Kenyans in Tanzania are living in fear after the controversial government of Samia Suluhu Hassan accused them of fueling violence and protests. Kenyans who spoke with Kenyan media narrated harrowing tales on how they are being targeted by Samia’s government operatives.
The targeted xenophobic attacks on Kenyans living in Tanzania come days after Samia’s ‘private’ swearing in at one of the military barracks.
During the swearing in, Samia had claimed without proof that the violence that had occurred in Tanzania during and after the controversial elections that were held on October 29 was not perpetrated by Tanzanians but by ‘watu kutoka nchi jirani‘ – a scornful phrase that some Tanzanians use to describe Kenyans.
“We cannot move freely like before… Even making phone calls is scary,” a Kenyan living in Tanzania told local media house, the Daily Nation. She added that when messaging each other, Kenyans have resulted to deleting messages to stay safe from Samia’s government snooping.
Reports of Kenyans being intimidated and arrested in the streets have also been growing. For instance, a Kenyan researcher who is based in Arusha narrated to Kenyan media how he was arrested and detained for hours at the Bahati Police Station in Manyara region.
Since the October 29 Tanzania elections, hundreds of people have been reported killed by the Tanzanian government, with videos showing wounded and deceased people circulating widely on the internet.
One of these is a Kenyan known as John Okoth Ogutu whose family claims that he was shot dead in Dar es Salaam but the whereabouts of his body are unknown after it was collected by the police.
According to a report that appeared in the Daily Nation, the Kenyan Embassy in Tanzania has denied that Tanzanian operatives are targeting Kenyans, even as it admitted that it is working to help stranded Kenyans.
“We are still reaching out to Kenyans who are stranded… Nobody is stranded because public transport is back to normal and normalcy has returned,” Kenyan Ambassador to Tanzania Isaac Njenga was quoted by the media house.
In the aftermath of the election, videos have been circulating online showing Tanzania election officials ticking ballot papers and stuffing them into ballot boxes.
Samia Suluhu was declared the winner of the elections that have received widespread condemnation across the world, on November 1. The Tanzanian electoral commission claimed that she had garnered 97.66 percent of the total votes cast.
The commission further claimed that the elections had recorded a turnout of 82 percent. Samia had gotten 31.9 million votes out of the 32.7 million votes that were allegedly cast in an election day that was dominated by protests and violence.
It was not clear how these votes were tallied and transferred from polling stations to the tallying centres in less than 72 hours during an election in which Samia’s government shut down the internet nationwide and had a curfew against citizens at 6pm.
In the previous presidential election of 2020, only 14.8 million Tanzanians had voted from a total of 29.7 million registered voters. That election had a turnout of about 51 percent and was won by the late Tanzania President John Pombe Magufuli with 12.5 million votes.
This means that in the recent controversial polls, Samia – who took over after Magufuli’s death – allegedly got more than double the number of votes the late former president had secured in 2020.
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