Growing Shadows: How Tanzania’s Spy Agency TISS Is Shifting from Anglo MI5/MI6 Traditions to China’s MSS Model
Ujasusi Blog - Africa Strategic Security Desk | 🗓️24 July 2025 | 🕜0015 BST
Introduction
Intelligence institutions mirror the political systems that create them. In Western democracies such as the United Kingdom, well‑defined statutory mandates and layers of parliamentary oversight seek to balance national security with civil liberties. In China, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) functions as a party‑security organ whose broad remit—combining foreign intelligence, domestic political policing and counter‑espionage—enables the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to secure its monopoly on power. Tanzania’s Intelligence and Security Service (TISS), established in 1996 under the Tanzania Intelligence and Security Service Act, historically resembled a modest civil intelligence organisation designed to collect information on external threats, advise leaders and avoid becoming a political police. Yet recent legal changes, technological projects and political dynamics suggest a worrying convergence between TISS’s direction and practices reminiscent of China’s MSS. This strategic intelligence analysis report examines how and why TISS appears to be aligning with MSS‑style practices and contrasts its evolution with the roles of MI5 and MI6 in the United Kingdom. Drawing on official legislation, credible news reports and scholarly analyses, it identifies warning signs of drift, operational and technological shifts, and the domestic and international drivers behind this evolution.