Tanzania Intelligence and Security Service: A Criminal Enterprise Operating Under State Authority
How TISS Has Transformed from Intelligence Agency to Instrument of State Terror While Leaving Tanzania Vulnerable to Regional Threats
Ujasusi Blog’s East Africa Monitoring Team | 06 November 2025 | 0220 GMT
The Tanzania Intelligence and Security Service (TISS), ostensibly established to protect national security and combat threats to the United Republic of Tanzania, has metamorphosed into what intelligence analysts increasingly characterise as a state-sanctioned criminal outfit operating under the direct authority of President Samia Suluhu Hassan. As the East African nation grapples with the aftermath of a post-election massacre that claimed hundreds—potentially over 1,000—lives in late October and early November 2025, uncomfortable questions emerge about TISS’s role not merely in political repression, but in its catastrophic failure to address legitimate security threats emanating from Islamic State affiliates in neighboring Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzanian nationals joining jihadist groups in Somalia and Somaliland, and the emerging risk of a Nigerian-style kidnapping-for-ransom ecosystem that could metastasize from state-sponsored abductions into criminal and terrorist enterprise.
This intelligence insight examines the triple crisis facing Tanzania: an intelligence apparatus that has weaponised state power against its own citizens while simultaneously demonstrating alarming incompetence in fulfilling its core counterterrorism mandate, failing to monitor or prevent radicalisation of Tanzanian youth travelling to join foreign terrorist organisations, and inadvertently creating the infrastructure and normalisation of mass abduction that criminal and terrorist networks could exploit. The convergence of these failures creates a perfect storm that threatens regional stability and positions Tanzania as East Africa’s most vulnerable state to transnational jihadist violence.