From Harare to Dar es Salaam to Mbabane to Lusaka, governments have learned they no longer need a guilty verdict to silence critics. They need a cell, a charge sheet, and a calendar they control. When the cell will not do, there is the bullet and, for those who survive, the border. At the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC), we see this pattern every other week. The question is whether the region's institutions are strong enough to stop this crisis.

On Africa Day, while the political class delivered its annual sermons on liberation and sovereignty, former minister Walter Mzembi walked back through the gates of Harare Remand Prison. Not as a prisoner this time, he had been acquitted a fortnight earlier after more than ten months in detention on charges that ultimately collapsed into nothing, but as a visitor. He had come to see Godfrey Karembera, the activist Zimbabwe knows as Madzibaba VeShanduko, whom he called one of his ‘sons’ from his own months inside.

This tender image should make every citizen in this region furious, because Mzembi's visit does not convey compassion; it tells the story of a practice that has become regional. Across Southern and East Africa, states have perfected a punishment that requires no conviction at all: the sentence you serve before anyone proves you did anything wrong. The verdict, when it comes, is almost beside the point, as the cage is the penalty.

Zimbabwe: bail as a privilege, not a right

Karembera is a farmer from Guruve South, a husband and father of three. In the eyes of the state, his offence was essentially a colour, the yellow robes he wore for the opposition, the rallies he danced at, and the visibility he refused to surrender. Arrested last October over fliers linked to the Blessed Geza protests and charged with inciting public violence, he has been imprisoned ever since, while his co-accused were granted bail by the High Court.

Section 50 of Zimbabwe's Constitution is unambiguous: an arrested person must be released pending trial unless there are compelling reasons to detain them. Yet the courts have inverted that presumption. Freedom has become the exception that must be begged for; detention, the default. Job Sikhala spent nearly 600 days in pretrial custody before walking out with a suspended sentence, having already served, in advance, a punishment heavier than any lawful one. The journalist Blessed Mhlanga, who had been refused bail on the breathtaking reasoning that his release would cause unrest, was eventually released in 2025. None of this is incidental; it is the design.

Tanzania: the unbailable charge and the trial that never moves

In Tanzania, the same machine carries a heavier weapon. Tundu Lissu, chairperson of the opposition CHADEMA and a practising lawyer, was arrested in April 2025 after a rally demanding electoral reform under the banner ‘No Reforms, No Elections.’ He was charged with treason, a capital offence that, conveniently, carries no right to bail. He has now spent well over a year in a maximum-security prison while his trial crawls forward on a handful of days, repeatedly postponed: for absent witnesses, for the prosecution's bid to conceal its witnesses, and for appeals the state itself lodged after losing a ruling.

The choreography is the point. The adjournments kept Lissu behind bars throughout Tanzania's October 2025 election, a vote his party could not contest, held amid an internet blackout, mass arrests, and hundreds of deaths. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has found his detention unlawful. None of it has freed him. When the charge is unbailable and the calendar belongs to the state, a court need not convict you to neutralise you. It need only keep adjourning.

Eswatini: the cage and the bullet

In Eswatini, the mask comes off entirely. Mduduzi Bacede Mabuza and Mthandeni Dube were sitting members of parliament when they backed calls for reform during the 202 protests; security forces responded with live ammunition, leaving dozens dead. Arrested in July 2021 and held for some two years before their conviction, they were handed lengthy sentences under the Suppression of Terrorism Act of 2008 and the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act of 1938, the latter a colonial relic drafted to protect a foreign crown from the people it governed, now used against citizens of an ‘independent’ state.

But Eswatini also shows what comes after the cage. Consider Peter Mpandlana Shongwe, the veteran PUDEMO activist arrested more than thirty-five times and never once convicted. His life is the argument: when the prosecution never has to succeed, the arrest itself is the sentence, served repeatedly for decades. Thulani Maseko, the human rights lawyer who fought these very laws in court, was gunned down through the window of his own home in January 2023, before his wife and children, hours after the King warned those calling for democratic reform. His killers have never been found, and the state has not come clean about any investigations. The state that could not convict him in a courtroom did not need to. Here is the spectrum laid bare: the cage for some, the conditional leash for others, and for the bravest, the bullet.

Zambia: the pre-emptive crackdown

Lest anyone imagine this is the preserve of long-entrenched autocrats, Zambia tells a different story. A country justly praised for its 2021 democratic transition is now drifting towards the same toolkit as its August 2026 election nears. In 2025, it enacted the Cyber Security Act, which criminalises ‘false information’, enables real-time interception of private communications, and concentrates surveillance powers under the presidency. The irony is that the government repealed criminal defamation in 2022 but has resurrected its logic in digital form. The arrests have followed: a former parliamentarian jailed over a social media post, opposition figures charged with sedition, and citizens detained merely for rumours about the president's health. Zambia reveals the pattern's most unsettling feature: it is not the signature of any one regime type; it is a reflex even reformist governments reach for as the ballot nears.

One coherent toolkit and the exodus it produces

These are not isolated national tragedies; they form a coherent toolkit that travels well. Counter-terror and cyber laws, paired with colonial-era sedition offences, criminalise speech that no democratic constitution would punish. Bail, a guaranteed right, is recast as a favour. Trials are not lost; they are simply never allowed to conclude. And the targets are revealing: a farmer, opposition MPs, a senior lawyer, journalists, and citizens posting online. When the state jails the very people whose job it is to scrutinise the justice system, the message to everyone else is clear.

When despots are allowed to dictate the rules of the game at the people's expense, the people pay twice, first in their freedom, then in their futures; ultimately, they flee. The cage and the bullet empty a country of its most courageous citizens, who cross borders to build new lives elsewhere and send home, in remittances and longing, what their homeland would not let them give in person. We do Africa no favours by indulging this. A continent that exports its dissidents and imprisons its reformers is not stable; it is merely quiet, and that quiet is the silence of an emptying room.

What are we doing about it?

At SALC, we reject silence and challenge it at its core, within the law itself.

In Eswatini, we have supported the long-running constitutional challenge to the country's security legislation, the consolidated cases bearing Thulani Maseko's name. In 2016, the High Court struck down provisions of the Suppression of Terrorism Act and the 1938 Sedition Act as unconstitutional; the government appealed, and in August 2024 the Supreme Court regrettably reversed that victory. The fight is not over: a statute this vague and so lethal to free expression cannot be the last word, and we continue to press for its repeal.

In Tanzania, we stand with the Legal and Human Rights Centre, the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition, the Media Council of Tanzania and the Centre for Strategic Litigation in their challenge to the Online Content Regulations before the East African Court of Justice. The Regulations would license bloggers, register social media users, and criminalise vaguely defined ‘prohibited content.’ When the Court's First Instance Division dismissed the case, the applicants appealed, and we continue to support that appeal. We have also backed the challenge to Tanzania's week-long internet shutdown during the October–November 2025 election period, which severed citizens' access to platforms such as X (formerly Twitter). These efforts build on the 2019 ruling in which the same Court found that provisions of Tanzania's Media Services Act, including its sedition, criminal defamation and ‘false news’ offences, violated freedom of expression.

This is the heart of our democratic-governance mandate across the region: defending the right to speak, assemble, publish and be free pending trial; resisting internet shutdowns and the return of colonial-era offences through cyber bills; and insisting that states honour the treaties they have freely signed. But we do this work with our eyes open to a hard truth. Strategic litigation is only as strong as the institutions that hear it and the bodies willing to enforce its results. We rely on courts, commissions and chambers that exist to empower citizens to hold their governments to account, and those are exactly the institutions our region has been dismantling.

The court we closed for working and the one we got right

This region once had a court where a citizen could be heard against the state. The SADC Tribunal opened its doors to individuals and, in the 2008 Campbell case, held that Zimbabwe's land seizures breached the Treaty's commitments to human rights and the rule of law. The region's answer was not to comply but to destroy the court: suspended in 2010, closed to individuals by 2012, and, in 2014, confined to disputes between states alone by a new Protocol. South Africa's Constitutional Court later found its own president's role in that demolition unlawful, but the damage was done. Southern Africa dismantled its only regional human rights court precisely because it worked.

Yet the region can act with integrity, as it did in Lesotho. After the 2014 coup attempt and the 2015 assassination of Lt-Gen Maaparankoe Mahao, SADC deployed the Phumaphi Commission of Inquiry, named the abuses for what they were, demanded accountability and constitutional reform, and maintained a mediation and oversight presence to pursue stability grounded in the rule of law. SADC chose to show up for the people of Lesotho. The lesson is unforgiving: the failure to do the same in Zimbabwe, in Eswatini, and now in Tanzania is not a failure of capacity. It is a failure of will.

A reckoning worth demanding

So, the call must be greater than the release of any one prisoner, urgent as those releases are.

We need an SADC with the will to honour its founding Treaty, not merely the protocols on trade and infrastructure, but Article 4, which binds members to human rights, democracy and the rule of law, and Article 5, which obliges them to defend peace and security, alongside the regional Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections. What we do not want is a bloc that monitors and enforces those commitments rather than merely reciting them at summits and abandoning them at borders.

We need to get the SADC Parliament right. The Treaty amendment recognising a regional parliament entered into force in 2024, and the transformation from the old Parliamentary Forum is underway. But a chamber conceived merely as ‘consultative and deliberative’ risks reproducing the talking shop it replaces, well-funded, well-attended, and powerless. A real and ethical transformation would give the Parliament genuine oversight powers and open its doors to civil society: human rights defenders, lawyers' associations, journalists' bodies, and citizens' movements who do the daily work of democracy when governments will not.

And we need a judicial framework worthy of the Tribunal's lost promise, one that restores the individual's right to be heard against the state, yet with checks and balances robust enough to prevent any single defiant government from again collapsing regional justice by persuading its peers to look away. Independence that can be revoked by communiqué is no independence at all.

Until those institutions exist and bite, the cage will remain the sentence, the bullet the threat, and the border will continue to swallow our brightest. A region that jails its reformers, buries its lawyers and exiles its young has already convicted itself. The only open question is whether it will find the courage to build the courts, the chamber and the will to say so and mean it.

Written by Melusi Simelane, Civic Rights Programme Manager, Southern Africa Litigation Centre