Indigenous Maasai community leaders met with the Tanzanian president in their ongoing to struggle to defend their land and human rights.
The following article was published in the January - February 2025 issue of NewsNotes.
On December 1, 150 Maasai delegates from Ngorongoro, Loliondo, and Sale met with Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan at the State House in Arusha to air their concerns for land rights raised in protests last August.
Over the last two years, different actors have been urging the Government of Tanzania to open dialogue with the Maasai communities living in Ngorongoro and Loliondo to find solutions to the land disputes and threats of evictions. The six days of peaceful demonstration organized in Ngorongoro, August 18 - 23, seems to have prompted the government to finally listen.
At their meeting with the president, delegates focused on the current situation in Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and the impacts of the June 2022 operation that displaced thousands of people in Loliondo to establish the Pololeti Game Reserve.
Community representatives offered a detailed account of the human rights crisis in Ngorongoro, including lack of adequate education and health services, and requested that a process be initiated to return the 1500 sq km of land taken from the Maasai people in the Pololeti Game Reserve.
The Maasai delegates requested the president halt ongoing forced relocation to Msomera and to ensureMaasai participation in conservation efforts. They also urged President Hassan to stop leveraging social services as a weapon to enforce relocation and to reinstate the operation of the Flying Medical Service (FMS). To avoid future mismanagement, community representatives recommended the president appoint a Maasai representative in the Board and management of NCA and repeal the Pololeti Game Reserve, allowing unconditional access to grazing for livestock in the area until a permanent solution could be made.
President Hassan committed to forming two inquiry teams: one to investigate the complaint of the community in Ngorongoro in relation to the relocation program, and another to assess the impact to the community brought by the establishment of Pololeti Game Reserve.
While the meeting marks a step toward addressing the community’s grievances, significant skepticism remains about how to hold accountable those responsible for the ongoing human rights violations, including President Hassan herself.
Photos of Maasai taking their cows back to graze in their ancestral lands on October 6, 2023 from the Maasai International Solidarity Alliance (MISA) third newsletter.