Chad’s government arrested nine opposition leaders on Saturday and has kept them locked up ever since, a move timed with surgical precision to decapitate a protest movement three days before it planned to march.

The nine are senior figures within the GCAP opposition grouping, which had called what it described as a “march of protest and indignation” for May 2. President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno’s authorities banned the rally before moving to detain the people who organised it. Spokesman Hissein Abdoulaye confirmed Sunday that all nine remained in police custody. A separate police source, speaking without authorisation, confirmed the same.

The timing is not subtle. It rarely is in Chad. The arrests arrive in the aftermath of a constitutional manoeuvre that opposition figures and international rights organisations have spent months condemning. In early October, parliament — operating under the familiar conditions of a legislature that knows which way its president wants it to vote — passed an amendment establishing a seven-year presidential term renewable without limit.

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The vote came less than two years after Chadians had approved a constitution by referendum, meaning the rules had barely settled before they were rewritten to suit the man at the top. The amendment does not merely extend Déby’s time in power. It removes the ceiling entirely.

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Les Transformateurs, one of Chad’s main opposition parties, connected Sunday’s detentions to a pattern it has been living inside for years. The party invoked the 2015 arrest of its leader Succès Masra, a former prime minister who was sentenced in May 2025 to 20 years in prison for “incitement to hatred and violence.” Human Rights Watch called the trial politically motivated. The sentence has not been served quietly — it has functioned as a warning, visible to every opposition figure calculating the personal cost of public dissent in a country where the rules of political competition are written by the man who benefits from them.

The nine detained GCAP leaders have not been publicly charged. They are simply in custody, on the eve of a protest their government has declared cannot happen, in a country whose constitution now guarantees their president can stay in office for as long as he chooses. May 2 is three days away.