By Madi Jobarteh
How long shall our elected and appointed public officials in Africa continue to violate and brutalize the very citizens they swore to protect? This exclusive video by CNN”s Larry Madowo has once again exposed our continent’s painful reality: police officers who are in fact public servants by law willfully using their guns to shoot and kill unarmed civilians in Tanzania.
These are officers who come from the same impoverished homes and neglected communities as their victims. They did not act alone. Such violence is never spontaneous. It is ordered. It is sanctioned. It flows from the highest levels of power from security chiefs, ministers, and ultimately from political leaders, including the presidency itself.
This is not an isolated tragedy. It is the African story since independence.
In the 1980s, Nigerian musician and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti captured this reality in his timeless lament, “Sweat, Blood and Tears,” describing brutality as the hallmark of African security forces. Four decades later, the script remains unchanged. Anytime citizens assemble to protest corruption, abuse of power, inefficiency, or incompetence of their governments, the security machinery is unleashed to rape, beat, shoot, gas, maim, and kill often with total impunity.
Across the continent, governments created to serve the people have become their primary violators.
It is precisely because of these relentless abuses and this systematic violence against citizens that Africa remains trapped in cycles of instability, civil war, and unconstitutional changes of government. Our poverty, our insecurity, our deprivation, and our shocking inequality are not accidents of fate. They are the direct consequences of regimes that disregard their own constitutions and mock the very idea of democratic governance.
Where is the African Union?
What will the African Union now say, faced with the brutal reality documented in Tanzania? The AU and its regional blocs were meant to be the last line of defense as the continental guardians of human rights, justice, and democratic norms.
When African leaders terrorize their people, the AU is supposed to be the refuge.
When governments subvert constitutions, manipulate elections, and undermine institutions, the AU is supposed to step in.
Yet time and again, the AU and its regional blocs have chosen complicity over courage.
The events in Tanzania expose this betrayal in all its shame. While Tanzanians are burying their dead, searching for missing loved ones, nursing wounds, and mourning lives shattered by state brutality, the AU rushed not to call for accountability, not to demand an investigation, not to deploy human rights observers but to congratulate President Samia Suluhu.
Over 3,000 people were reported dead or injured. Yet the AU did not even utter a symbolic call for justice.
Even SADC’s own election observation mission documented serious electoral malpractices. But SADC, as an institution, failed to hold the Tanzanian authorities accountable. Instead, presidents of member states shamelessly flew to Dar-es-Salaam to celebrate with a leader whose hands are stained with the blood of her people.
What Is the AU For? One is forced to ask: What exactly is the function of the AU and its regional blocs?
This is an organisation with one of the world’s richest collections of instruments, protocols, norms, and institutions on elections, democracy, human rights, and good governance. These are boldly proclaimed as the foundational principles of the African Union.
But what good are principles if they are abandoned every time a leader violates them?
What good are institutions if they never defend the people they were created for?
What good is the AU if it sees a member state break every rule in the book and still endorses the violator?
Calling out this level of moral collapse is not disrespect. It is truth-telling. It is the honest assessment that millions of Africans whisper daily: that far too many individuals occupying the AU Commission, the AU Assembly of Heads of State, and even the Pan-African Parliament have chosen loyalty to power over loyalty to the African people.
Their silence in the face of mass violence in Tanzania is indefensible. Their endorsement of a tainted election is an insult to every grieving family. Their betrayal undermines the very idea of continental unity and African dignity.
Shame on the AU. Shame on the regional blocs. Shame on this cowardice.
Africa will not know peace, stability, or prosperity until the AU finally stands with its people loudly, consistently, and courageously. Until then, the blood of our citizens will continue to stain the hands not only of national leaders, but of the continental institutions that enable their tyranny.
Africans! rise up and claim your country from violators!
