Global Profile: Samia Suluhu Hassan, The President of Tanzania
The politics of rebuilding Tanzanian democracy by law, not revolution - A blueprint for America?
Serengeti National Park, Kilimanjaro, and Zanzibar are the most common associations Americans have with Tanzania. And let’s be honest, it’s not a country of great importance to the US strategically, economically, or geographically. But it is doing something unexpected, something the US would be wise to learn.
Tanzania shows that rebuilding democracy doesn’t have to start from scratch or descend into civil conflict. It can begin inside damaged institutions.
That’s the lesson for the United States. When the Trump-Republican dictatorship collapses, America will face the same challenge Tanzania is facing now. The instinct in Washington will be big changes, constitutional amendments, sweeping reforms, or another round of culture-war drama. Tanzania shows the US a different path: small, legal, procedural changes can restore legitimacy step by step.
A Republic Built with the Door Half‑Shut
For a decade, Tanzania’s political system accumulated the hard edges of authoritarianism: bans on opposition rallies, the end of a free press, and criminal cases against critics. The message was stability through control. The same thing that is happening now in the US.
In 2021, Tanzania’s authoritarian leaning President John Magufuli died. His Vice President, Samia Suluhu Hassa, took power. Her goal was to restore democracy, and she chose a different starting move: undo first, then build. And this is what the US can learn from Hassan, what it will need to do after the Trump-Republican regime is eliminated.
Within months of taking office, during the pandemic, she publicly took a COVID‑19 vaccine and ordered more doses, an explicit break from Magufuli's pandemic denial. In 2022, her government lifted bans on multiple newspapers and dropped high‑profile charges against opposition leader Freeman Mbowe, who was released and met the president the same day. In January 2023, she lifted the six‑year ban on political rallies imposed in 2016.
Many wanted deeper and faster changes, but those in power saw it as a threat. Hassan found the middle ground to effect change without triggering a coup.
Rewriting the Incentives Without Blowing Up the System
Hassan’s method is administrative and legislative. She’s not mobilizing the masses or calling for a revolution; she’s started on a series of administrative filings.
She began by reopening the public debate, lifting a six-year ban on rallies, unfreezing opposition parties, and letting banned newspapers back into circulation. This made democratic politics possible again in a country where it had been all but eliminated.
Then she moved to the rules of the game. In 2024, she signed a package of electoral laws that, for the first time in years, clarified how parties raise money, how disputes are handled, and who runs the commission. Technical on paper, but in practice, it reintroduced the rules of fair play into Tanzania’s elections.
Her economic strategy follows the same pattern: pragmatic agreements that move the economy forward. She revived the LNG mega-project stalled for a decade, opened part of Dar es Salaam port to DP World a Dubai-based global logistics and port management firm. She pushed ahead with two signature projects, the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Plant and the Standard Gauge Railway.
Add in billions from the World Bank for rural electrification, and the pattern is clear, she is delivering tangible infrastructure while writing the rules that make political competition sustainable.
It’s a sequence: remove bans → clarify election rules → bring in external capital → make concerted changes that improve people’s lives → raise state capacity. The behavioral bet: once people feel the system is open, they re‑enter it.
Inclusion on Trial
The test isn’t in the laws already passed or the projects already launched. It will be whether they hold up in the 2025 general election. That’s the moment when inclusion (opposition participation, free rallies, independent media) either proves real or collapses.
There are problems. Police crackdowns and arrests of opposition leaders in 2024, and renewed legal jeopardy for the opposition party in 2025, raise doubts that openness will hold under electoral pressure.
In the United States, the trajectory runs in reverse. The Trump-Republican regime has restricted voting, gutted civil service protections, and politicized institutions. While Tanzania is inching toward democracy, the US has entered dictatorship, with Trump as America’s first dictator.
If Hassan’s model results in a genuinely competitive election, Tanzania will stand as a model for how the US can rebuild after Trump and the Republicans have been removed, without triggering violent retaliation.
Cultural and Archetypal Profile
Hassan’s Tanzania governs for the group, not the individual. Her flagship projects are village electrification and affordable rail, public goods that reach communities, not just elites. It reflects a collectivist logic: legitimacy comes when everyone shares in the gain.
Power inside the Party remains top-down (moderate–high power distance), but Hassan enforces it through high-context politics, meetings, and reconciliatory gestures. That’s why she met opposition leader Freeman Mbowe the day he was released from prison, turning a concession into a symbol of inclusion.
Her style blends flexibility with rules. On one side, particularism: cutting custom deals for DP World at Dar es Salaam port or reviving the LNG project by adjusting terms. On the other, universalism: electoral laws that fix timelines, regulate financing, and create a commission that applies to all parties.
Hornby’s archetypes make the mix clearer. As a Mediator, she moves reforms forward carefully, taking into account all sides of the issues. As an East (Communicator), she prioritizes dialogue with opposition and investors. As a Blue (Guardian), she codifies rules to keep order. Her Green (Caregiver) side showed in her early COVID-19 vaccination push and rural electrification drive.
Read more about Hornby’s archetypes here
It is pragmatic, small, legal steps to bring back democracy and inclusion.
Why It Matters
For Americans, it reframes recovery. The test is not whether the US can invent a new democracy out of ruins. The test is whether it can use its own laws and institutions, however battered, to make politics fair and functional again. That is exactly what Hassan is attempting in Dar es Salaam, and it’s why her experiment may hold the blueprint for America’s return.
The United States has something Tanzania does not: two centuries of constitutional precedent, a history of independent courts to return to, and federal structures that, even weakened, are still intact. If Tanzania can reopen civic space after years of repression, America has no excuse for failing to do the same after Trump.
The challenge will not be a lack of tools, but a lack of political will to use them patiently, legally, and inclusively. Hassan’s step-by-step approach shows that democracy is not restored with one sweeping reform but through dozens of smaller ones that, together, restore democracy and more importantly, inclusion.
If democracy can be rebuilt in Tanzania, it can be rebuilt in America.
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