“Shoot to Kill”: Inside Tanzania’s Ongoing Post-Election Massacre | Intelligence Assessment

Ujasusi Blog’s East Africa Monitoring Team | 05 November 2025 | 0345 GMT

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The violent suppression of Gen-Z protests in Tanzania represents a calculated authoritarian gambit driven by existential threat perception, regional contagion fears, and a collapse of the ruling party’s traditional legitimacy structures. President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s decision to deploy maximum force—resulting in credible reports of hundreds of deaths—emerged from a strategic calculation that brutal repression in a permissive international environment would succeed where democratic competition would guarantee defeat. This intelligence assessment applies structured analytic techniques to decode Hassan’s political endgame and the implications for Tanzania’s democratic trajectory.

The Triple Legitimacy Crisis and Strategic Context