When the Tanzanian vice president Emmanuel Nchimbi ‘resigned’ towards the end of August and vanished, it took me some time to believe, let alone understand. More than a month later, a question many are asking now is: how can an elephant sink in a cup of tea?
I wondered how a country we believed and used to proudly refer to as an island of peace amid a turbulent African continent – ensnared in autocracy, bad governance, corruption, and gratuitous degeneracy – has damagingly changed.
Being a Tanzanian, the prevailing situation exposes the whole shebang of how the country our forefathers and mothers painstakingly liberated changed so as to need a second liberation. The beacon of hope Tanzanians built, if anything, is a bar pin of chaos, callousness, and unpredictability.Politically unstable neighbours we used to laugh at, and tower over, are now laughing at us. Loyalty has overthrown merit and deceit replaced honesty.
Due to what became of us, a new spirit descended on the Tanzanian Gen Zs who pulled off the mask of ‘cohesion and peace’ and went against the wrong belief that they’re fraidy-cats. They staged demonstrations following the contested October 2025 general election in which more than 500 were killed, according to government figures. For the first time, we witnessed our peace evaporate into the thin air. People who used to call each other ndugu, or kith and kin, abducted and disappeared their own ’ndugu’. Thus far, nobody except those who killed them knows the actual number of fatalities resulting from power lust under the beloved ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM).
If former Ugandan strongman Idi Amin were still alive, he would laugh at how a country that taught him a lesson about accountability, human rights, justice, and good governance failed to learn its own lesson. Aside from the above violations, nothing shocked the world like the ‘resignation’, or call it firing, of Vice President Nchimbi recently. It reminds me of how Tanzania’s founding father Julius Nyerere wisely fired Aboud Jumbe, then vice president in 1984 – a year before Nyerere abdicated – for arrogance and seeking to question his power.
Nevertheless, what transpired recently vis-à-vis Nchimbi has never been understood, especially how a whole VP can disappear. That’s because Nchimbi, whom many Tanzanians believe was fired, resigned through social media instead of through the appointing authorities and was soon expelled from the ruling party.
To cap it all, since then, Nchimbi has neither spoken nor been seen in public. In his resignation, he promised that he would retire from public life, but up until I pen this piece, Tanzanians do not know if he is free or jailed. Those who wrongly might think I’m making this up must show us where Nchimbi is and how he is faring.
The doubting Thomases like myself would like to know why Nchimbi was fired and why he is nowhere to be seen. I say so because he didn’t even hand over his office.
In sum, jailing or intimidating opponents isn’t a new thing on our continent. Again, things have dramatically changed in my beloved Tanzania, so one famous opposition leader was shot but miraculously survived after the wasiojulikana (the anonymous ones) pumped 16 bullets into his body.Thereafter, for his crime of refusing to die, the man was charged with treason. Up until now, the man has been languishing behind bars simply because he refused to die. Indeed, things have changed dramatically so to speak.
Source: Daily Monitor, Sunday yesterday.


