Fatma Karume, one of Tanzania’s top lawyers, has said she’s been struck off from the roll of advocates, a decision that bans her from practising law in the mainland.
Ms Karume, popularly known as shangazi, Swahili for aunt, has been a vocal critic of President John Magufuli.
She shared news of her disbarment on Twitter:
I have been PERMANENTLY removed from the Roll of Advocates: https://t.co/fHIsXSnNFG
— fatma karume aka Shangazi (@fatma_karume) September 23, 2020
The news comes a day after she was booted out of her law firm. She had tweeted:
“Everything has a beginning and an end. This is to inform you all that I have been fired from the firm that I helped build. My sin: ‘activism’.”
She told the BBC in a brief interview that she had been permanently disbarred by the Advocate’s Committee because she took Mr Magufuli to court for breaching the constitution.
The president, she said, had appointed an attorney general who did not fulfil the constitutionally stipulated requirements for the post.
The committee also told her that some tweets she had posted breached professional ethics.
Ms Karume said she did not plan to appeal against the decision to bar her from practising on the mainland.
She wanted people to read the judgments against her “100 years from today”, and “analyse them from a dispassionate distance and understand the times we were living under”.
Ms Karume is still allowed to practise law on the island of Zanzibar.