Dear Sir,
I am writing this not just as a policyholder, but as a father and a citizen whose trust in our insurance regulatory framework has been pushed to the breaking point. This is a detailed account of my ordeal with Sanlam Allianz following a traumatic accident involving my wife and two small children.
The air near the village of Tengwe in Mkata was heavy with the late afternoon heat of Thursday, December 18, 2025. It was around 5:00 PM, that deceptive hour when the sun begins its descent and travellers start calculating the distance to their destination.
We were part of a stationary queue, halted by roadworks to allow oncoming traffic to climb the hill just after Mkata. We sat at the very end of that line—my wife Izabel, our two little children, and I—unaware that in a matter of seconds, our lives would be measured by the distance between a dashboard button and a desperate prayer.
In front of us sat a government V8 and a semi-trailer, a silent wall of steel. To our left was a deep valley; to our right, a continuous stream of heavy trucks ascending the hill. There was nowhere to go. The silence of the queue was shattered by a sound every driver dreads—a distant, frantic horn followed by the unmistakable roar of a Scania truck gaining momentum on the descent behind us.
Within twenty metres, the terrifying reality set in—the truck had no brakes! In that split second of clarity, I did the only thing a driver in total paralysis could do; I glanced at the dashboard to ensure the electronic handbrake was engaged, a final, futile gesture of control. Izabel later told me she realised the magnitude of our danger only when she looked at my face; she saw a brand of terror she had never witnessed in all our years together.
A miraculous survival
In that moment of absolute helplessness, she remembered a sermon by Pastor Mmbaga about calling upon Christ in times of profound uncertainty. She screamed the name YESU! into the cabin just as the world exploded around us. The rear-end collision was a violent rupture of metal and glass that propelled our car into the government V8 ahead, which had also braced for impact.
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By some divine geometry, as we were being crushed between two giants, the runaway Scania somehow found a sliver of space to our right—shaving past us despite the oncoming traffic—before plunging into the river valley below. When the dust settled, the miracle revealed itself in stages. We emerged from the wreckage physically unharmed.
Even our belongings, including a high-end graphic laptop—an architect’s workhorse positioned precariously in the boot at the exact point of impact—remained miraculously functional. We walked away with our lives and our property, thinking the worst was over, unaware that a different kind of wreckage awaited us in the boardrooms of Sanlam Allianz. The trauma of the crash was soon replaced by the cold, calculated exhaustion of a claims process that felt more predatory than protective.
After cooperating fully with the Mkata Police and ensuring my BMW X5 was towed to Noble Motors in Dar es Salaam within 24 hours, I was met with a saga that has now stretched into April 2026. My handler’s initial promises of a few-day resolution vanished as Sanlam’s leadership initiated a third-party investigation that felt less like an audit and more like a violation of my family’s dignity. This investigator’s conduct was a flagrant violation of the 2025 TIRA Guidelines on professionalism.
An intrusive investigation
Rather than assessing the mechanical reality of a shattered vehicle, the third-party evaluator bypassed the wreckage to target my family’s privacy. He bypassed technical expertise to interrogate the very souls of the survivors, demanding before and after photographs of my wife and two small children.
He pried into our personal itinerary, questioning whether we concluded our journey after the accident, as if the psychological trauma of a near-death experience could be quantified or used as a lever to discount our suffering.
This was not a motor vehicle valuation; it was a disturbing intrusion that felt like a secondary assault on our peace of mind. This investigator proceeded to manufacture a reality that Noble Motors management and I found unrecognisable. He cooked figures, claiming he had negotiated repair costs down to 20 per cent of the actual invoice despite never having a formal audience with the garage.
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He unilaterally decided my vehicle was worth a staggering 18 per cent of its actual value, a figure Sanlam used to force a total loss negotiation that felt like being robbed a second time, this time in broad daylight.
This is the code of practice currently masquerading as insurance in Tanzania—a system where an insurer can undervalue your asset, invade your privacy, and then withhold an agreed settlement whilst they wait for a salvage buyer to fund their cheque. Perhaps most uncouth is the current demand from the Sanlam claims team.
Despite surrendering my original registration cards and keys weeks ago—effectively transferring legal title and control to Sanlam—they now insist that I, the victim, must settle the garage’s inspection and storage fees before they will handle my file or release my money.
They are holding my indemnity hostage to a garage bill that legally forms part of the claim itself. It is a display of breathtaking arrogance: an insurer demanding that a policyholder pay to clear the way for the insurer to collect their salvage, all whilst my agreed settlement remains a mere entry on a delayed spreadsheet.
The regulatory failure
As I conclude this letter, Dr Saqware, by mid-January 2026, Sanlam’s internal valuators had concluded their assessment. However, the saga then took a dark and intrusive turn. Sanlam’s leadership, apparently suspicious of the proximity between my policy inception and the date of the accident, commissioned a third-party investigator without my prior knowledge—an individual whose conduct and the subsequent ordeal I have already detailed.
Dr Saqware, is a policyholder expected to wait for a prescribed duration before an accident is deemed permissible? Is not the very essence of insurance to provide a shield against the unforeseeable future, rendering the concepts of proximate or distant occurrences entirely immaterial to the contract of indemnity?
The new Salvage Management and Disposal Guidelines 2025 were established to guarantee fairness, transparency, and efficiency. Yet, I must ask you, Commissioner: is the policyholder merely a bridge for the insurer’s liquidity? When an insurer demands physical possession of the asset and audaciously requires the insured to settle the garage’s fees before remittance, they are no longer practising insurance; they are exercising a lopsided leverage that leaves the citizen utterly powerless.
I walked away from the valley in Mkata, but I am still struggling to survive the suffocating bureaucracy of Sanlam.
Kiiya Joel Kiiya is the founder and chief executive of C-Sema. He can be reached at kiiya.jk@sematanzania.org or on X as @KiiyaJK. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
