Couples urged to ask what they can give, as 458 of 941 Tanzanian murder cases tie to relationships

Of 941 murder cases Tanzanian police reported from January to June 2026, 458 were linked to relationship conflicts, according to a statement from member organisations of the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition (THRDC) dated October 22, 2026. That week, a ministry seminar in Dar es Salaam heard a professor urge couples to think first about what they can contribute.

A seminar with four skills and five stages

The seminar was organised on a Tuesday by Tanzania's Ministry of Community Development, Gender, Women and Special Groups, and the Daily News reported it on October 22, 2026. The speaker was Professor of Religious Studies Rev Dr Susulu Fedy, not a clinical psychologist, and the paper presents his points as his own advice rather than as findings.

Fedy said emotional intelligence has four elements: self-awareness, understanding others, self-management and managing relationships. He tied them to a plain claim about how couples drift. Many relationships begin with strong feelings and the belief that an ideal match has been found, before partners know each other's personalities and expectations.

"Understanding yourself and your partner is essential because it helps you recognise your differences, manage your emotions and find common ground," he said.

He then outlined five stages of a relationship: initial attraction, conflict, healing, teamwork and legacy. Healing, in his account, means acknowledging disagreements, forgiving one another and rebuilding trust. Teamwork means pursuing shared goals. Legacy means a common family vision, raising children and setting values for future generations. The article gives the five-stage model no source or study.

His example of a conflict that can be handled early was small and domestic. One partner may expect an immediate answer in a disagreement while the other needs time to think before speaking. He urged patience, active listening and open communication instead of assumptions about a partner's intentions, and he named upbringing as a second source of friction, since people arrive with different family backgrounds and ideas of marriage.

Ms Happy Msimbe, the ministry's Assistant Commissioner for Social Welfare and Child Services, said the ministry had been running training and research on social welfare and community development with various experts. The article gives no figures on how many couples that training has reached.

What 458 of 941 means

The Daily News opened its seminar report with the alleged shooting of a woman in the Bunju B area of Dar es Salaam, for which her husband was charged with murder at the Kinondoni District Court and remains in custody pending investigations. The THRDC statement, covered in a second Daily News article, supplies the wider count.

According to that statement, police statistics show 941 murder cases between January and June 2026, against 926 in the same months of 2025. In 2024 there were 2,193 murder cases, 422 of them associated with relationship-related conflicts. In 2025 there were 1,977, with 725 linked to such disputes. The coalition's headline total of 1,605 people killed from 2024 to June 2026 equals those three relationship-linked counts added together (422, 725 and 458), so it seems to count one death per case, though the statement does not say so.

Two things stand out. The relationship-linked count rose from 422 to 725 between 2024 and 2025 while total murder cases fell, and the statement offers no explanation for the jump, such as a change in how police classify motives. And a different reading of the same half year circulates: an op-ed in The Chanzo, published on October 20, 2026, says 36 per cent of homicides from January to June 2026 came from domestic conflicts, with 19 per cent from vigilantism. Neither text explains how it classifies a case, so the 36 per cent and the 458 of 941 cannot be reconciled from what is printed.

The THRDC lists the drivers as romantic jealousy, marital and family disputes, suspected infidelity, financial disagreements and challenges in raising children. It adds a sentence that matters for any advice about communication: some killings follow prolonged warning signs, including death threats, repeated physical assaults, controlling behaviour and psychological abuse.

The Chanzo's author, Francis Nyonzo, an economist and Fulbright alumnus, notes that 1,006 emotional-violence cases, classified as abusive language, were reported in the same six months. His argument is that verbal abuse comes before physical violence, and that dealing with it may take fewer resources.

For readers in the United Kingdom, the nearest official yardstick is the Office for National Statistics (ONS). In the year ending March 2025 it counted 111 domestic homicides in England and Wales, of which 67 victims were killed by a partner or ex-partner, and it found that 40% of adult female victims were most commonly killed by a partner or ex-partner. The categories differ from the Tanzanian ones, so the figures describe the same kind of harm, not a ranking.

Giving first, and what thanks does

Fedy's most concrete line was about direction. He encouraged partners to focus on what they could contribute towards improving their relationships instead of concentrating only on what they expected to receive. He also said that "One partner cannot change the other, but can create an environment that allows the other person to change."

Psychology has an experiment on a narrow version of that question: what keeps a partner giving once the giving gets tiring. Emily R. O'Brien and Amanda L. Forest, of the University of Pittsburgh, reported three studies with more than 1,000 US adults in romantic relationships, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Their question was whether hearing thanks makes people more willing to help a partner reach a goal in the future.

The first study asked participants to recall times they had helped a partner and how much gratitude they received. The second and third gave them imagined situations in which they helped a partner prepare for a promotion, varying whether the partner said thanks and, in the third, whether the partner reached the goal. On the SPSP website, the authors write that participants who received gratitude felt more motivated to help again, and that whether the goal was achieved did not matter: "gratitude alone was enough to keep people motivated."

The effect was largest in lower-quality relationships. The authors read this as a ceiling: in high-quality relationships, motivation to help was already strong, whereas in less satisfying ones gratitude gave an extra boost. Susan Krauss Whitbourne, professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, summarised the study in Psychology Today and added that the lower-quality couples in the sample were not all that low.

The limits sit in the design. The first study relied on recalled self-reports, which Whitbourne notes cannot rule out bias in how people remember thanks. The two experiments used imagined scenarios and measured intentions to help, not help given. The result also says what a thank-you does for a giver's willingness, not that giving buys affection back.

The study is not new: the authors' own write-up dates from October 29, 2025, and the journal issue carries 2026. It is relevant here only because it tests the same idea as the seminar, that attention to what a partner gives keeps the exchange going. A survey-based brief on what women say they need from men found one small word at the top, "Listen", which echoes the active listening Fedy recommended.

Where a seminar stops

Fedy urged forgiveness, tolerance and mutual support. The THRDC, looking at the same country, asks for something else. It points to weaknesses in violence-prevention systems, limited public education on healthy relationships, mental health challenges and a shortage of social welfare officers and counselling services.

Its demands are specific. It asks the government to strengthen the systems that receive and follow up reports of threats, to hire more social welfare officers and to set up mechanisms that protect people at risk. It also asks Parliament to pass legislation aimed at gender-based and domestic violence, and it says no relationship-related reason can justify murder.

Nyonzo's op-ed lands between the two. He proposes trained, trusted, neutral figures from communities, who would facilitate talks where there is verbal or emotional abuse and refer people to formal support where there is danger, coercion or physical violence. He adds that such efforts should never pressure anyone to remain in an abusive marriage or relationship, and that jailing someone does not, by itself, tackle the problem. He also notes that relatives, the traditional place to discuss such matters in Tanzanian culture, may take sides.

A second Daily News piece, published through allAfrica on October 15, 2026, cites the 2022 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey, which found that approximately 39 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 who had ever been married or had an intimate partner had experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence from a current or most recent partner. The same piece recalls that in July 2025 Minister Dorothy Gwajima launched the Badilika, Tokomeza Ukatili campaign in Kigoma, which aimed to recruit 150,000 ambassadors for change.

The two lists sit at different distances from the problem.

Learning to name a feeling or to say thanks works inside a relationship where both people can still talk, and it costs a couple nothing but the habit. Warning signs such as threats and controlling behaviour call for the second list: counsellors, officials, a legal framework, none of which a single seminar can supply.

The THRDC and other human rights organisations have announced plans to launch a sustained campaign under the slogan "Love Is Not War; DO NOT KILL". The statement gives no launch date.

Sources

• THRDC reports 1,605 deaths linked to relationship conflicts, Daily News (Tanzania), October 22, 2026
• Saying "Thank You" Inspires Your Partner to Help More, SPSP, Emily R. O'Brien and Amanda L. Forest, October 29, 2025
• Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2025, Office for National Statistics