Tanzania is standing on a political fault line. President Samia Suluhu Hassan has appointed her daughter Wanu Hafidh Ameir as Deputy Minister for Education and her son-in-law Mohamed Mchengerwa as Minister for Health in her new cabinet. These are not small roles. Education and health shape the minds and bodies of an entire nation. When both sectors fall directly under the influence of a single family, the message is unmistakable: the state is being quietly reorganized to serve a household rather than the people. This is how state capture begins. It begins with such soft, smiling appointments that convert public institutions into family property.
Nepotism is never a neutral act. It is not about competence. It is about constructing a loyal inner circle that answers to blood before it answers to the constitution. When a president installs close relatives at the heart of critical ministries, it becomes easier to shape policy behind closed doors, channel budgets in preferred directions, influence contracts, mute dissent, and block investigations. The formal state that appears in law books starts to be replaced by an informal state that lives inside the president’s family network. In Tanzania’s case, the appointments of Wanu Hafidh Ameir and Mohamed Mchengerwa are not symbolic. They are a signal to civil servants, security agencies and ruling party elites that the main highway to power and protection now runs through the presidential household and cronies.
Africa has seen this script before. One of the clearest examples is Equatorial Guinea. President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo did not suddenly wake up one day and declare his son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, as heir apparent. He followed a slow, calculated path. Teodorín, as he is widely known, was first given powerful economic responsibilities as Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, placing him close to key revenue streams. Later, he was elevated to Second Vice President, in charge of defence and security. In 2016, he was promoted again to become First Vice President, a role that effectively positioned him as the man waiting in the wings to succeed his father.
This was not a coincidence. It was political engineering. Each promotion expanded Teodorín’s reach. Each new office deepened his control over security and resources. Step by step, a message was broadcast to the elite and to ordinary citizens: this is the next man. Today, Teodorín sits as First Vice President and is widely regarded as the heir to the presidency, even as Equatorial Guinea’s vast oil wealth has enriched a tiny circle while most citizens remain trapped in poverty.
The pattern is painfully familiar. First, you place a family member in a strategic ministry. Then you surround them with loyalists. You let them control budgets, patronage and visibility. You normalize the idea that this person speaks for the state. You allow media coverage to grow around them. Eventually, when the time is ripe, you present them as a natural successor. It is not succession by democratic competition. It is succession by bloodline.
Seen through this lens, Tanzania’s current path becomes even more worrying. Wanu Hafidh Ameir is not an ordinary appointee. She is the president’s daughter and a Member of Parliament, now made Deputy Minister for Education, a portfolio that touches every family in the country. Mohamed Mchengerwa is not an ordinary technocrat. He is the president’s son-in-law, now in charge of the Health Ministry, one of the most sensitive and powerful dockets in government.
If such relatives can be placed at the centre of these ministries today, what stops the same daughter from being promoted to a full cabinet minister tomorrow, perhaps to a ministry with even greater national visibility? What stops a future narrative from arising that presents her as the experienced, tested, obvious choice for the highest office? Equatorial Guinea teaches us that this is not a wild conspiracy. It is a logical end point of unrestrained nepotism.
Supporters of such appointments often hide behind the word “trust”. They argue that a president must work with people she trusts. But we must ask the real question: trust for what purpose. Trust to protect the nation, or trust to protect the regime. Trust to strengthen independent institutions, or trust to weaken them. Trust to serve the people, or trust to ensure that no one in the family is ever held accountable. When family loyalty becomes the main qualification for high office, the republic quietly shrinks and the dynasty quietly rises.
Supporters of nepotistic appointments often push back by claiming that political families are nothing new. They point to the United States, where George H. W. Bush was president before his son George W. Bush won two terms of his own. They also cite Malawi, where Peter Mutharika succeeded his brother Bingu wa Mutharika, defeating Joyce Banda in the election that followed Bingu’s death. But these comparisons crumble under scrutiny. In both the Bush and Mutharika cases, the successors won competitive national elections. George W. Bush was never appointed by his father; he fought through primaries and a national vote. Peter Mutharika did eventually win a national mandate.
Yet even Malawi’s case reveals the danger: Peter was first appointed into cabinet by his brother, a move that gave him national visibility and political machinery. That early appointment was not neutral. It was a preparatory step, a grooming strategy, and it ultimately positioned him to capture the presidency when his moment arrived. The same pattern is visible in Uganda, where Muhoozi Kainerugaba, President Museveni’s son, has been elevated through military ranks until he now stands as the clear heir apparent, not because Ugandans chose him, but because the system was engineered to make him inevitable. This is the real difference. In a healthy democracy, political families rise or fall through open competition. In a captured state, they rise through orchestrated appointments, institutional manipulation and dynastic ambition disguised as trust.
The timing in Tanzania makes it even more alarming. These family appointments come in the shadow of a deeply contested election and a brutal crackdown in which thousands of Tanzanians have been killed by security forces. At such a moment, a truly reformist government would be widening the circle of accountability, inviting scrutiny, and strengthening checks and balances. Instead, the circle is being tightened around blood ties and personal loyalty. That is not the posture of a government that fears wrongdoing. It is the posture of a government that fears accountability.
Equatorial Guinea stands in the background like a mirror. There, state institutions have been hollowed out and fused into a single family project. Public wealth has been converted into private luxury, complete with supercars, mansions and offshore accounts, while the majority remain poor. At the centre of this story is a father who carefully prepared his son through ministerial and vice-presidential posts until the idea of succession felt normal, even inevitable.
Tanzania is not Equatorial Guinea. It has a proud history of liberation politics and a founding president, Julius Nyerere, who believed that the state must serve the many rather than the few. But that history is now being tested. When Tanzanians see Wanu Hafidh Ameir and Mohamed Mchengerwa occupy key ministries, they are right to feel that a line has been crossed. Today it is Education and Health. Tomorrow it could be Finance, Defence or even the Vice Presidency. The more the family’s roots spread through the state, the harder they will be to uproot.
Nepotism is not a harmless African habit. It is not a cultural quirk. It is a political weapon. It is the first chapter in a longer story in which the presidency stops being a public trust and quietly becomes a family asset. If Tanzanians and Africans more broadly fail to confront this pattern now, they may one day wake up to discover that they are living in a dynasty that was never openly declared, only silently constructed.
For Tanzania, the question is urgent and simple. Will the country defend its identity as a republic where leadership is earned through service and competition, or will it slide into the shadow of Equatorial Guinea, where power is treated like a family inheritance. The appointments of Wanu Hafidh Ameir and Mohamed Mchengerwa have given us a glimpse of the road ahead. The people of Tanzania, and Africa at large, must decide whether to accept that road or resist it before it is too late.
