Civil Society Organisations Call for Lasting Solution to Loliondo Land Crisis

The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)

Zephania Ubwania

15 May 2011

Civil society organisations yesterday reiterated their pleas for a lasting solution to the long simmering land crisis in Loliondo, pitting mainly the local communities and the investors. They have also called for an end to acts of intimidation against them by the state organs whenever they aired their grievances against human rights abuses in the area. In a statement issued to the media in Arusha, Haki Ardhi executive director Yenfred Myenzi said the NGOs insisted that the draft Land Use Plan for Ngorongoro 2010-2030 should be scrapped. The NGOs accused the government for not being serious in addressing the crisis as reflected in the failure to release a report by a team formed by the government and a Parliamentary Committee on the torching of Loliondo herders’ residences in 2009. The ‘operation’, conducted by the regional and district leaders, was spearheaded by police and members of other security organs.

Several houses were burnt down in order to force the herders out an area leased to a foreign investor for hunting activities. Mr Myenzi wondered why the government has failed to release the report on the findings of both commissions, which were formed nearly two years ago following an outcry by human rights activists across the country. He told reporters that no government official, among those suspected to carry out the torching of the herdsmen’s cattle ‘bomas’ and severe beatings, has been taken to court.

Villages much affected by the land conflicts in Loliondo, which have lingered for years, include Ololosokwan, Soitsambu, Oloipir, Oloipir, Olorien/Magaiduru, Loosoito/Maaloni, Arash, Piyaya and Malambo. The gist of the crisis is on utilisation of land and resources on much of Loliondo Division in Ngorongoro District, which is essentially a buffer zone between the Serengeti National Park and heavily populated human settlements.

The NGOs also called for the scrapping of the protected status of the Loliondo Game Controlled Area (CGA), claiming that it was in collision with the village land legislations. In February this year, the Ngorongoro District councillors insisted that their plea to have the GCA scrapped from Loliondo should not be seen as if they were opposed to wildlife conservation. They added that their pleas were born out of the premise that land use in the area should not be governed by two legislations, one of which does not support livelihood of the locals.

“We are not going to oppose wildlife conservation but make sure that the welfare of the local people and our traditional pastoralism is sustained,” they reiterated. According to them, all the villages in Loliondo and Salle divisions where the land conflicts have been more pronounced were being administered through both the 1999 Land Act and the customary law.

Yet the same villages have to observe legislations pertaining to the GCAs, thereby confusing the local administrators as to how the two laws should be applied at the same time in managing the land. By being part of the GCA, the villagers cannot be flexible enough to draw up their land use plans without being overruled from the top by government officials, who according to them, favoured investors. Under the wildlife ordinance from the early independence days, GCAs are designated areas where wildlife cannot be hunted without a license. However, it was made redundant by the 1974 Wildlife Conservation Act because the latter prohibited any kind of unlicensed hunting of wild animals. However, many GCAs have mainly been considered as important buffer zones or animal corridors close to the national parks or game reserves. Loliondo GCA lies between the Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) while to the north it borders Kenya.

In 1995, the Wildlife Sector Review Task Force called GCAs “totally ineffective” in terms of continuity to wildlife conservation. Three years later, the New Wildlife Policy recommended that GCAs either be upgraded to game reserves or conserved through community-based conservation programmes. The latter were to give birth to the wildlife management areas (WMAs) but which the Ngorongoro councillors claimed was not the case there. Available information had it that there were 22 villages in Loliondo Division alone, and that nomadic pastoralists, who were evicted from Serengeti National Park in 1959, inhabit the area. Ngorongoro District, which covers 14,036 square kilometres, has three divisions namely Ngorongoro, Salle and Loliondo. The latter covers some 5,000 square kilometres.

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