Two presidential commissions in Tanzania have recommended the forced removal of Maasai communities from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and surrounding ecosystems, findings that carry direct implications for the safari tourism industry that depends on those landscapes, Survival International reported on March 19.
The commissions were established by President Samia Suluhu Hassan in February 2025, following earlier evictions of Maasai pastoralists and large-scale protests in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in 2024. Their reports were delivered to the president on March 12. The government has not made the documents public.
According to Survival International, the commissions endorsed previous evictions and called for them to continue, including in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Ngorongoro and neighbouring Lake Natron. The reports characterised the long-standing Maasai presence as an environmental pressure and called for existing legal recognition of Maasai residency rights in Ngorongoro to be removed.
President Hassan indicated she intends to act on the recommendations. Three days after the reports were delivered, park rangers in the Ndutu area reportedly beat and arrested three community members and issued notices to vacate, with the stated purpose of clearing land for tourism development.
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area was established in 1959 with an explicit provision recognising the right of the Maasai to live there with their cattle. UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has backed the government’s relocation programme, describing it as voluntary. Rights groups, including the Oakland Institute, dispute that characterisation.
An anonymous Maasai spokesperson told Survival International: “We are blamed for environmental degradation while the unchecked expansion of tourism is ignored. Forced relocation, disguised as policy, has deprived our people of basic rights and dignity.”
Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute, said the findings were “the latest attempt by the government to rapidly expand its brutal fortress conservation model across the country, threatening hundreds of thousands of Indigenous lives in blind pursuit of tourism dollars that have failed to trickle down to improve the lives of poor Tanzanians and local communities.” — Intercontinental Cry