The Maasai of Ngorongoro lives in constant fear of eviction from their ancestral and lawful lands as her government is determined to remove them illegally and without a justifiable cause in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
It all began as a voluntary effort to persuade the Maasai to go to Mvomero in the Tanga region. Still, now, systematically, the government is squeezing them out without going to Parliament to change the principal legislation that recognizes Ngorongoro Conservation Area as the bonafide home of the Maa since immemorial times.
The government announced on June 6, 2022, that it would restrict 1,500 square kilometres of village land as a game reserve, prohibiting the primarily pastoralist Maasai residents of Loliondo division, Ngorongoro district, from living on the land, using it for grazing or even entering the area to seek water for household and agricultural use.
As Tanzanian law requires, community members claim they were not adequately consulted before the decision. Since that time, the authorities have engaged in abusive and unlawful tactics, including beatings, shootings, alleged sexual violence, and arbitrary arrests to evict residents from their land forcibly.
In my previous article on the matter, I recorded that the Maasai issue settling in Ngorongoro was the British Colonial solution to two pressing problems: one was to resolve the problem of colonial settlers who had snatched Maasai lands in the Moru mountains, and the second was to keep the Maasai Mara-Serengeti wildlife areas in as pristine a state as possible.
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On all two frontiers, the British colonial rule of the Tanganyika protectorate was immensely successful. The Maasai approved that Ngorongoro Conservation Area was their ultimate home, enabling and sustaining nature and human life interaction.
Following this political solution, laws were hatched in 1959, two years before independence, the Ngorongoro Conservation Unit was established, and the indigenous rights of the Maasai were well enshrined in the new legislation.
Post-independence governments have strengthened the rights of the indigenous Maasai by having their pastoralist council that determines their vision in the area and the inclusion in the Board of Directors of two representatives with gender considerations, which are very much accommodated: male and female.
When there was famine, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority, through the Pastoralist Council, provided foodstuffs to sustain the Maasai population. Since 1959, the Maasai population in Ngorongoro has grown from 8,000 to more than 100,000.
Over the years, the delicate balance between human and wildlife interactions has been stretched to the limits because human tastes have gradually changed.
Permanent structures and cultivation have posed significant threats to the ecosystem there. At one time, budgetary allocations to the Pastoralist Council reached over Tshs 1 billion and counting per annum, and now all that is bale water under the bridge, gone forever!
Cultivation has eroded the most spectacular landscapes in the world, and hiring labour and tractors in certain areas has contributed to conservation challenges. Foreign investors see the ironies of kicking out the Maasai in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
Currently, there are four major hotels in the area, which is littered with campsites. In the Loliondo game reserve, former President Ali Hassan Mwinyi leased the controlled area to a Dubai investor in the mid-1990s.
President Mwinyi and the current President both hail from Zanzibar. This prompts some analysts to question the challenges faced by the Maasai community during this period.
The Minister for Local Government issued a fiat, or “Amri” in Swahili, that degazetted all the villages in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, basically making staying there illegal. One major problem is that the Ngorongoro Maasai are protected by the Principal Legislation Act, cap 284, and no ministerial order can vitiate their rights in the area.
My query now becomes, how is our government a trespasser on Maa’s legislated rights? Where is the rule of law and good governance when written statutes are treated with contempt by the very government that passed them?
Our government has never provided financial statements on how the Dubal investor in Loliondo Controlled Game Reserve has benefited the economy. Still, this policy of forceful evictions seems to help the investors, to the chagrin of this country’s citizens.
We need to ask ourselves why we sought independence in the first place. Was it to benefit our people or the aliens? Our government ought to answer this question honestly.
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We also need the government to answer the question of why the Maasai rights are being taken away. We have had six Presidents, but two from Zanzibar are willing to kick them out of their ancestral lands.
If the current President succeeds, this move will be equivalent to annexing another large chunk of Mainland land and handing it over to foreign investors.
The first was the Loliondo-controlled game reserve, which Mwinyi completed in the ten years of his reign. President Dr Samia would have paved the way for Dubai sheikhs and other investors to own and control Dar es Salaam port and Ngorongoro Conservation Area in less than four years.
I say so because Ngorongoro evictions will make the investors and civil servants the sole players, violating the spirit and the letter of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Act, cap 284.
There have been pros and cons of arguments about relocating people from their ancestral lands. Most people do not comprehend that it is more than lands swapping hands. It is also a desecration of indigenous religions, culture and traditions. It is akin to banning major religions like Christianity or Islam in Tanzania.
Most people do not know, for example, that the spiritual value of Oldonyo Lengai mountain is placed in the hearts and minds of the Maasai of Ngorongoro. The Empakaai mountains carry spiritual meaning to them, and uprooting them from their ancestral lands means excommunicating them from their places of worship, which in itself is unconstitutional!
Under Tanzania law, everybody’s religion and places of worship must be revered, and there is no room for heresy or obstructing worshippers from accessing them. This is what this government is perspiring to do to empower foreigners in our collective agony. President’s policy positions on nature and conservation are lean on details and very conflicting.
During her recent visit to Rukwa, she urged that the mining ban in conservation-designated areas such as Katavi National Park be abandoned to permit the miners to have a field day. However, humans and citizens cannot be incorporated into Conservation efforts, which is regrettably unacceptable. This regime encourages mining in protected areas, but people living side by side with wildlife are sneered at—but for whose gain?
Perhaps what hurts most is the hypocritical temperament this regime exudes. Earlier, it claimed the exercise of the repatriation of the population from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area was voluntary; some were duped, including myself, but now we are seeing the wolf without the sheepskin.
I know there is external pressure to push everyone out of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to lease or benefit foreign investors. We need to take a step back and ask ourselves some serious questions: who should be the ultimate of our independence? Is it us or them and their local puppets?
I urge this government to back off and acknowledge that it is lawful to live there. This one of the most extensive experiments in the world needs to be sustained with internal reforms that control human development to ensure a delicate balance between human and wildlife coexistence for future generations.
What this government is attempting to do is not dissimilar to disowning the indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon forests. That will eradicate their culture, religion, values and means of livelihood. If we can mine in the protected areas, we can certainly accept the people continuing perpetual living in their ancestral lands.
We owe it to Our Maker!
