The book evaluates the performance of Tanzania’s first female president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, from her assumption of office in March 2021 to the calamitous general election in October 2025 when security officers gunned down hundreds of unarmed demonstrators. It shows her policies as they oscillated between those of her two predecessors, the diplomatically sly Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete and the more authoritarian John Pombe Magufuli. The analysis relies on current affairs in Tanzania as they were reported locally and discussed vibrantly through social media and other online forums during Samia’s first term of office. Emerging from that analysis is a detailed assessment of the latest stage of Tanzania’s decades long experiment in multiparty democracy as can be viewed from the perspective of the country’s citizens. As such, the book taps into the Tanzanian grassroots to contribute to a broader academic discussion and effectively bridges free non-professional debates with mainstream scholarship.

Festo Mkenda, SJ, is a Tanzanian historian trained at SOAS (London) and at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on politics and religion in Africa. He has taught at Hekima University College in Nairobi (Kenya), Xavier University in Cincinnati (USA), and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome (Italy).