PHOTO: Animals in Loliondo and the Maasai indegenous people now in constant threats of eviction
Who is saying the truth in Loliondo?
By Elias Mhegera and Onesmo Olengurumwa
The Vice President of the Ngorongoro Elites Association (NDUSA), Onesmo Olengurumwa has condemned deliberate disturbances of the pastoralists in the area and distortion by some media segments.
Olengurumwa who spoke to The Express by a phone from Ngorongoro District said that the district is one of the richest districts in Tanzania in terms of natural resources, which has made it a centre of resource based conflicts.
He said this has caused not only disturbance but also poverty to Ngorongoro dwellers in a district which produces more than 50 billion per year. He cited the Ngorongoro Conservation Authority which collects about 40 billion per year but the District Council does not receive any distribution for the development of its people.
The human rights activist and assistant researcher at the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC), in Dar es Salaam, say Ngorongoro local communities are weakened in favour of investors.
“This is polarization of wealth and poverty at two opposite extremes. It is all sheer robbery, criminal plunder of the weak by the strong,” he commented.
He criticized the condemnation of pastoralists and cultivators as simply trouble-mongers, who must be dealt with, a trend which has never ceased since 1992 when OBC acquired village land in Loliondo.
The lawyer said that the mushrooming of tourism related investments are the corner stone of the resource based conflict in Ngorongoro. He lambasted the fact that citizens from the grass root levels are not involved in the policy making.
He therefore referred the Loliondo case as just one of those ‘Natural Resource Curse’, since the indigenous people do not benefit from the natural resources around them. “The rights to exercise permanent sovereignty over natural resources have been put in jeopardy in Ngorongoro ever since,” he commented.
Elaborating further Olengurumwa said the parasitic stratum between investors through government officials revealed the way natural resource curse play a role to endlessly resource based conflicts in Ngorongoro and in Africa in general.
He was surprised that the Masaai have lived and preserved the nature for many years but today they are termed as destroyers of the environment.
Defending the pastoralists he asked in astonishment “who is killing Loliondo between the pastoralists and investors like OBC?” he said that the answer to this question is simple; it is investment activities on the land that kill the nature of Loliondo but not the pastoralists.
He further elaborated that wild animals and livestock have been in many years in coexistence, he was therefore surprised that today the agents of investors stand and mislead the public about the current situation in Loliondo.
He was reacting to a series of reports that were published by a Kiswahili daily tabloid recently which he claims had a one sided version that the pastoralists were causing trouble in Loliondo.
The Minister for Tourism Ezekiel Mayige visited the area in order to find an amicable solution to the problem. He promised that the government will give fair treatment to both the pastoralists and the investors.
END
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