Indigenous Maasai Persecution Continues Discretely, Despite Global Outcry
16th March 2024 — Amidst all the natural beauty and wonder of Ngorongoro lies a story of repression, gross human rights violations, genocide, and land grabbing committed by one of Africa’s most corrupt regimes, the United Republic Of Tanzania.
Published by Human Rights Watch back in June 2023, residents of Loliondo division in northern Tanzania’s Ngorongoro district protested what they said was a government move to evict them from their ancestral land in the name of conservation. The government responded with excessive force, leading to two days of violence.
Sadly, it is now March 2024 and the situation hasn’t changed, despite all the noise echoed across the world from different platforms, and Tanzanian activists calling out the Samia Suluhu Hassan regime on social media.
Only yesterday, I published a World Alert On Tanzania’s Politically Motivated Abductions and Arbitrary Arrests, when award-winning lawyer Joseph Oleshangay, a human rights activist who hails from the Maasai community was being hunted down by Samia Suluhu Hassan’s henchmen in his village in Ngorongoro, where the police and the Ngorongoro Authority were trying to prevent an ancient traditional Maasai rite of passage to becoming an elder … Laigwanani, scheduled to take place for Oleshangay.
In defiance, the ceremony did go ahead in secret, away from the prying eyes of the aggressors. Watch the beautiful ceremony highlights on X here.
The Maasai are still being forcibly evicted from their ancestral land in the name of conservation when the truth is the regime has sold their land to the Arabs for the personal gain of a handful of corrupt politicians, including the president herself.
Want proof? There’s an area in Ngorongoro where your mobile phone provider will switch to the UAE.
According to Joseph Oleshangay’s revelation on #MariaSpaces on X recently, it appears these Arabs have now taken control of Kilimanjaro International Airport using a proxy, and that the Tanzanian government has given all the Maasai villages around its vicinity just a few days to evacuate, causing even more displacement of the Maasai communities.
We urge Tanzania’s development partners, donors, and the international community–including tourists–who in one way or another put money into the coffers of this dictatorship, to stop and think again. I wouldn’t imagine anyone with a good head on their shoulder would want to help fund a regime that grossly violates human rights.
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