October 2025 marks the end of Samia Suluhu Hassan’s first constitutional mandate as president. Arguably, one of the most remembered legacies is the way she and her government dealt with the land problem in Ngorongoro and Loliondo—from what was initially seen as a conservation issue to a Maasai issue.
More than all previous presidents, Samia has involved herself deeply in this matter, including issuing direct statements, some of which were openly hostile. President Samia is still eligible for a second and final term in accordance with the Constitution.
With Tundu Lissu, the leader of the largest opposition party CHADEMA, in prison following a sham treason trial, October is nothing but a day to rubber-stamp Samia’s second tenure. For the Maasai, her second tenure is a message of another five years of reign of terror.
This August also marks a year after the historic demonstration by the Maasai in Ngorongoro that almost brought Samia’s government to order, at least for once. I believe both the 2024 demonstration and Samia’s four and a half years deserve a brief reflection.
How it started
On April 6, 2021, President Samia made a public comment about what she described then as “population pressure” in Ngorongoro. Whilst some of us were outraged about it and took the initiative to respond, little did we know that it was the beginning of an era.
Six days after the president’s statement, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA) issued a notice directing the demolition of social services, including schools, dispensaries, village offices, police stations, people’s homes, and religious institutions on the pretext that they were constructed without government knowledge and consent.
The government was complaining that the government had constructed social services without the government’s knowledge and consent. Was this not itself outrageous? Although the order was quickly withdrawn after public backlash, the intent was clear—the machinery of displacement had been activated.
For clarity, let it be known that the desire to relocate the Maasai from Ngorongoro for touristic interests is not new. The colonial regime attempted to alienate both Serengeti and Ngorongoro in the 1950s, but the Maasai were able to retain Ngorongoro while losing Serengeti.
The idea was reinvented from 1980s to 1991, with alternative relocation sites considered then as Salei plains (close to Malambo) and western Loliondo, both now within Pololeti Game Reserve. The 1980s/90s plan was aborted with the arrival of Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC), which was allocated land in both Salei and western Loliondo for hunting in 1992.
Because this was never a conservation problem but a tourist business, relocation then faded away because the government could get what it needed (money) from Loliondo and Salei from OBC.
During Jakaya Kikwete’s presidency, the relocation was reincarnated, as it has been historically a factor, without involving those subjected to relocation. This time, it was not Salei Plains or western Loliondo, but Jema village, close to Oldoinyosambu, Sale division, in the northeast part of Ngorongoro District, that was considered and made a relocation site.
The government records show that at least 200 families were relocated from Ngorongoro to Jema village between 2007-2010, but few, if any at all, still reside at Jema. What happened to them?
During John Magufuli’s presidency, the idea of relocation was considered. The Multiple Land Use Model (MLUM) report of 2019 proposed Gilai Mirrugoi (Longido) as a relocation site for Ngorongoro residents. This area then immediately became one of the key hotspots for hunting and carbon credits since 2021. Like Western Loliondo and Salei plains, hunting interests and emerging carbon demand distorted another relocation site.
Yet by 2021, a new name emerged: “Msomera”—a location hundreds of kilometres from Ngorongoro, with no cultural, environmental, or historical ties to the Ngorongoro Maasai. Who made this decision?
It was not the Ngorongoro targeted communities because they were not asked. It was not the Ministry of Lands or Natural Resources, or Tourism. It was not the environmental scientists, ecologists, or anthropologists.
It was opted for in a meeting held in Arusha from 21-24 April 2021 between the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the Tanzania Association of Tour Operators (TATO), a private lobby group whose interests lie in clearing land for luxury tourism, not in conservation or human rights.
All this for conservation?
What is now called “conservation” in Tanzania generally, and Ngorongoro in particular, bears the imprint of its colonial birth—a conservation known for its racial bias, violence, profit orientation rather than morality, and exclusion against communities’ traditional land practices deemed incompatible with a Eurocentric vision of “wilderness.”
The conservation name is being used to justify expansion, not of the wildlife refuge but of tourism infrastructure and trophy hunting concessions. The displacement in the name of conservation, as in the case of Serengeti, for example, left people who once shaped that land to now live as refugees whose memories have been replaced by luxury tents that resemble Maasai huts.
This type of conservation has always been and remains an imposition by those with power against those without power. It was initially imposed by white colonialists against Africans, but now by the government, tourist investors, trophy hunters, and lobbyist conservation groups against rural poor communities.
The idea of relocating people in the name of conservation or historical preservation is absurd. Truly civilised societies protect history and the environment while allowing original inhabitants to remain. If preserving history required evicting people, then the entire Middle East—the birthplace of giants of history such as Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Noah, Pharaohs, and Abraham—would have been emptied of its people to safeguard that heritage. Such an approach would have been sheer madness.
Powers behind the scenes
Perhaps the most chilling part of this saga is the behind-the-scenes power wielded by tourism business groups and conservation agencies.
In private meetings with the NCAA between 21-24 April 2021, Tanzania Association of Tour Operators (TATO) members not only suggested Handeni and Kilindi, among other distant areas that serve the purpose of disconnecting the Maasai from Ngorongoro, but some of the participants shockingly discussed “hormonal vaccine” to control the Maasai population without any whimper from TATO or the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
Seven months later, between November and December 2021, thousands of Maasai livestock died after being fed government-provided saltlicks. The Tanzania Bureau of Standards, Tanzania Veterinary Laboratory Agency (TVLA), Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), and the Chief Government Chemist revealed the presence of harmful contaminants in violation of national feed safety regulations.
This is not just corruption; considering other operating circumstances at the time, it borders on biopolitical warfare. The death of livestock in a pastoralist society is not just an economic loss—it is the erasure of culture, the theft of inheritance, and a deliberate act of destruction aimed at pushing people into submission.
It has been four years without any accountability, except that the Maasai representative in the testing of salt, Simon Morintat Saitoti, was arrested in July 2022, interrogated for sharing a lab results report without permission, before being charged with the murder of a police officer in Loliondo in PI case No 11 of 2022, Resident Magistrate Court. He and the other 26 charged with murder in connection with the Loliondo 2022 operation were released without trial on November 22, 2022.
READ MORE: Over 100 Maasai Threaten to Return to Ngorongoro Following Claims of Abandonment
In Loliondo, the land was alienated for exclusive Trophy hunting by a Dubai Royal family, but explained as a conservation demand. If Lions and elephants were to ever speak, they would oppose this madness as not in animal welfare. When peaceful means to take land failed, the government deployed armies to violently enforce the creation of the Pololeti Game Reserve.
Despite open resistance from the Maasai and rejection by the Ngorongoro District Council, Frankfurt Zoological Society, in collusion with the government, financed the land use plan to give some legitimacy to the violent operation in June 2022. When private interests can influence state policy to the point of population control, toxic poisoning, and cultural erasure, this is what is called state capture.
Propaganda and lies
From 2022 onwards, government officials and allied media began weaving a tapestry of untruths to justify the relocation. Local media launched a full-scale assault against the Maasai community.
Day after day, headline after headline framed the Maasai as dangerous creatures to a delicate Ngorongoro landscape—illiterate, beggars, population burdens destroying the ecosystem, overbreeding livestock, harbouring foreign livestock, hunting illegally with German Shepherds.
Even a video of hunting dogs, always accompanied by the government-allied media, was shown to justify the claim as fact. The Maasai were accused of threatening the national cake of “tourism,” refusing to bury their dead, and feeding ailing and elderly people to wildlife.
This was not organic journalism but a state-sponsored smear campaign designed to soften public opinion for mass displacement. Each of these claims was more absurd than the last, and none held up to any scrutiny.
The government campaign, from a spectator’s point of view, has not only been a disorganised one but has exposed a disturbing level of lack of intelligence and open cruelty by the people entrusted to take care of our country’s affairs, whether in government, parliament, or some of our embassies abroad.
When a lion killed three young boys at Olbalbal in 2021, it became groundbreaking evidence for relocating the Maasai away from dangerous wildlife. Tanzania’s ambassador to the European Union, Jestas Abuok Nyamanga, in a roundtable discussion, said that they trained that lion and put a collar on it to monitor if it could feed on humans, and it did.
READ MORE: Lawmaker Accuses Govt of Depriving People of Ngorongoro of Basic Social Services
For God’s sake, what substance did they use to train the lion on their adventure to test if it could feed on humans? Many of the lies by the government were suicidal to the government itself. The goal, however, was simple: to dehumanise the Maasai so that when our rights were violated, few would speak out in defence.
The tactic of dehumanising through propaganda has a grim history, from colonial regimes to genocidal governments—it is a textbook tool for justifying repression.
On February 9, 2022, the relocation issue was tabled in the Parliament. Rather than a platform for open debate, the session was a coordinated performance of outrage, misinformation, and Maasai scapegoating.
MPs repeated the lies aired in the media, offered no factual counterbalance, and some of the members as Hassan Mtenga, the then Mtwara Member of Parliament, urged the government not to engage but to deploy the army to displace as if they were real enemies of the state.
Within days, on the directive of Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa, a closed-door but aired “training session” was organised for ignorant Members of Parliament to be lectured by NCAA, TAWA, TANAPA, TAWIRI, and Mweka University College—all government agencies aligned with the conservation lobbyists—about the urgency of the relocation in Ngorongoro.
It was painful to watch how parliament was turned into a platform for incitement and inflammatory rhetoric, fuelling ethnic and political antagonism rather than fostering understanding. It was as if the Maasai were to be allowed a few more days, they would sink Ngorongoro.
Is it a problem if it does? Perhaps there will be another caldera that the government will be reaping many dollars from, as they are doing with the three craters. Out of 392 members of parliament, only four members (Prof Kitila, Olesendeka, Olekaita and Shangai) who somewhat opposed the idea and were openly scolded by other members on the accusation that they supported the Maasai stance against relocation.
Immediately, Prof Kitila and Olekaita backed off, and both survived the latest CCM parliamentary nomination, whilst Olesendeka and Emmanuel Shangai, who somewhat remained defiant throughout 2022-23, did not see the CCM intraparty ballot in 2025, as their names were axed before delegate elections. What was missing from this entire process was the voice of those subjected to displacement to make their case.
READ MORE: Maasai People From Ngorongoro Yearn for Rights Their Fellow Tanzanians Enjoy
Propaganda has become the trademark of Tanzania’s conservation movement since the 1950s. Some included in the colonial system refused the trap of these conservation rhetorics. Responding to this propaganda, Governor Twining, in a BBC interview on September 6, 1958, clearly stated that “Maasai rights in Ngorongoro and Serengeti were considered sacred under British rule.”
Twining dismissed the theories that the Maasai would ever exterminate wildlife, citing that the crater and its environs were shaped and protected by Maasai stewardship. The current government’s attempt to outdo even colonial powers in suppressing Maasai rights is not just ironic—it is tragic.
If we are to believe the government data of 100,000 people (NBS August 2022), it then means Ngorongoro holds a density of 12 people per square kilometre, whilst the national profile stands at 74 people.
A quick scan of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) population growth data between 2002 and 2022 indicates a clear pattern of low population growth in pastoralist communities. One of the factors that makes Ngorongoro’s population growth low compared to surrounding districts is the pastoralist lifestyle. Actually, Ngorongoro division, which accounts for 59 per cent of the Ngorongoro District, accounts for 34 per cent of the Ngorongoro District population, a factor influenced by the pastoralist lifestyle.
For livestock, only three cows were added to the cow population between 1957-2018 (62 years). Any underdevelopment in Ngorongoro, including school and health services, is policy-driven by the government.
No foreign livestock has ever been impounded in Ngorongoro, despite the government seizing and confiscating at least thirty-seven thousand livestock between January 2023 and June 2024 for grazing either in the Pololeti Game Reserve or entering Ngorongoro from Mang’ola for market day. Poaching in Ngorongoro is nearly nonexistent thanks to pastoralism as the main economy for the Maasai.
Social services were targeted by the government with a view to creating a crisis that would trigger massive relocation. It did a good share of it, but it will never move everyone out of Ngorongoro.
Out of the Sh64 billion budgets appropriated to Ngorongoro District between the 2022/2023-2024/2025 fiscal years, Ngorongoro division did not receive a penny. The government spokesperson, Gerson Msigwa, said on May 28, 2022, that stakeholder “lobbyists” had advised the government to introduce sanctioning policies.
READ MORE: Much-Anticipated But Highly Controversial ‘Epic Tanzania Tour’ Launches As Criticisms Heighten
Ironically, the same land that the government and its PR machines have consistently claimed as endangered by the Maasai generates 52 per cent of the finances from the tourism industry in Tanzania (more than all national parks combined).
Out of what I believe to be forgetfulness, the government claims Ngorongoro continues to win international awards for conservation and tourism. If degradation by the Maasai were real, as claimed, this would not be the case. These numbers reveal a truth hidden behind the conservation rhetoric.
Maasai grazing practices promote biodiversity by keeping grass short and encouraging species like gazelles to survive. It is also not disputed that Maasai seasonal livestock migration, similar to wildlife migration, is environmentally adaptive, not destructive. The Maasai are not the problem but the guardians of a landscape that now enriches the state and machines of displacement without being allowed to share that prosperity.
So why the campaign of lies? Because without these falsehoods, the relocation could not be sold as “voluntary,” urgent, or “necessary.” Fabricated crises had to be created to justify draconian actions.
In September 2021, on camera, then Ngorongoro conservator Fred Manongi told deputy minister Masanja, “We have to manufacture conspiracies.” This is the only way this government can make a case for relocation plausible to an ignorant population to support.
Illusion of voluntary relocation
The Tanzanian government has repeatedly described the relocation to Msomera as “voluntary.” But this claim falls apart under even minimal assessment. Certainly, people who left Ngorongoro for Msomera did not do so out of free will—they were cornered by despair.
From 2021, armed conservation forces began patrolling homes, beating herders, firing live bullets at children, and conducting home raids under the pretence of ensuring no one builds new homes amid relocation. Cars owned by the Maasai were taxed at exorbitant rates—Sh42,000 per day—intended to cripple the ability to access services.
People were arrested arbitrarily, interrogated about why they had not relocated, tortured, and later released without charges or only after filing habeas corpus writs to secure their freedom.
Services like schools, dispensaries, and water projects were deliberately defunded. The Medical Flying Service (MFS), which had operated in Tanzania for over fifty years, was suddenly grounded in April 2022, the same month that the government reallocated all funds in social institutions.
READ MORE: Ngorongoro: A Blot on Samia’s Human Rights Record?
In 2023, when MFS received a brief one-month operating permit, local officials in Ngorongoro division blocked its activities on the grounds that such a waiver did not cover Ngorongoro.
The impact of such grounding has had a devastating effect on human life, including women in labour who died and children, making these actions not pro-conservation but anti-life. Voter ID became the most important thing in Ngorongoro, as you cannot be allowed to go back home after accessing distant services like health in Karatu unless you show ID, a policy akin to apartheid South Africa.
The government’s strategy exploited the existing patriarchal system to use men to coerce their spouses to relocate. Women, in particular, have been haunted by the relocation; those who refused to relocate were left without livestock, their huts destroyed by the government, and some had their children, as young as two years old, taken away from them.
Political activity was restricted, and imagining holding any political rally in Ngorongoro would be met with all the force of the state. Tundu Lissu is the only politician who attempted to hold a political rally in Ngorongoro in the last four years, and he was under surveillance by security operatives before his plan was aborted with an armed police blockade close to Loduare gate.
Community gatherings were banned on the pretext that Ngorongoro is unsafe, but this danger was not communicated to an average of three thousand tourists who enter Ngorongoro daily. Is the government not caring about them?
Of course, there is no danger. The government’s fear has been that allowing the Maasai freedom to associate will end in collective action. These are not the conditions under which people make free choices but tactics of siege and starvation. I am certain that if it were ever put to those behind the relocation, they would choose exile.
Disenfranchisement
In July 2024, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) took a shocking step, delisting Ngorongoro Division as a voting district as a deliberate attempt to erase political rights. The transfer included particulars of even deceased people, making a case for “No Reform, No Election” valid.
In August 2024, the Minister of Local Government issued a Government Notice that abolished all sub-villages (96), villages (25), and wards (11) in Ngorongoro. The intent was to extinguish the community’s capacity to organise, elect leaders of their choice, or legally resist.
READ MORE: Tanzania Drops Case Against 24 Maasai Leaders
This had the effect of rendering all people in Ngorongoro stateless within their own country. It bears a legitimate question: how does extinguishing voting rights or delisting villages save conservation or add to the number of lions or elephants?
The Tanzanian government’s actions against the Maasai in Ngorongoro violate multiple legal frameworks. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area Act doesn’t authorise the madness we have witnessed in the last four years.
The Constitution protects basic rights such as that of life, liberty, access to basic services and participation in Tanzania governance that were violated with impunity in the name of Conservation.
Importantly, some of the government and its enablers’ actions and omissions constitute crimes prohibited under international law. Fortunately, the perpetrators of these crimes have done a good share of their actions in broad daylight, in the digital age. They are known and occupy the most powerful position in Tanzania’s government.
It was a cumulative of these injustices that ended in a massive demonstration from 18th August to 23rd exactly a year ago. While the President has since formed two commissions to investigate this entire siege, there is little sign of the government taking serious measures to normalise the situation.
Importantly, the removal of Ngorongoro as a constituency for the purpose of the election and a subsequent decision to delist villages in Ngorongoro have been reversed thanks to a collective action by the community to have their voices heard.
Biblical resonance
Many people have been asking themselves, Why are the Maasai not ready to relocate with all the injustice they have endured with this government for the last four years? If injustice has to ever scare people to leave their land, Palestine would have been an empty land.
They suffer, but they continue to claim their land. We, the Maasai, are not strangers to Ngorongoro; we are its architects, its caretakers, and its rightful owners. No amount of pressure or injustice will make all of us leave.
READ MORE: Unmasking Government Controversial Proposals in Ngorongoro
To the Maasai, Ngorongoro is not just about a place and people. It’s about identity, economy, traditions, spirituality and cosmology that are entwined with the land. If patriotism is about standing by your own country, our resistance against relocation should be viewed as an act of bravery, refusing to betray our birthright, the land we inherited from those we call ancestors.
We were not implanted by the state or legislation; we were born in Ngorongoro. We are fighting a betrayal by the government that ought to protect us, a betrayal that enables land dispossession masked under a conservation emergency. We are not opposing conservation; this is not conservation but dispossession and displacement by the state.
As a country, we need a new conservation thinking, one that is not rooted in colonial legacies, racial bias, displacement, and financial greed, but in justice, truth, and the lived knowledge of the people who know the land best. Anything less will continue to destroy both communities and the very ecosystems conservation claims to protect.
Throughout the history of mankind, some people have suffered for standing for the truth, trying to resist the most powerful, the kings, the pharaohs, the presidents. There is a biblical story recorded in 1 Kings 21:19.
It speaks about a just man named Naboth who refused to give up his ancestral land (the vineyard) for the king to grow vegetables despite promises of compensation with either money or another vineyard afar.
Enraged, King Ahab, spurred on by his wife Jezebel, conspired to have Naboth falsely accused and executed. The vineyard was seized, and the crime was buried beneath a royal narrative.
This ancient story finds resonance in the Maasai struggle for land in Ngorongoro, northern Tanzania. The government, cloaked in the rhetoric of conservation, has schemed to seize our land.
We are being told in the name of the President that we should surrender our pastoral land, Ngorongoro/vineyard, for the government to conduct tourism and conservation business with the promise that the President will allocate us a land we never knew existed in Msomera.
READ MORE: What President Samia Needs To Know About Ngorongoro
Like Naboth, we are simply saying, our land is not for sale. If the President has another land in a distant place in Msomera, why wouldn’t her government conserve that seemingly empty land?
Like Naboth, we are being asked to sell our vineyard not with honest intent, but under the shadow of conspiracy, propaganda, and force. And like Naboth, we have refused and are prepared for the consequence of our decision not to sell our birthright to the President.
For it is written that Prophet Elijah declared justice to King Ahab in the following words: “The place that dogs lick Naboth’s blood is the same place they will lick yours.” 1 Kings 21:19.
Joseph Moses Oleshangay is a lawyer, advocate and human rights activist from Ngorongoro, Tanzania. He is available at joseshangay@gmail.com or on X @Oleshangay. These are the writer’s own opinions, and they do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of The Chanzo. Do you want to publish in this space? Contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com for further inquiries.
