Inevitable questions follow MP’s shooting
What you need to know:
Many Tanzanians are eager to know why he has been shot, who have shot him and how he is doing.
Dar es Salaam. Singida East MP Tundu Lissu (Chadema), who is admitted to hospital, following yesterday’s gunshot wounds in Dodoma, where he was attending a Parliamentary session, has drawn public attention. Many Tanzanians are eager to know why he has been shot, who have shot him and how he is doing.
Mr Lissu is the President of the Tanganyika Law Society (TLS) and the Chief Whip of Opposition in Parliament. The outspoken politician heads the Chadema legal department since 2004.
He has been a politician since 2010, when he was elected for the first time as Singida East MP. He has been also criticising the government and on several occasions has been arrested and arraigned for seditious charges.
In 2016, he was charged together with an editor of a weekly tabloid, Mawio, Mr Saimon Mkina, for publishing seditious material. Others co-accused are journalist Jabir Yunus and printer Ismail Mehboob.
Mr Lissu is charged with another count on inciting religious feelings during by-election campaigns in Dimani Constituency in Zanzibar on January 11 this year. He accepted to have said so, but he denied uttering seditious remarks.
On March 6 this year he was re-arrested after the Director of Public Prosecutions issued a nolle prosequi terminating his case. He was charged afresh for making seditious remarks during by-election campaigns in Zanzibar.
On August 5 this year, Mr Lissu appeared at the Kisutu Resident Magistrate’s Court facing seditious charges, accused of calling the President a “petty dictator”.
He faces another seditious charge said to have been committed on July 28 at the Kisutu Resident Magistrate’s Court premises through his remarks that a dictatorship government should be opposed at all costs, otherwise the country would plunge into darkness.
