Private Security Company Licence in Tanzania: The Police File

This page is the guarding licence operating file: who may hold the approval, what the police file carries, and which staff may ever be armed.

• Matching an activity to its licence — business licensing
• What a guard roll triggers — employer registration
• Where non-citizens are barred — the restricted list
• Stakes in conditioned activities — ownership restrictions
• Paper under every guard — contracts and policies

As at 21 September 2026. Confirm the live position on tpf.go.tz and moha.go.tz; this file rests on the Firearms and Ammunition Control Act, 2015, the Police Force and Auxiliary Services Act Cap. 322, the Penal Code Cap. 16 and the 2025 minimum wage order.

Who may hold the approval, and who may arm nobody

Three screens run before any step-by-step matters. The applicant must be a company: the 2015 Act defines a private security company as one registered under the Companies Act to render security services and which has been approved by the Inspector General of Police. No sole trader, no registered business name.

Ownership is not answered by a list. Guarding is not among the fifteen activities closed to non-citizens by the Business Licensing (Prohibition of Business Activities for Non-Citizens) Order, 2025, GN No. 487A of 2025. A foreign-held applicant is decided by the Inspector General’s approval instead — a security judgement, not a formula — and the ownership the Force accepts is settled at filing. A directory percentage is not a condition of licence.

The third screen ends most business plans. No guard is armed merely because the company may guard. Section 11(1) shuts out anyone under 25, anyone neither a Tanzanian citizen nor a holder of a Tanzanian residence permit, and anyone convicted of a Second Schedule offence — terrorism, drugs, the Penal Code, money laundering, wildlife. Section 16(8) leaves the permitted firearm types to the Minister responsible for Home Affairs.

The statute names the licence; no private security Act does

Tanzania has no private security industry Act, no regulator and no published licensing schedule. The approval lives inside two instruments nominally about something else, which is why generic licensing pages never reach it.

Section 72(1) of the 2015 Act lets the Minister responsible for Home Affairs, in consultation with the relevant authority in Tanzania Zanzibar, make regulations regulating and monitoring private security companies, paragraph (d), and for safe custody of firearms held by security guard companies, paragraph (k). The instrument is the Firearms and Ammunition Control Regulations, 2018, GN No. 667 of 2018.

Cap. 322 supplies the Force and, in Part XVI, an Auxiliary Police Force mistaken for a private guarding route. It is not one. Auxiliary police officers are appointed under section 134, stationed in areas declared special under sections 129 and 130, controlled and equipped by the Inspector-General under sections 133 and 138, and deliver up badge, precept and uniform on resignation. A guarding company’s staff are employees, holding no precept and no police powers.

A BRELA certificate authorises nothing on a guarding contract

Incorporation under the Companies Act, Cap. 212 establishes that the company exists and who stands behind the register — beneficial ownership records travel with the memorandum and articles into a register of beneficial owners. None of it says the company may guard.

The business licence is a third instrument: Class A from BRELA, Class B from the local government authority, on form TFN 211, alongside the sector permits the activity requires. The police approval is one of those permits, so filing for the licence first leaves the licensing officer nothing to grant. Bank, port, mine and embassy tenders ask for that approval by name; none asks for a certificate of incorporation alone.

Vetting runs through the Forensic Bureau, not the portal

The certificate of good conduct is not a field on a form. Fingerprints are taken by police and the application runs to the Director, Forensic Bureau, at Criminal Investigation Department Headquarters in Dar es Salaam, which searches the criminal record and issues the certificate; the Force’s clearance portal is the online route into it.

Two habits cost weeks. Treating directors as the only people vetted — the guard roll is the substance of a guarding file, and the Second Schedule offences that end a firearm application end a guard’s file too. And letting clearances age: one from a two-year-old visa application describes a person who may since have been charged. Separately, a non-citizen with no Tanzanian residence permit cannot be licensed to possess a firearm under section 11(1)(c).

The arm sits on a company licence and a certificate in the guard’s name

Two documents, never one. The company takes a business-purpose firearm licence from the Registrar of Firearms under section 16(1) — a Registrar appointed by the Inspector General after consultation with the Commissioner of Police in Tanzania Zanzibar, holding the Central Firearms Database. The guard takes a certificate of competency under section 12, after safe-handling training at an approved institution and range classes, tested and re-tested every five years. A military background exempts the applicant from the training, not the certificate.

Section 16(4) closes the loop: the firearm may go only to a private security officer in the company’s service holding that certificate — not to one whose certificate is pending, and not to a subcontractor’s guard. Section 16(6) requires a register of every firearm held, stored and transported as prescribed, and section 16(7) requires firearm and licence to be produced to an authorized officer on request. An armoury book written up after the visit is the finding, not the defence.

Uniform and marking: the offence nobody budgets for

Section 178 of the Penal Code, Cap. 16 makes it a misdemeanour to wear, without lawful authority, the uniform of the Police Force or of the Defence Forces of the United Republic. The offence attaches to the wearer, on the client’s site, at the start of the shift.

Companies walk into it at the sampling stage: rank slides copied from a police pattern, cap badges that read as state insignia. The specification belongs in the licence file and the supply contract, settled before the shirts are cut.

What the police file carries

The sequence the desk runs

1. Settle ownership with the Force before the shareholding is registered. No schedule answers it; the question is what the Inspector General will approve.
2. Incorporate with the security object stated. An object bolted on later reads as an afterthought.
3. Clear the directors. Fingerprints, then the Forensic Bureau; nothing moves until those certificates are current.
4. Build the guard roll and clear it name by name — a roll the Force can count, not a number asserted.
5. Lodge the permit request on the Force’s portal, with company papers, clearances and the roll attached.
6. Take the approval before promising anything to a client. Until then the company is not a private security company within the Act’s meaning.
7. Run the firearm file only where arms are needed — the section 16 licence, a certificate for every armed guard, the armoury discipline behind both.
8. Take the business licence and employer registrations, then price off the wage order.

The wage floor that prices every guarding contract

The Labour Institutions (Minimum Wage for Private Sector) Order, 2025, GN No. 605A of 2025, in force from 1 January 2026 under section 39(1) of the Labour Institutions Act, Cap. 300, sets private security in two rows: TZS 292,000 a month for international companies, TZS 197,000 for domestic ones. The same guard on the same gate costs TZS 95,000 a month more on an internationally-held roll.

One static post held around the clock is three eight-hour shifts, three guards before weekly rest is covered. At the domestic floor, 3 × TZS 197,000 = TZS 591,000 a month; at the international rate, 3 × TZS 292,000 = TZS 876,000. Over twelve months the gap on that post is TZS 3,420,000; a twenty-post contract carries it twenty times — TZS 68,400,000 a year. Neither figure is the cost of the post: the Skills and Development Levy, the Workers Compensation Fund, the National Social Security Fund and leave provision sit above it.

What the engagement costs, and what it does not buy

Zatra runs the file at TZS 300,000 an hour, scoped at six to twelve hours: TZS 1,800,000 at the low end, TZS 3,600,000 at the high, TZS 2,700,000 at the nine-hour midpoint. Government charges — clearances, business licence, firearm licence, competency training — are paid to the bodies that levy them.

Three things push a file to the top of that range: a roll assembled after the application is open, clearances started from fingerprints, and ownership that must be discussed with the Force first.

Where this file stalls

• Guarding contracts signed on a certificate of incorporation, then re-tendered when the client asks for the approval by name.
• A roll that changes faster than it is cleared, so guards on site were never in the approved file.
• Armed response sold before the company holds a firearm licence or any guard a certificate.
• Uniform ordered from a catalogue whose rank marking copies a police pattern.

Mandate-holders this file does not replace

The Tanzania Police Force owns the approval and the portal that carries it. The Registrar of Firearms owns every firearm licence, permit and certificate of competency, holds the Central Firearms Database, and may renew, suspend or cancel what has been granted. The Forensic Bureau at CID Headquarters owns the record search; the Minister responsible for Home Affairs owns the regulations. BRELA owns incorporation and the Class A business licence, a local government authority Class B, and labour, occupational safety, the Workers Compensation Fund and the National Social Security Fund the payroll side. Zatra prepares and coordinates the file; it grants no approval and does not practise law.

What to confirm before acting

• Whether the intended shareholding is one the Force will approve, asked before it is registered.
• Whether the company object as registered actually says security services.
• The date on every director’s certificate of good conduct, not merely that one exists.
• Whether any guard is to be armed and, if so, whether the section 16 licence and the guard’s certificate exist.
• Whether the uniform specification clears section 178 before the order is cut.
• Whether the company is international or domestic in the wage order.