The Independent Patriots for Change says president Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah should use her state visit to Tanzania to speak out against human rights abuses in the country.
The party’s statement comes as Nandi-Ndaitwah visits Tanzania for the second time since president Samia Hassan’s election.
“Tundu Lissu, the 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,” IPC shadow minister for international relations Rodney Cloete says in a statement released on Sunday.
The United Nations found the detention to be unlawful in February.
Cloete calls on the president to publicly raise the issue and demand Lissu’s release.
“In April, 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,” Cloete says.
He says Hassan’s election saw security forces using disproportionate lethal force and shut down the internet.
“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,” Cloete says.
He is also asking the president to report to the National Assembly after her return and table any agreement signed during her visit.
