President Samia Suluhu Hassan has been declared the winner of Tanzania’s presidential election, securing another mandate amid days of unrest across the country.
According to the electoral commission, Samia won 98% of the votes, well ahead of the 32 million votes cast in Wednesday’s vote.
International observers have expressed concern over the lack of transparency and widespread unrest that has reportedly left hundreds dead and hundreds injured.
The nationwide internet shutdown makes it difficult to verify the death toll. The government sought to downplay the scale of the violence and extended the curfew to try to quell the unrest.
“I hereby announce Samia Suluhu Hassan as the winner of the presidential election for the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party,” election chief Jacobs Mwambegele said when announcing the results on Saturday morning.
In Tanzania’s semi-autonomous Zanzibar archipelago, which elects its own government and leader, CCM’s Hussein Mwinyi, who is the incumbent president, won with nearly 80 percent of the vote.
The opposition in Zanzibar said there had been “massive fraud”, the AP news agency reported.
Protests continued Friday, as demonstrators in the port city of Dar es Salaam and other towns took to the streets, tearing down Samia’s posters and attacking police and polling stations despite warnings from the army chief to end the unrest.
The protests are mostly led by young demonstrators, who have denounced the elections as unfair.
They accuse the government of undermining democracy by suppressing the main opposition leaders: one of them is in prison and another was excluded on technical grounds.
A spokesperson for the opposition Chadema party told the AFP news agency on Friday that “around 700” people had been killed in clashes with security forces, while a diplomatic source in Tanzania told the BBC there was credible evidence that at least 500 people had died.
Foreign Minister Mahmoud Kombo Thabit described the violence as “a few isolated pockets of incidents here and there” and said “security forces acted very quickly and decisively to address the situation.”
There were two main opposition candidates – Tundu Lissu, incarcerated for treason, which he denies, and Luhaga Mpina, of the ACT-Wazalendo party – but he was excluded on legal grounds.
Sixteen fringe parties, none of which have historically enjoyed significant public support, were allowed to run.
Samia’s ruling party, the CCM, has dominated the country’s politics and has never lost an election since independence.
Ahead of the election, rights groups condemned government repression, with Amnesty International citing a “wave of terror” involving forced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings of opposition figures.
The government rejected the claims and officials said the elections would be free and fair.
Samia took office in 2021 as Tanzania’s first female president following the death of President John Magufuli.
