Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

An unlikely coincidence of ballots in a forty-five day period from the middle of September to the end of October 2025 has cast a new light on the state of democratic governance in Africa. And this now threatens to unscramble the ritual hollowness that has become the fate of elections on the continent under the indifferent watch of the African Union and other regional institutions in Africa. How the continent’s leaders and institutions handle the aftermath could have serious implications for the stability of the continent.

On 16 September, Malawi went to the polls to elect their president. The last time the country did that in 2019, it produced results that were so transparently rigged that five judges of the Constitutional Court of Malawi, wearing bullet-proof vests, were needed to set aside the result declared by the electoral commission. That was only the second time in Africa’s history that a court would nullify the declared outcome in a presidential election.

The annulled result had favoured then incumbent and fifth president of the republic, Peter Mutharika (a long-serving Law Professor and brother of Malawi’s third president, Bingu wa Mutharika), in a contest against Lazarus Chakwera, a theologian and pastor with the Assemblies of God Church in Malawi. In the re-run that followed the judicial nullification in 2020, Chakwera prevailed and the people ousted Peter Mutharika from the presidency.

The contest in September 2025 pitted 85 year-old Peter Mutharika against his nemesis, Lazarus Chakwera. In the preceding five years, President Chakwera had managed to squander the considerable civic goodwill that powered him into office. Despite being 15 years younger than Mutharika, President Chakwera lost resoundingly to his older opponent who secured 56.8% of the vote.

Malawi may have vindicated the trust of both the voters and of the candidates in a test of the will of the people, but it is an outlier in a continent that has grown used to seeing elections as charades. This reluctance for credible ballots was evident when the Central African country of Cameroon went to the polls nearly one month later on 12 October 2025, to elect their president. The incumbent, Paul Biya, was a 92 year-old, whose sojourn in Cameroon’s government dates back to his appointment as Chief of Staff in the cabinet of the Minister of Education in 1964. In 1975, President Ahmadou Ahidjo made him Prime Minister. On 6 November 1982, two days after the resignation of President Ahidjo on grounds of ill-health, Biya ascended to the presidency and has ruled the country for 43 years since.

At 92, Paul Biya is the oldest serving president in the world, only outlasted in office by Teodoro Obiang, president of the neighbouring Equatorial Guinea, who has been in office since he toppled his uncle, Macias Nguema, in August 1979 before executing him. In the election this year, his main opponent was Issa Tchiroma, a 35-year veteran in the cabinet of President Biya, who stepped down from the ruling Cameroon Peoples’ Democratic Movement (CPDM) and from the cabinet in order to run against his former boss.

It took the Constitutional Council 15 days to tabulate the figures in an election which had 8.1 million registered voters with an average turnout of about 68.5%. When it eventually declared that outcome on 27 October, the Constitutional Council announced Biya as winner with 53.66% of the votes in disputed results. That in an election in which he was unable to campaign because of infirmity. Independent analysts who have examined the official numbers insist he “couldn’t have won.”

With the result, Biya – who was born one month after Adolf Hitler assumed office as German Chancellor and in the month preceding the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the president of the United States of America – entered upon his seventh presidential term in a country in which the median age belongs to children who were born in 2006. By the time of the next election, he will be nearly one century old. In the wake of the announcement, United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, pointedly declined to extend congratulations to President Biya. Instead, he focused his attention on the need for a “thorough and impartial investigation” of the “post-electoral violence and…. reports of excessive use of force.”

Paul Biya can at least claim that he had a genuine contest against a genuine opponent. In Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, the contest two weeks later, on 25 October 2025, pitted incumbent President Alassane Ouattara – whose ambitions drove the country to the brink of fragmentation at the beginning of the millennium – against no one.

When the result was announced, President Ouattara, a child of the Second World War, having been born on New Year’s Day in 1942, contrived at 83 years to award himself nearly 90% of the vote and a fourth term in office in an election from which he barred every credible competition. That was indeed a generous four percentage points lower than the 94% of the votes that he awarded himself in 2020. In power since 2010, Ouattara was supposed to be term-limited after two terms of ten years in office. At 83, he expects to rule until at least he is 88, which would still be five years younger than President Biya’s current age.

The election in Tanzania four days after Côte d’Ivoire’s took place in a graveyard. The incumbent and candidate of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution) was Samia Suluhu Hassan, who inherited the office when her principal, John Pombe Magufuli, died in March 2021.

Ahead of the contest, however, it became evident that Samia would not tolerate a fair contest. Under her leadership, the government unleashed what Amnesty International described as a “wave of terror” designed to make her candidacy unopposed and the ruling party unchecked in its march to a pre-determined seventh decade in power. On the day of the contest on 29 October, protests unexpectedly erupted in key cities, such as Dar-Es-Salaam, Arusha, Mbeya, and Mwanza. Under cover of a media blackout complemented by an internet shutdown imposed on the day of the ballot, Samia’s government orchestrated a campaign of targeted mass murder in population centres suspected to be opposition strongholds.

President Samia’s electoral commission declared her winner with 87% voter turnout and nearly 98% of the vote. As Tanzanians in different parts of the country woke up to find bodies on their courtyards with fatal injuries from unknown persons and morgues overflowing with fresh cadavers reportedly being disappeared under instructions of the government, President Samia turned up at a military base in new capital city, Dodoma, where on the fourth night following the vote, she was stealthily inaugurated for a new term.

Initial estimates putting the casualty count in the hundreds were quickly eclipsed by more updated tallies of over 3,000 killed in under 72 hours. Fresh reporting by the New Humanitarian put the number over 5,000 and suggests that the casualty count may indeed be over 10,000. Around the country, initial trepidation gave way to alarm at the scale of the massacre. That alarm has now been ousted by outrage.

Meanwhile, for the first time in their histories, official election observer missions deployed by the African Union (AU) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) both concluded separately that the election in Tanzania “did not comply with AU principles.” This caught many people unprepared. Now both institutions are scrambling to figure out what to do. There is an emerging consensus that President Samia is illegitimate. The leaders of both institutions must articulate consequences and citizens have a right to expect them to do so clearly.

Consensus is also growing around the urgent need for an independent, international investigation and accountability. Meanwhile, Tanzania’s young people prepare for nation-wide protests on 9 December 2025. The symbolism is significant: it is World Anti-Corruption Day; it is the anniversary of the adoption of the Genocide Convention; and it is Tanzania’s Independence Day.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu