a signal of where power actually sits.
Silencing the opposition, one remand at a time
Both governments have discovered the same legal trick: you do not need to convict a rival if you can simply never let the trial finish.
In Uganda, four-time presidential candidate Dr Kizza Besigye was abducted in Nairobi, Kenya, on 16 November 2024 and smuggled across the border to face a military court, later moved to a civilian court in February 2025 after Uganda's Supreme Court ruled that trying civilians in military courts was unconstitutional. Besigye was upgraded from firearms charges to treason — a capital, non-bailable offence. By November 2025, he had spent a full year at Luzira Maximum Security Prison without trial, his bail applications repeatedly denied, his lead lawyers either jailed (Erias Lukwago, seized by the army) or barred from the country (Kenya's Martha Karua). His treason trial finally opened in mid-2026, without his own defence counsel present.
In Tanzania, Tundu Lissu — CHADEMA's national chairman and a survivor of a 2017 assassination attempt — was arrested on 9 April 2025 in Mbinga, Ruvuma Region, hours after addressing a rally for the party's "No Reforms, No Election" campaign. He was driven over 1,000 kilometres overnight to Dar es Salaam and charged with treason the next day, alongside three counts under the Cybercrimes Act, for a 3 April 2025 YouTube address accusing police of vote-rigging and judges of ruling under CCM's instruction. Like Besigye, Lissu has never been allowed to enter a plea on the treason count itself — a non-bailable charge — and by April 2026 he had marked a full year in custody, his imprisonment declared unlawful by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention while he still awaited trial. His arrest came just before CHADEMA was formally barred from contesting the October 2025 election over its refusal to sign an electoral code of conduct without reform guarantees.
Neither Besigye nor Lissu has been convicted of anything. Both have simply been made to disappear into a legal limbo indefinite enough to remove them from the ballot.
Elections as ritual, not choice
Uganda voted on 15 January 2026, two days after the government imposed a total internet blackout. Biometric voter-verification kits malfunctioned nationwide, and even Museveni himself complained on record that the machines had failed to recognise his fingerprints. The Electoral Commission declared him the winner with 71.65% — his strongest margin since the turn of the century — against Bobi Wine's 24.72%, on a turnout of just 52.5% in a country where roughly 78% of the population is under 35. In at least one polling station, Museveni was recorded receiving more votes than the station had registered voters. Bobi Wine went into hiding after soldiers raided his home; Muhoozi, in his capacity as army chief, issued a public 48-hour ultimatum for his surrender. Protests from 16–20 January 2026 left at least seven dead before the army restored order and Wine fled the country.
Tanzania's script, nine months earlier, was bloodier. The 29 October 2025 election proceeded with Lissu in jail, CHADEMA barred, and the second-largest opposition party's candidate, Luhaga Mpina of ACT-Wazalendo, also disqualified — leaving Samia to run essentially unopposed. She was declared winner with just under 98% of the vote. What followed was three days of the worst political violence Tanzania has seen in a generation: an internet blackout, a nationwide curfew, and security forces firing live rounds into crowds in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Arusha, and Mbeya. CHADEMA's own count reached 2,000 dead; even the more conservative documentation by Human Rights Watch confirmed dozens of bystanders killed and credible reports of many more, while the UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, said on 11 November 2025 that hundreds of people were reportedly killed, and accused police of moving bodies to undisclosed locations to hide the toll. More than 150 people, including children, were arrested and charged — several with treason — simply for being on the streets.
Disappearance as governance
The Tanzanian Human Rights Defenders Coalition documented 48 attacks on human rights defenders in a single year leading up to the 2025 vote. Chadema official Dioniz Kipanya vanished on 26 July 2024 after a phone call from an unknown number. On 18 August 2024, activists Deusdedith Soka and Jacob Godwin Mlay, along with a bystander motorcycle-taxi driver, Frank Mbise, were abducted by men suspected to be police. Senior CHADEMA figure Ali Mohamed Kibao was abducted from a bus on 6 September 2024 and found dead two days later. Amnesty International documented four enforced disappearances and one unlawful killing of government critics in 2024 alone — before the bloodier 2025 election crackdown that followed.
In Uganda, the pattern is older and equally entrenched: opposition figures picked up by unmarked vehicles, held in unofficial "safe houses," and produced — if produced at all — only after international pressure. Besigye's own abduction from Kenyan soil in November 2024 is itself an act his lawyers argue violated both Kenyan sovereignty and the East African Treaty, a case now before the East African Court of Justice in Arusha.
The puzzle at the bottom of it
Two countries. Two ruling parties with six and four decades in power respectively. Two presidents who have each turned the machinery of the state — police, courts, intelligence services, electoral commissions — into instruments for keeping one household in charge indefinitely. Sons run militaries and shadow spy agencies. Wives and daughters run ministries and legislatures. In-laws inherit parliamentary seats like family land. Meanwhile, the men and women who dare to challenge that arrangement are shot at rallies, vanished from buses, dragged a thousand kilometres in the night, or simply left to rot on remand until the next election has already been decided without them.
So here is the puzzle every citizen of Tanzania and Uganda inherits every morning they wake up under these regimes: if a government can imprison its most credible rival without ever proving a case against him, kill hundreds of its own citizens for standing in the street, and hand its intelligence services to a son whose only qualification is his surname — at what point does "election" stop meaning anything at all? How many more Besigyes and Lissus, how many more Kipanyas and Kibaos, how many more "technical glitches" and internet blackouts, are these nations expected to absorb before the cost of staying silent exceeds the cost of speaking? And when history finally asks who was watching while power calcified into bloodline — what will an entire generation of Tanzanians and Ugandans say they did, besides wait?
Enough is a threshold each nation must set for itself. But it will not set itself. Someone has to say it first.