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Samia Suluhu Hassan

Hundreds of people were reportedly killed in Tanzania after taking to the streets to protest this week’s presidential election, which saw the increasingly authoritarian incumbent, President Samia Suluhu Hassan, run unopposed for another term after her main challengers were jailed or barred from standing.

Some 700 people have been killed in three days of election protests in Tanzania, the main opposition party said Friday, with protesters still on the streets in the midst of an internet blackout. “As we speak the figure for deaths in Dar (es Salaam) is around 350 and for Mwanza it is 200-plus. Added to figures from other places around the country, the overall figure is around 700,” John Kitoka, spokesman from the main opposition party Chadema, said. “The death toll could be much higher,” he warned, saying killings could be happening during the nighttime curfew.

Samia Suluhu Hassan became the East African nation's first female president. According to Tanzania's Constitution, Vice President Hassan, 61, should assumed the presidency for the remainder of the five-year term that John Magufuli began serving in 2020 after winning a second term. Suluhu became the second woman to head an East African country. Agathe Uwilingiyimanain was the first woman to head an East Africa country when she served as Prime Minister of Rwanda from July 18 1993 until her death in April 7 1994.

Magufuli, one of Africa's most prominent coronavirus sceptics, died aged 61, Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan said on 17 March 2021 Wednesday after a more than two-week absence from public life that led to speculation about his health. “Dear Tanzanians, it is sad to announce that today 17 March 2021 around 6 p.m. we lost our brave leader, President John Magufuli who died from heart illness at Mzena hospital in Dar es Salaam where he was getting treatment," the vice president said on state broadcaster TBC. Magufuli, had not been seen in public since February 27, sparking rumours that he had contracted COVID-19. Officials denied on March 12 that he had fallen ill.

Born in the semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar, Hassan studied economics in Britain, worked for the U.N.'s World Food Programme and then held various government posts prior to becoming Tanzania's first female vice president in 2015. Samia Suluhu Hassan was the 10th Vice President of the United Republic of Tanzania. She assumed Office on 5th November 2015, under President Dr. John Pombe Magufuli. Previously, she was a Minister of State, Vice Presidents Office in charge of Union Affairs. In 2005-2010 she served as a Minister for Tourism, trade and Investment in Zanzibar and in 2000-2005 a Minister of Youth Employment, Women and Children Development in Zanzibar.

Since he was sworn into office in 2015, President Magufuli only traveled out of Tanzania eight times. He had only traveled to the neighbouring countries of Kenya, Rwanda, Namibia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Uganda – the only country he visited twice. What this meant over the years is that his vice-president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, was the face of Tanzania in most of the international meetings. She represented Tanzania at all UN, AU, SADC and EAC meetings that are held outside Tanzania.

When Samia Suluhu Hassan assumed Tanzania's presidency in March 2021 following John Magufuli's sudden death, international observers anticipated a democratic opening. Her initial gestures toward reform appeared promising: she lifted the ban on political rallies, reopened shuttered media outlets, engaged in dialogue with opposition leaders, and released political prisoners including CHADEMA leader Freeman Mbowe after 226 days in detention. Western powers and civil society organizations celebrated what seemed to be a reformist turn away from Magufuli's authoritarian excesses. Yet by October 2025, as Tanzania approached national elections, Hassan had not merely reverted to her predecessor's tactics but had crossed democratic red lines that Magufuli himself never breached. She charged opposition leader Tundu Lissu with treason carrying the death penalty, banned the main opposition party CHADEMA from participating in elections until 2030, orchestrated the disqualification of the second major opposition candidate Luhaga Mpina, and presided over a wave of abductions, enforced disappearances, and torture that culminated in an election where she faced no credible opposition. Understanding this trajectory requires moving beyond individual agency or moral failing to examine the structural imperatives embedded in Tanzania's political system that effectively compelled this authoritarian consolidation.

The most fundamental structural imperative driving Hassan's authoritarian turn lies in the nature of Chama cha Mapinduzi itself as a liberation party fused with the state apparatus. CCM and its predecessor TANU have governed Tanzania continuously since independence in 1961, making it one of Africa's longest-ruling parties and the last remaining hegemonic liberation party in southern Africa. Over six decades, the boundaries between party and state have dissolved to the point where they are functionally indistinguishable. CCM controls the security apparatus, dominates the judiciary through presidential appointments, manages the electoral commission whose leadership the president selects, and penetrates civil service structures at every level. This institutional fusion creates a situation where threats to party dominance become existential threats to state stability itself, at least from the perspective of those embedded within the system. For party elites who have known no other political order, the prospect of losing power is not simply electoral defeat but civilizational collapse, the unraveling of everything built since independence.

This institutional architecture generated profound internal contradictions during Hassan's presidency that narrowed her political options over time. When she initially pursued limited reforms in 2021 and 2022, she faced immediate resistance from Magufuli loyalists within CCM who viewed any democratic opening as dangerous weakness. These hardliners, emboldened by Magufuli's success in crushing opposition through brute force, occupied key positions in the security services and party structure. They regarded Hassan's dialogue with opposition leaders as betrayal and her release of political prisoners as capitulation. The organizational power of this faction meant that Hassan could not simply ignore their preferences without risking internal party fracture. By 2024, as local elections approached and CHADEMA showed signs of organizational recovery, hardliners intensified pressure on Hassan to demonstrate her commitment to CCM hegemony. Her appointment of prominent Magufuli allies like Doto Biteko and Paul Makonda to government positions signaled accommodation of this faction. The structural reality was that Hassan's power base within CCM remained contingent on satisfying these conservative elements who controlled critical security and administrative functions.

Yet the internal party imperative alone cannot explain the specific timing and intensity of Hassan's authoritarian turn. Equally crucial was the dramatically shifting international context that made aggressive repression more feasible and less costly than at any point since the end of the Cold War. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Western donors maintained significant leverage over Tanzania through development assistance and debt relief, creating real constraints on authoritarian excess. The transition to multipartyism in 1992 occurred under sustained international pressure during a moment of Western ideological triumphalism. But by 2025, the global landscape had fundamentally transformed. The rise of China as Tanzania's largest infrastructure investor offered an alternative development model explicitly decoupled from democratic conditionality. Western aid budgets were shrinking as donor priorities shifted elsewhere, reducing both carrots and sticks available for democratic promotion. Simultaneously, the perceived failure of democratic transitions across the Middle East and North Africa, combined with democratic backsliding in established democracies including the United States and European nations, undermined the normative appeal of liberal governance. The international system had transitioned from unipolarity to multipolarity, with authoritarian powers asserting alternative governance paradigms and demonstrating that economic development could proceed without political liberalization.

This international permissiveness created what scholars call an opportunity structure for authoritarian consolidation. Hassan could observe that neighboring autocrats faced minimal consequences for repression. Uganda's Yoweri Museveni continued ruling after nearly four decades with opposition leaders imprisoned on treason charges. Rwanda's Paul Kagame maintained power through lengthy prison sentences for critics, with his fiercest opponent spending eight years in jail before being rearrested. Regional patterns normalized tactics that would have triggered international isolation a generation earlier. The failure of international observers to mount serious monitoring of Tanzania's 2025 election until the final weeks symbolized this permissive environment. SADC and the East African Community initially provided only limited observation before deploying missions at the last moment, effectively sanctioning the process through their presence without meaningful oversight. When Ugandan activist Agather Atuhaire was brutally assaulted by Tanzanian security forces in May 2025 and foreign political figures like former Kenyan Justice Minister Martha Karua were detained and deported for attempting to observe Lissu's trial, the international response remained shamefully muted. This silence communicated to Hassan's government that brutal repression carried negligible geopolitical costs.

Economic imperatives provided additional structural pressure toward authoritarian consolidation. Hassan inherited an economy requiring massive infrastructure investment and foreign capital to achieve Vision 2050's goal of upper-middle-income status. The ruling party's legitimacy increasingly rested on its ability to deliver economic growth, infrastructure projects, and improved living standards rather than on democratic governance or ideological appeal. This developmental imperative created tension with democratic competition because opposition parties could credibly argue for alternative economic policies and criticize CCM's management, potentially undermining investor confidence and disrupting major projects. The stalling of the 40 billion dollar offshore gas development project and a 1.2 billion dollar arbitration claim over a terminated gas-to-power project illustrated how political instability could sabotage economic transformation. From the perspective of party technocrats focused on development outcomes, democratic competition represented an inefficient distraction that complicated long-term planning and deterred investors seeking stability. Authoritarian consolidation offered a path to the political predictability required for sustained economic transformation, even if it sacrificed accountability and popular participation.

The structure of Tanzania's electoral system itself created powerful incentives for increasingly aggressive manipulation rather than democratic competition. The presidential winner is determined by simple plurality, while the electoral commission's leadership is appointed by the president, creating institutional bias favoring incumbents. CCM's organizational advantages built over six decades mean the party has penetrated every village and neighborhood with structures that opposition groups cannot match. In the 2024 local elections, CCM captured over 98 percent of seats through a combination of organizational superiority and systematic manipulation, demonstrating that even with some political opening, the playing field remained hopelessly tilted. For Hassan, this created a perverse logic: if opposition parties could not win even under relatively favorable conditions due to structural advantages, why risk allowing them real competition that might produce instability? The calculus shifted from competing for votes to managing the appearance of electoral legitimacy while ensuring predetermined outcomes. The distinction between electoral authoritarianism, which allows opposition participation within constraints, and closed authoritarianism, which bars opposition entirely, collapsed because the structural dominance made the former approach seem unnecessary and potentially destabilizing.

Demographic and generational pressures intensified these structural dynamics. Tanzania's population exceeded 60 million by 2025, with over 37 million registered voters representing a fivefold increase since the one-party era of 1990 despite voter registration numbers suggesting suppression. This massive young electorate, increasingly mobilized through social media platforms like TikTok and Facebook, represented an unpredictable force that party elders struggled to control. Youth-led democracy movements across Africa in Kenya, Uganda, and elsewhere demonstrated that new generations increasingly rejected liberation party legitimacy based on independence struggles that occurred before they were born. For CCM, this demographic shift posed an existential threat because the party's historical legitimacy derived precisely from its role in the independence movement under Julius Nyerere's leadership. Young Tanzanians consuming opposition content online and organizing through digital networks fell outside traditional party structures and patronage relationships. The government's response blocking platforms like X, Clubhouse, and Telegram, while taking down independent citizen journalism sites like JamiiForums reflected not mere censorship but structural panic about losing control over information flows essential to maintaining hegemony.

The security apparatus itself represented a structural constraint pushing toward harder authoritarianism. Tanzania's military and police forces had been professionalized during the Nyerere era as instruments of single-party rule and national development. When multipartyism emerged in the 1990s, these institutions never underwent democratic reform to separate them from partisan control. Security forces remained CCM's security forces, with officer advancement dependent on party loyalty and institutional culture treating opposition activity as inherently suspicious. This created organizational imperatives within security services toward aggressive suppression of dissent regardless of civilian leadership preferences. The pattern of abductions, enforced disappearances, and torture documented by human rights organizations reflected not merely orders from above but institutional momentum within security services executing their understood mission of protecting party-state continuity. The sexual assault of Agather Atuhaire, filmed by security forces apparently to humiliate her into silence, revealed security services operating with impunity according to their own brutal logic. Hassan could not easily redirect these institutions without risking their loyalty, especially given Magufuli loyalists embedded in command structures.

Legal and constitutional structures paradoxically facilitated rather than constrained authoritarian consolidation. Tanzania's constitution concentrates enormous power in the presidency with limited checks and balances. The president appoints the chief justice and other senior judges, controls the attorney general who serves as the government's chief legal adviser, and selects the electoral commission leadership. This means that even when opposition parties sought legal remedies for rights violations or electoral manipulation, they faced a judiciary structurally dependent on the president for appointments and advancement. The treason charges against Tundu Lissu and the legal machinations that barred Luhaga Mpina from the presidential race operated through ostensibly legal procedures, giving repression a veneer of rule-of-law legitimacy that made international condemnation more difficult. The ability to weaponize legal institutions against opposition while maintaining procedural formalities represented a sophisticated form of authoritarianism more difficult to challenge than crude military dictatorship. Calls for constitutional reform to limit presidential powers and strengthen institutional independence threatened to unravel this architecture of control, explaining why Hassan resisted reform demands despite initial promises to pursue constitutional amendments.

The Zanzibar dimension added layers of complexity to these structural imperatives. Tanzania's union structure between mainland Tanganyika and the semi-autonomous archipelago created perpetual tension about power distribution and political competition. In Zanzibar, the opposition ACT-Wazalendo had historically mounted stronger challenges to CCM dominance than mainland opposition parties, winning or nearly winning multiple elections that CCM then disputed or manipulated. This created fear among mainland party elites that allowing genuine competition in Zanzibar might produce a demonstration effect encouraging mainland opposition. Conversely, Zanzibari political leaders resented mainland dominance and demanded greater autonomy, potentially threatening the union itself if political competition produced separatist outcomes. Hassan's government faced competing structural pressures: maintaining CCM hegemony in Zanzibar to prevent opposition victories that could embolden mainland challengers while also preventing Zanzibari autonomy demands from escalating into existential union questions. The manipulation of Zanzibar's 2025 local elections, where ACT-Wazalendo was allowed to compete but observers reported ballot stuffing and intimidation, reflected this impossible balancing act.

Economic class dynamics within CCM itself generated pressures toward authoritarian consolidation. Over six decades, party control had enabled massive accumulation of wealth among political elites through state contracts, land allocation, regulatory capture, and outright corruption. This created a party bourgeoisie with enormous economic interests in maintaining power. Democratic competition threatened not merely political position but vast accumulated wealth that could be subject to investigation and prosecution under alternative governments. Opposition parties explicitly campaigned on anti-corruption platforms and promised accountability for past abuses, making them existential threats to elite economic interests. For this propertied faction within CCM, authoritarian consolidation represented wealth protection as much as political strategy. They had capacity and motivation to fund repression, facilitate abductions through private resources, and pressure Hassan toward harder tactics. The abduction of Humphrey Polepole, a former CCM official turned critic, sent a message that even party veterans were not safe if they threatened elite interests.

Regional competitive authoritarian diffusion operated as an additional structural factor. Political tactics that work in neighboring countries tend to spread through learning and emulation as leaders observe which strategies successfully maintain power. Tanzania witnessed Uganda's Museveni, Rwanda's Kagame, and other regional autocrats successfully crushing opposition through imprisonment of leaders on treason and terrorism charges, manipulated elections, and targeted violence while facing minimal international consequences. This created a regional authoritarian ecosystem where repressive innovations diffused across borders. The specific tactic of charging opposition leaders with treason rather than lesser offenses occurred in Tanzania after similar approaches in Uganda and Rwanda demonstrated that even Western-educated, internationally connected opposition figures could be neutralized through such charges. Regional authoritarian learning extended beyond tactics to institutional arrangements, as governments compared notes on controlling electoral commissions, managing civil society, and containing social media. Tanzania's turn under Hassan must be understood within this regional context where authoritarian consolidation became normalized best practice among governing elites.

The COVID-19 pandemic's legacy shaped structural conditions favoring authoritarianism in unexpected ways. Magufuli's denialism about the pandemic's severity and refusal to implement mitigation measures likely contributed to his death in March 2021. Hassan's reversal of these policies and embrace of public health measures initially suggested pragmatism and willingness to challenge her predecessor's disastrous decisions. However, the pandemic had normalized emergency powers, restricted movement, and enhanced surveillance capabilities that could be repurposed for political control. Infrastructure built for pandemic management including expanded security force presence, digital tracking systems, and restrictions on assembly provided tools easily redirected toward opposition suppression. The economic disruption from the pandemic also created fiscal pressures that made stability and investor confidence paramount, encouraging authoritarian reflexes. Moreover, the pandemic's demonstration that mass mobilization could be prevented through public health justifications offered a playbook for restricting political activity under plausible pretexts.

Media landscape transformation created structural conditions that both enabled and required harder authoritarianism. Traditional media outlets, long controlled through licensing and indirect pressure, were losing influence to social media platforms that CCM could not easily manipulate. Opposition figures like Lissu built followings through Facebook and Twitter that bypassed state-controlled television and newspapers. This created what scholars call a "liberation technology" problem for authoritarian regimes: digital tools that facilitate mobilization and information sharing beyond state control. Hassan's government responded with platform blocking and censorship, but these tactics proved insufficient because populations increasingly accessed information through VPNs and encrypted channels. The structural inadequacy of censorship created pressure for physical repression of opposition leaders themselves, since controlling their messaging had become impossible. The targeting of activists, journalists, and opposition politicians for abduction and torture represented adaptation to technological changes that undermined traditional information control. When ideas cannot be contained, regimes resort to eliminating the people expressing them.

The weakness and fragmentation of Tanzania's opposition parties paradoxically facilitated Hassan's authoritarian turn by reducing the political costs of repression. CHADEMA and ACT-Wazalendo, while the two largest opposition groups, lacked resources, organizational depth, and geographic reach to match CCM's nationwide structures. This meant that even under conditions of relative political freedom, they struggled to win elections beyond a few urban constituencies. Opposition leaders like Lissu spent years in exile or recovering from assassination attempts, disrupting organizational continuity. Internal factionalism and leadership disputes prevented unified opposition fronts. For Hassan's government, this weakness meant repression could be surgical and targeted rather than requiring mass violence. Imprisoning Lissu on treason charges and banning CHADEMA effectively eliminated the only credible opposition without necessitating wider crackdowns that might trigger mass protest. The structural fragility of opposition parties made authoritarian consolidation easier to achieve and cheaper to maintain than in contexts with robust opposition infrastructures requiring more extensive repression to contain.

Generational dynamics within CCM itself shaped Hassan's strategic options. The party contained competing factions defined partly by generation: older elites who remembered the Nyerere era and its socialist ideology versus younger technocrats focused on development and market economics versus middle-aged Magufuli loyalists committed to nationalist authoritarianism. Hassan, ascending to power without having won a presidential election and lacking an independent power base, needed to balance these factions while establishing her authority. This made her vulnerable to pressure from any faction threatening to withdraw support. The Magufuli loyalist faction's strength in security services gave it particular leverage despite Magufuli's death. Hassan's increasingly authoritarian trajectory reflected her need to satisfy this faction's demands for aggressive opposition suppression while also delivering the economic results that technocratic factions required. The structural need to maintain party unity in the face of potential fracture limited her room for democratic maneuver even if she personally preferred liberalization, which remains an open question.

Fiscal dependence on Chinese infrastructure investment created economic constraints that indirectly encouraged authoritarianism. China's bilateral lending for roads, railways, ports, and industrial zones came with minimal political conditionality but required governmental stability and policy continuity. Chinese investors had observed African cases where electoral competition produced policy reversals that disrupted major projects, making them wary of political uncertainty. Tanzania's reliance on Chinese capital for realizing Vision 2050 development goals created implicit pressure to demonstrate stability and predictability, which authoritarian consolidation could provide more reliably than democratic competition. This dynamic was not crude Chinese interference in domestic politics but rather the structural logic of development finance where lenders prefer borrowers offering political certainty. Hassan's government understood that major Chinese-backed projects required demonstrating control and stability, creating economic incentives for authoritarian practices even in the absence of explicit Chinese demands.

The collapse of Tanzania's civil society sector as an independent political force removed a crucial check on authoritarian temptation. During the 1990s and early 2000s, relatively robust civil society organizations advocated for democracy, monitored elections, and provided institutional counterweight to state power. By 2025, sustained government pressure through restrictive NGO laws, harassment of activists, and funding restrictions had decimated this sector. International donors shifted resources elsewhere, local activists faced imprisonment or exile, and organizations that survived did so by avoiding sensitive political issues. The structural absence of civil society meant Hassan's government faced minimal organized domestic resistance to authoritarian moves beyond the weakened opposition parties themselves. When Freeman Mbowe was imprisoned or Tundu Lissu charged with treason, few domestic institutions had capacity or willingness to mount sustained opposition. This created permissive conditions where authoritarian escalation met little friction from intermediary institutions that might have constrained earlier governments.

The global democratic recession provided crucial ideological cover for Hassan's authoritarian consolidation. During the 1990s, democracy enjoyed hegemonic status as the only legitimate governance model, placing authoritarian governments on the defensive. By 2025, democratic backsliding in the United States, European nations, India, and other major democracies undermined democracy's normative appeal. The rise of strongman populist leaders in multiple Western democracies suggested that democracy itself was in crisis, making it harder to criticize African authoritarians when Western nations faced their own democratic deficits. Hassan's government could point to democratic dysfunction in America and Europe to deflect criticism, arguing that Western prescription of democracy represented hypocrisy rather than universal principle. This global context made authoritarian consolidation ideologically easier to justify domestically and internationally because the universal applicability of democratic norms seemed less certain than during the post-Cold War moment.

The October 2025 election's violent aftermath demonstrated the accumulated pressure generated by these structural imperatives. When Hassan ran virtually unopposed after eliminating all credible challengers, opposition parties called for boycotts and protests. The government's response included deploying troops alongside police, implementing an internet blackout, imposing curfews, and unleashing security forces against demonstrators. Opposition claims that over 700 people died in three days of protests, if accurate, would represent unprecedented violence in Tanzania's post-independence history. Whether these figures prove accurate or constitute opposition exaggeration, the magnitude of unrest and the government's willingness to employ lethal force reflected the fundamental instability created by authoritarian consolidation. Having closed the electoral playing field entirely, Hassan's government faced populations with no peaceful mechanism for political expression. The structural imperative of maintaining CCM hegemony had produced such extreme measures that it generated precisely the instability it aimed to prevent, creating potential for escalating cycles of repression and resistance.

Understanding Samia Suluhu Hassan's authoritarian turn through these structural imperatives does not absolve individual agency or moral responsibility. Hassan made choices at each juncture that could have been different, and those choices carried moral weight. However, the structural analysis reveals that these decisions occurred within powerful constraints that heavily shaped available options and their likely consequences. The fusion of CCM with state institutions, the permissive international context, internal party dynamics, economic development imperatives, regional authoritarian patterns, and demographic pressures created a gravitational pull toward authoritarian consolidation that any leader in Hassan's position would have confronted. The tragedy lies not in Hassan personally preferring authoritarianism but in political structures that made authoritarian consolidation appear necessary for party survival, economic development, and political stability, even as it undermined democracy, generated violence, and potentially planted seeds for future instability. Breaking these structural patterns would require fundamental reforms to Tanzania's constitutional order, party system, security forces, and international relationships. Without such transformation, future Tanzanian leaders will face similar imperatives pushing toward authoritarian solutions regardless of their personal preferences or initial commitments to democratic governance.

Suluhu was born on January 27, 1960 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar. She went to school in Zanzibar and studied statistics at the Zanzibar Institute of Financial Administration before getting employed by the Ministry of Planning and Development as a clerk. In 1986 joined Mzumbe University for advanced studies in Public Administration before joining the Institute of Management for Leaders, Hyderabad in India or a course in management. She also attended the University of Manchester for her postgraduate diploma in economic and in 2005 she did her master degree in community economic development through a joint program between Open University of Tanzania and Southern New Hampshire University, USA.

She was first elected as a member of the Zanzibar House of Representative for special seat in 2000, and was appointed Minister by then President Amani Abeid Karume of Zanzibar. She was the only high-ranking woman minister in that cabinet. Her entry into national electoral politics came relatively late by African standards. Suluhu was elected to the National Assembly in a landslide win in 2010 as the MP representing Makunduchi constituency, marking her entry into national electoral politics.

In 2014, President Dr. Jakaya Kikwete of the United Republic of Tanzania appointed her minister of State for Union matters for the office of the Vice President. In the same year, she was also elected the Vive chairperson for the Constitutional Assembly – the body tasked with drafting the country’s new constitution. She told a reporter in 2014 that when president Karume appointed her to the cabinet in her Zanzibar, she was the only woman and the male colleagues looked down on her, however, “I stood my ground and eventually they appreciated my contributions.” Her competence at that first cabinet appointment in Zanzibar saw the number of female cabinet members rise to four, a development she describes with pride. “I have risen to this position as a result of my competence and not through favors,” she told the same reporter.

In July 2015, the ruling party CCM’s presidential nominee Hon John Magufuli chose her as his running mate ahead of the country’s 2015 General Elections. During the party elections in July 2015, Hassan beat two other female CCM candidates Amina Ali and Asha-Rose Migiro who came second and third respectively. The Magufuli-Suluhu ticket won the 2015 General Elections making her the first female vice-president in the region since Uganda’s Specioza Naigaga Wandira who was in office from 1994 to 2003. Chama Cha Mapinduzi (loosely translated from Swahili as party of the revolution); Magufuli and Hassan’s party faced the strongest competition it has ever faced in its long reign as the party that has been in power the longest in the entire African continent.

Suluhu is married to Hafidh Ameir and together they have three sons and daughter. While her husband is a retired agriculture officer, her daughter Mwanu Hafidh Ameir, is the only one in the family who has followed in her political footsteps. Mwanu is a member of the Zanzibar House of Representatives.