Tanzania’s deportation of Kenya’s former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga and former Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister Martha Karua has dealt a severe blow to democracy in the East African Community (EAC).

Mutunga, Karua and several Kenyan lawyers and human rights activists, including Boniface Mwangi and Ugandan Agather Atuhaire, with the latter two claiming they were tortured, are victims of Tanzania’s high-handed democratic failings.

The EAC citizens were also blocked from attending the controversial treason trial of opposition leader Tundu Lissu, which has captured global attention and is proving to be a test case for Tanzania’s democracy and human rights record.

Lissu’s “no reforms, no elections” protest call has rattled Tanzania’s dominant ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party and its top hierarchy led by President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who is seeking re-election for a second term.

Suluhu succeeded the late President John Magufuli, whose hands-on, tough-on-corruption populist leadership style and policies transformed Tanzania.

However, he maintained the brook-no-opposition trait his successor, Suluhu, has now rekindled.

Expectations were high that Suluhu would open the democratic space and allow multipartyism to thrive, especially after letting Lissu return from exile. But old traditions and habits die hard.

The opposition leader was soon on the receiving end of CCM’s ironclad one-party stranglehold of Tanzanian politics.

There was no way its leadership would allow its political dominance to be undone at the ballot by a radical opposition.

While they may not have caused long-term harm to the long-cherished EAC citizens’ dream of regional integration, Dar’s actions demonstrate the wide gulf between human rights, electoral justice and political freedoms in the EAC nations.

The aloofness and indifference with which Kenyan and Ugandan leaders have responded to the Tanzanian authorities’ actions suggests that they share the same ideology in dealing with political dissent and diplomacy, the EAC factor notwithstanding.

What Lissu’s case has proved is that despite some achievements on the political and economic front since independence, many governments in Africa are suffering from a crisis of legitimacy.

Increasingly, as demonstrated by the Gen Z protests in Kenya last year and challenges to authoritarian rule in Uganda and elsewhere on the continent, the influence and right of leaders and ruling parties to dominance is being increasingly questioned.

The accusations facing individual leadership may or may not be justified, but the broader issues underlying them, as in the case of Lissu and the draconian measures taken by the Tanzanian authorities, must be taken seriously.

Governments must be held accountable for the democratic rights, welfare, prosperity and human rights of the citizens they represent, and common regional aspirations.

The causes of the crisis of legitimacy are the gap between citizens and leaders, economic disparities, abrupt technological changes, demographic pressures, growing populism, rejection of the status quo, and declining confidence in the prevailing institutions that make systems work.

The Dar deportations are an affront to diplomacy, harm regional integration and fail the democratic reform legitimacy test.

The writer comments on political affairs