Tanzania’s effort to make criminal-justice institutions more accountable should begin with a proposition that, I believe, is sometimes lost in law enforcement circles and even public debate, or at least whose significance is underappreciated: lawful police work is not an obstacle to justice. It is, in fact, one of its preconditions.
This matters at a moment when the Ministry of Constitution and Legal Affairs is considering a guide to monitor the responsibilities of criminal-justice institutions through measurable indicators.
The draft is meant to improve coordination, accountability and access to justice, but the public has not yet seen the proposed indicators, reporting system or consequences for non-compliance. That is an opening worth using well.
Too often, procedure is portrayed as a loophole used by suspects to avoid responsibility, or some cumbersome standing in the way of law enforcement. That, I think, is the wrong frame. The rules on arrest, detention, charging, statements, exhibits and fair trial exist to protect everyone.
They protect a suspect from arbitrary state power. They protect victims by requiring investigators and prosecutors to assemble reliable, testable cases. And they protect the public by ensuring that a conviction rests on evidence a court can lawfully uphold.
When those rules are ignored, the court is not “setting criminals free on a technicality.” It is applying the burden that the State must meet before it can take a person’s liberty. The more difficult question is why an avoidable lapse was allowed to reach that stage—and why the system did not correct it earlier.
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Recent reported High Court decisions, which I sourced at TanzLII, provide a troubling but carefully limited illustration. The analysis that follows draws on a defined, non-statistical screen of reported TanzLII High Court decisions from September 1, 2024 to September 17, 2026. Each featured case was selected because the court identified a material process failure connected to the outcome.
I should emphasise here that the selected cases do not, in whatever manner, prove that acquitted people committed the offences alleged against them. They do show, however, how a flawed charge, an unexplained detention or improperly received evidence can make a conviction unsustainable, even in cases involving grave allegations, undermining some significant policy and national interests.
Important illustrations
Consider Kassam Haji Daudi @ Babu Mzungu v Republic, decided by the High Court in Moshi in June 2025. Kassam had been convicted after an allegation involving a 12-year-old. But the charge cited a rape category concerning consent obtained through unsoundness of mind or intoxication, while the particulars and evidence described a statutory-rape allegation.
Neither the prosecution nor the trial court corrected the mismatch. The High Court held that the defect was never addressed, that it denied the appellant a fair trial from the outset, and that the charge remained unproved. In the end, it quashed the conviction and sentence.
The lesson here is not that procedure eclipsed the protection of a child, as some would argue. The lesson, I think, is that a legal system cannot credibly protect children from sexual abuse if a case concerning a child is allowed to proceed on a charge that does not match the evidence, and when the accused is let free on the grounds of this failure, the courts should not be the target of the blame but the prosecution.
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Tanzania’s National Plan of Action to End Violence against Women and Children promises, among many other things, implementation and enforcement of protective laws and access to quality services. Those commitments must include the painstaking work of framing, checking and, where necessary, lawfully amending charges before a conviction is put at risk.
The High Court’s December 2025 decision in Deus s/o Sylvester v Republic makes the point even more directly. The case concerned an 11-year-old. The prosecution’s witnesses placed the arrest and the beginning of the investigation two days before the date alleged for the offence. The charge was not amended.
The court held that the material variance alone meant the conviction could not stand because it prejudiced the appellant’s ability to know and answer the case. It also found that the appellant had been held for more than 50 days before arraignment, without explanation. Even if the evidence had otherwise been consistent, the court said, that delay would have vitiated, or negatively affected, the proceedings.
The Criminal Procedure Act does not make punctual arraignment an optional courtesy. It requires an arrested person who is retained in custody to be brought before a court as soon as practicable, and it addresses the position where this cannot happen within 24 hours.
Recording the time, grounds and handling of an arrest is therefore both a rights obligation and a basic safeguard for the prosecution’s case. An unexplained gap is both a failure in paperwork as well as a source of doubt that an appeal court cannot responsibly overlook.
Beyond sexual offences
Nor is this only a question for sexual-offence investigations. In Hamis Kashindye v Republic, decided in September 2026, the High Court quashed a narcotics-trafficking conviction after excluding central evidence that had been received without the required oath and a remotely tendered seizure certificate for which the record did not demonstrate compliance with the governing safeguards.
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The exclusions left no competent proof of the alleged substance’s identity and weight. The court refused a retrial because that would allow the prosecution to repair gaps in a failed case, rather than simply conduct a proper trial.
And in Bakari Said Pele v Republic, an armed-robbery conviction was quashed in August 2026 after the High Court found that the prosecution had not sought to amend material differences between the charge and the evidence about the alleged stolen property.
The court considered that failure together with a material contradiction concerning recovery of a phone. Importantly, the judgment did not hold that every chain-of-custody gap is fatal; it said the particular custody complaint did not, on its own, render the phone unreliable.
Still, the court found for the appellant, quashing both the conviction and the sentence. But the distinction that the court made is valuable. Courts in Tanzania are not mechanically rewarding error. They are asking whether the error is material, whether it prejudices fairness, and whether the State has still proved the case beyond reasonable doubt.
And, of course, not every alleged procedural problem collapses a prosecution. In Hassan Habibu Hassan v Republic, for instance, also decided in September 2026, the High Court rejected a statutory-rape appellant’s complaint about delay because it accepted that he had fled and found the delay explained, upholding the conviction.
This is why the present examples should not be used to claim that any breach automatically ends a case, still less to estimate how frequently procedural failure occurs. These are just illustrative decisions, selected through a defined, if random, TanzLII screen, not a national rate.
A concerning pattern
Still, a pattern of preventable failure in even a small number of serious cases should concern all institutions in the chain: police, investigators, prosecutors, medical and forensic services, magistrates and supervisors, and even we members of the public.
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Victims pay the price when a case is not prepared to legal standards. Suspects pay when they are held unlawfully. The public pays when it cannot see whether an outcome reflects the facts, a failure of proof, or a failure by institutions to do what the law already requires.
The proposed monitoring guide can therefore turn this problem into a measurable reform agenda. It should track, at a minimum, whether arrest grounds and times are recorded; how long people remain in police custody before first appearance; how often investigations and charges are reviewed for material variances; whether cautioned statements and exhibits carry the required safeguards; and how many appellate reversals identify a remediable process failure.
The aim should not, of course, be to punish an officer for every case lost. It should be to require a prompt joint review—between police, prosecutors and supervisors—of a decision that identifies a preventable defect, followed by corrective training, clearer supervision or a changed practice.
The guide should also publish aggregate results. Without public indicators, there will be no way to know whether institutions are improving lawful arrest, evidence handling and prosecution readiness, or merely moving files more quickly. Speed matters, yes, but speed without reliability can simply move failure from the police station to the courtroom.
Tanzanians have good reason to value courts that insist on lawful process. There’s a noticeable and substantial public trust in courts, alongside real concern about fairness, delay and equality before the law.
That trust will be strengthened, not weakened, when the public sees that criminal-justice institutions, particularly the police, learn from the cases that fail, and therefore behave and conduct themselves lawfully and professionally.
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The national interest is therefore not served by asking courts to overlook defective prosecutions or by treating legal safeguards as irritants, or perceiving calls to reform institutions like the police as purely activist demands.
It is in the best national interest if the Tanzania Police Force, and every other criminal-justice organ, act professionally enough that the truth can be tested fairly, victims can obtain lawful redress, and convictions, where the evidence proves guilt, can endure.
Khalifa Said is the Editor-in-Chief of Dar es Salaam-based digital publication The Chanzo. He’s available at Khalifa@thechanzo.com or on X as @ThatBoyKhalifax. 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.
