As in many other parts of the world, Africa has in recent years been experiencing democratic backsliding. GNV is republishing two articles by African Arguments that focus on some of the issues facing African democracy. The first is ‘AI and the New Machinery of African Repression’ by Khalid Bencherif, and the second, ‘Have Election Crackdowns Become the Norm? Domestic and Cross-Border Repression in East Africa’ by Devon Knudsen and Otsieno Namwaya.
Election poster, Tanzania (Photo: Alexander Gafarro / Shutterstock.com)
AI and the new machinery of African repression
Artificial intelligence is lowering the cost of authoritarian control in Africa. The danger is not only mass surveillance, but a state that can abort reformist change before it is even born.
Dictatorship used to be expensive. It needed informants, prisons, police files, propaganda and visible violence. Today, some of that work can be bought as software, financed through loans, connected to biometric systems and sold as modernization.
The African question is not whether AI will suddenly turn a democracy into a dictatorship. It is whether AI can strengthen habits of rule that already exist: executive impunity, politicised security services, weak courts, opaque procurement and the treatment of dissent as a security problem. In many states, AI makes scattered records searchable.
The surveillance rush
A March 2026 study by the Institute of Development Studies and the African Digital Rights Network found that at least 11 African governments had spent more than USD 2 billion on AI-enabled smart-city surveillance systems. The countries named were Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Nigeria alone accounted for more than USD 470 million; Mauritius for USD 456 million; Kenya for USD 219 million.
The equipment is not abstract. It includes high-definition CCTV cameras, automatic number-plate recognition, facial recognition, biometric identity layers, analytics platforms and command centres where the feeds converge. Much of it is supplied or financed by Chinese firms and banks. Other layers come from spyware and digital-forensics companies, including NSO Group, Cellebrite and Intellexa-linked firms whose tools have appeared in African and Middle Eastern political cases.
The sales language is familiar: public safety, traffic management, counter-terrorism, efficient cities. But the African pattern is not neutral. Wairagala Wakabi of CIPESA, one of the editors of the IDS/ADRN report, has warned that these systems are being used to monitor activists, track protesters and silence dissent. The report found little independent evidence that the cameras reduce crime. It found clearer evidence that surveillance infrastructure appears around opposition activity, protest routes, central business districts and politically sensitive neighbourhoods.
EndSARS protest, Nigeria, 2020 (Photo: Asokeretope / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 4.0])
This is the uniquely African implication. In countries where politics is often mediated by the police station, the court, the ruling party and the street, AI does not replace older power. It helps older power see earlier, sort faster and punish more selectively. Kenyan writer Nanjala Nyabola has argued that digital politics cannot be separated from analogue politics. AI makes that connection harder to escape.
Amnesty International reported on how authorities in Kenya used technology to monitor and target protestors in 2024 and 2025.
Old states, new engines
Control through information is not new in Africa. Colonial administrations counted bodies, mapped communities, issued passes and built files for policing labour and movement. Postcolonial states added national IDs, voter rolls, tax, telecom, school, bank and welfare records. AI changes retrieval: a face, number plate, transaction history and contact network can be joined in seconds.
The Atlantic Council and Paradigm Initiative reported in 2025 that 49 African countries had at least one biometric system, and that 35 of the continent’s 54 countries used biometrics in elections. Foreign technology firms dominate much of this ecosystem. In one sample cited by the report, only 38 percent of citizens surveyed knew their governments had purchased biometric, facial-recognition or AI systems.
That ignorance matters. A citizen cannot challenge a database they do not know exists, correct a watchlist they cannot see, or contest a machine match police treat as neutral truth. Where courts are slow and data-protection authorities weak, error can become a political weapon.
Security camera, Mauritius (Photo: Benoit Prieur / Wikimedia Commons [CC0 1.0])
Zimbabwe shows another layer, data extraction. In 2018, Zimbabwe entered a partnership with the Chinese firm CloudWalk for a mass facial-recognition project. Rights groups warned that Zimbabwean faces could become training material for systems later sold elsewhere. Ethiopian-born AI scholar Abeba Birhane has described this wider pattern as algorithmic colonialism: African bodies, data and social problems become raw material for technologies designed, owned and governed elsewhere.
The target list
Every movement for change begins with a calculation. People decide that visibility is less risky than silence. They gather, post, march and film. Sometimes government retreats; sometimes it cracks down. The decisive moment is when scattered frustration becomes visible as a movement.
AI-enabled surveillance changes that calculation. It does not have to arrest everyone. It only has to identify enough organisers, leaders, donors, livestreamers, and activists to make the next protest feel traceable. A face, plate number, phone movement or old hashtag becomes a thread in a political profile.
The effect is pre-emptive. For instance, a protest planned for Sunday and detected on Saturday through metadata, social-media monitoring and face-matching may not need police. The organisers know they have been seen, employers can be called, Passports can be delayed, and Tax files can be reopened. Often, the protest simply does not form.
The logic compresses: the algorithm flags a likely organiser; the flag is treated as proof the event would have occurred; and the person cannot be innocent because the alarm itself becomes evidence. With thin courts and politicised security services, intention starts to look like guilt.
This is why the African context matters. Surveillance abuses exist in richer democracies too, but they often face stronger courts, media, procurement records and civil-society litigation. In many African states, the control room is funded before the oversight body, and cameras are installed before the law defines search, storage or redress.
Computer for making biometric ID cards, Somalia (Photo: AMISOM Public Information / Wikimedia Commons [CC0 1.0])
Those who refuse
There is a hopeful conference question: could smart tools in citizens’ hands become a catalyst for democratic change, as mobile phones did in earlier protests? Sometimes, but not symmetrically. African journalists and civic technologists document abuses, fact-check generative propaganda, monitor hate speech, trace disinformation and build safer tools for reporters and activists. Groups such as CIPESA, Paradigm Initiative, Amnesty Kenya and MISA Zimbabwe make the invisible architecture more visible.
But the asymmetry is enormous. Infrastructure, compute, contracts, training data and technical support sit mostly with the state and foreign suppliers. A civic-tech app can expose corruption; it cannot match a command centre connected to cameras, telecom records, border systems and biometric registries. A fact-check cannot stop an activist’s phone being located by a security unit.
The democratic demand is not that citizens out-compute the state. It is that states justify and limit what they buy. Smart surveillance should require law, warrants, independent oversight, procurement transparency, human-rights impact assessments, deletion rules and remedies for abuse. Without those constraints, innovation becomes a cover for political sorting.
The upgrade
The danger is not that AI invents authoritarianism in Africa. It is that it upgrades authoritarianism where it already has roots. It lowers the cost of watching, raises the speed of sorting and makes punishment selective. A government need not terrorise everyone if it can identify the few people around whom others might gather.
AI can still support development and well-being in Africa, such as health systems, agriculture, translation, education, public services and expression. But without democracy, a free press, independent courts and enforceable digital rights, the same tools become a machine for narrowing civic life. The promise is efficiency, but the risk is obedience.
(This piece was made possible by support from the International Center for Journalists’ Michael Elliott Award, which is celebrating its ten-year anniversary.)
Youth with smartphones, Togo (Photo: Btwien / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0])
Have election crackdowns become the norm? Domestic and cross-border repression in East Africa
by Devon Knudsen and Otsieno Namwaya
Human rights abuses marred the presidential elections in Uganda in January 2026 and the contested polls in Tanzania in October 2025. As neighbouring Kenya enters a pre-electoral phase with presidential elections expected in 18 months, political violence is already underway. The government has carried out detentions, arrests, and intimidation of activists and political opponents in response to waves of mass protests since 2023. This repression is shaping the political environment ahead of the 2027 elections, exacerbated by increasing transnational repression of critics and political opponents between the three countries.
The question arises: has repression become normalized around elections in East Africa and what can be done to prevent it? Civil society leaders across the region are innovating new approaches to demanding electoral integrity and protecting civic space. International actors have tools with a proven track record of successfully mitigating election violence. If Kenyan, regional, and international actors take coordinated action now, there’s still time to lower the risk of election violence.
A regional race to the bottom
While Tanzanian political analysts had warned of the risk of human rights abuses by security forces in the 2025 national elections, few anticipated the scale of abuses that ensued. Although instances of political violence occurred in the months leading up to election day, the level of violence spiked after Tanzanian security forces responded to protests over election manipulation with lethal force. Amnesty International verified 26 videos and 10 photos, one of which showed 70 bodies piled up on the floors of a morgue of a hospital in the country’s capital. Media and civil society reported that Tanzanian security killed hundreds of protesters and bystanders, while officials of the main opposition party, Chadema, told Human Rights Watch they had collected reports of up to 1,000 people killed by police and unidentified security forces. Network data showed signs of a deliberate internet shutdown during the violence.
Tanzania experienced lower levels of violence in past elections, but by failing to hold perpetrators accountable, it increased its risk of renewed violence. In the 2020 elections, Human Rights Watch documented that security forces killed at least 14 people and injured another 55 on the semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar alone. Human rights abuses continued to occur in between elections, with the Tanganyika Law Society writing in 2024 that they received reports of at least 83 people going missing since President Samia Suluhu Hassan assumed office in 2021. Additional reports of killings, intimidation, and mass arrests preceded the 2024 local elections reiterating warning signs of potential violence in national elections, when the political stakes would be higher. Despite these warnings, United States foreign assistance for election-related programming in Tanzania was paused nine months before the election and later terminated.
Although the scale of violence following Uganda’s national election in January was smaller than Tanzania’s, there are parallels in the lead up to elections in both countries. United Nations experts reported at least 160 cases of enforced disappearances in 2025 and 550 opposition members had been arrested ahead of Ugandan elections. In the days leading up to the vote, Ugandan authorities suspended at least 10 human rights organizations and blocked internet access.
Ugandan election violence is not new. Uganda’s 2021 elections were marred by violence and abuses, including killings by security forces, arrests and beatings of opposition supporters and journalists, disruption of opposition rallies, and another internet shutdown. One of the main opposition leaders alleged that hundreds of people had been detained or abducted. Uganda’s 2016 election saw many of the same patterns of abuses.
Election campaign, Tanzania, 2010 (Photo: flowcomm / Flickr [CC BY 2.0])
Cross-border collaboration
Political repression by the security forces in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya against their citizens has been compounded by cross-border collaboration in targeting opponents and critics. Kizza Besigye, a veteran Uganda opposition politician, was abducted from Kenya in November 2024 and arraigned in a Ugandan military court. Four months earlier, Kenyan and Ugandan security officials abducted 36 supporters of Besigye’s former political party, the Forum for Democratic Change, in Kenya and transferred them to the Ugandan capital, where they were charged with terrorism. In January 2025, a Tanzanian activist, Maria Sarungi Tsehai, was abducted in Nairobi by three men believed to be Tanzanian security officers. In October, Ugandan authorities abducted two Kenyan activists, Bob Njagi and Nicholas Oyoo, and detained them incommunicado for 38 days. Upon their release and return to Kenya, President Yoweri Museveni accused them of being “experts in riots.”
Regional authorities have also attempted to thwart expressions of solidarity among civil society leaders and Gen Z youth movements across the three East African countries. Following Besigye’s arrest, Martha Karua, a Kenyan High Court advocate, led a team of 50 lawyers to defend him. The military court rejected the team’s appearance, alleging a lack of written instructions from the defendants. When Tundu Lissu, the leader of Tanzania’s main opposition party, was charged with treason and denied bail, Ugandan and Kenyan activists, including Agather Atuhaire and Boniface Mwangi, travelled to observe Lissu’s trial. Tanzanian security forces abducted Atuhaire and Mwangi and tortured them before leaving them at the borders of their respective countries. Other political and human rights activists with them, including Kenya’s former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga and Advocate Karua, were turned away at the airport.
Kenyan politicians have also threatened their own citizens supporting opposition candidates elsewhere in East Africa. In May 2025, Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi said activists who recently travelled to Tanzania would have themselves to blame if they exported “bad manners“ to neighbouring countries. Two days later, President Ruto apologized to Tanzania and Uganda for “cyberbullying” by Kenyans online. In a televised address in November 2025, a senator of the ruling United Democratic Alliance (UDA) urged President Hassan and Ugandan President Museveni to arrest the “busybody activists“.
Implications for Kenya
Kenya is approaching two decades since the disputed 2007–08 presidential election, during which at least 1,100 people were killed, including more than 400 by the police. The country’s response to those abuses included the passage of the 2010 constitution, which established key accountability institutions, such as the Independent Policing Oversight Authority, the Internal Affairs Unit of the police, and the National Police Service Commission.
In the interim, however, Kenyan authorities have severely weakened these mechanisms. Although Kenyan political leaders agreed to promote accountability for election violence to prevent its recurrence, Kenyan authorities failed to prosecute state and non-state actors implicated in the 2007–08 post-election violence. That pattern of abuses has persisted during and after elections.
During Kenya’s contested 2017 elections, police and armed gangs killed more than 100 people, mostly in Nairobi and western Kenya. The authorities have been slow to prosecute those responsible. The trial of police officers charged with beating a six-month-old infant to death during house raids is the only case to reach the courts to date. Hundreds of protesters were injured but many chose not to forego medical attention out of fear they would be arrested in hospitals.Although Kenya’s 2022 elections were largely peaceful at the time, recurring demonstrations started months later, citing “electoral malpractice“ as one of the grievances. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a non-profit organization that collects data on political violence, reported excessive use of force by police, with at least 35 deaths during protests. The unrest stopped after President William Ruto and the late Raila Odinga signed a pact that included a plan to enhance the credibility of elections and ensure accountability for police violence. The pact remains largely unimplemented, raising fears over future electoral disputes.The 2027 elections are over a year away, but repression and attacks on activists have been underway for several years. More recent examples of attacks on activists and civil society, independent media, the judiciary, and key opposition figures who have expressed interest in running for president have created a climate of fear ahead of the 2027 elections. Will Kenya follow in the steps of its neighbours?The indicators are not encouraging. Just as the violence in Tanzania’s 2024 local elections forewarned the violence in national elections a year later, Kenyan analysts see recent by-elections as a portent of things to come. Local elections were characterized by police abuses and informal youth militias were paid to commit violence across multiple constituencies. In Malava, for example, a coalition of five NGOs said that police provided security for the so-called “goons,” and appeared to support the state-backed candidate.
Recent incidents of harassment against possible opposition candidates are also worrying. In the aftermath of the by-elections in November, the state withdrew security from George Natembeya, the Trans Nzoia county governor who supported an opposition candidate and has expressed interest in running for president in 2027. Police and pro-government youth groups have disrupted several public meetings of Ruto’s former deputy and vocal critic, Rigathi Gachagua. Mwangi has reportedly received death threats over an extended period, which intensified after he announced his candidacy for president.
Despite Ruto’s campaign promise to end extra-judicial killings, new waves of killings and enforced disappearances by police units occurred during his administration. During the 2024 Gen Z protests, security forces from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and National Intelligence Service assaulted, arbitrarily detained, tortured, abducted, disappeared, and killed scores of protesters. Similar activities against protestors have been documented in 2025.
Commonwealth election observers, Kenya, 2017 (Photo: The Commonwealth / Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0])
What can international actors do?
During the 2007–08 election dispute, the African Union, United Nations, European Union, and the United States responded robustly by freezing assistance to security forces and enhancing support for election monitoring and civil society safety mechanisms. They also invested in addressing the underlying drivers of violence and establishing early warning systems to help prevent recurrence. Such resolute responses to election violence have yet to be replicated in Uganda and Tanzania. The mechanisms that USAID and the U.S. Department of State had in place to prevent election violence in both countries were cut short due to foreign assistance terminations and the dismantling of USAID and human rights-focused bureaus across the Department of State.
Nevertheless, diplomats did take some action in response to abuses by state security forces during the 2025 post-election protests in Tanzania. Notably, the European Union and the United States urged Samia Suluhu Hassan to establish an inclusive, independent commission of inquiry, demanding transparency, accountability, and political reforms. However, many analysts say that without stronger measures from the international community, pressure on Suluhu Hassan will fall short of producing meaningful reform.
Stronger action is also needed from regional actors. Although the African Union and East Africa Community were a driving force behind the negotiations that reached an agreement resolving Kenya’s 2007–08 post-election crisis, they too fell short in insulating electoral and accountability institutions from executive branch interference. Taking this additional step would have established a positive example, not just for subsequent elections in Kenya, but also Uganda, Tanzania, and other countries in the region. Looking forward, several European donor governments are supporting Kenyan civil society organizations advocating for transparent and credible election processes, and at least one multilateral donor is hoping to join them, but more international and regional support is urgently needed.
While the international community’s strong ties to the Kenyan government obligates them to act, the primary responsibility of preventing election violence clearly falls to Kenyan authorities. The Kenyan government must respect the independence of electoral institutions, government oversight bodies, and the judiciary, while answering citizens’ calls for campaign finance reform and restoring faith in election processes. The government should refrain from directing the police to intimidate protestors and opposition supporters and prevent interference in the investigation and prosecution of political violence. They must also respect civic space and media freedom and facilitate an environment where journalists and human rights activists can do their work without harassment ahead of the 2027 elections. Kenya is at a crossroads—it must not follow the well-beaten paths of its neighbours or regress to its own violent past.
(Both articles by African Arguments are republished here under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.)
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