Ngorongoro Conservation Area: An Analysis of Land Use and Exclusion Policies

On 12 March 2026, the Ndika Presidential Commission handed President Samia Suluhu Hassan a report naming three species as locally extinct in the Ngorongoro Crater: Oryx, Eland and Gerenuk. The same three animals appear, in the same order, on pages 65, 68, 69 and 85 of a Tanzanian Ministry review printed seven years earlier. No independent field survey has been conducted to reconcile these two lists.

The 1951 Colonial Baseline

In 1948, a British colonial census in Tanganyika counted 47,000 Maasai across 23,000 square miles of grazing country. The count also logged 650,000 cattle and 500,000 sheep and goats. In the same set of files, administrators noted that 70 per cent of the land could not be used in the dry season because of missing water and tsetse fly infestation.

That admission was critical; it attributed the strain on herds to the land’s limitations rather than animal density.

Three years later, the colonial administration launched the Masai Development Plan. Its stated aim was to alter the stock-carrying capacity of Maasailand and press the semi-nomadic Maasai into bounded ranching areas. Historian Dorothy Hodgson, working through the same set of declassified colonial files in the Journal of African History, traces the plan back to the internal admission that the land, not the herd, was the problem.

In 1959, an ordinance separated the crater and highlands from Serengeti National Park under a new name: the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. That statute set up a multiple land use area, which carried a legal duty to safeguard the interests of the Maasai residents living inside it. A multiple land use area is a legal designation that lets more than one activity, such as wildlife conservation and human settlement, share the same territory.

That legal duty is still on the books. And the assumption behind the 1951 plan is still operating.

Governor Twining Policy Admission

On 5 September 1958, British colonial Governor Edward Twining gave a BBC radio interview about the Maasai. He said the group did not threaten wildlife, that the land rightfully belonged to them and that the population figures being cited to pressure them out were exaggerated propaganda.

Twining was the senior administrator responsible for the very policy he was describing. The statement went out over the airwaves and was preserved in the BBC’s audio record.

Despite this admission, the Masai Development Plan proceeded without modification, driven by an administrative habit of blaming pastoralist stocking for issues already linked to environmental factors.

Ecological Monitoring and Population Data

Long-term ecological monitoring inside the Ngorongoro Crater covers the years 1963 to 2012. Peer-reviewed work by Moehlman and colleagues, published in PLOS One in 2020, tracked the combined weight of wild plant-eating animals across those five decades. That weight remained broadly stable.

The same paper identifies a persistent 4.83-year rainfall cycle as the primary driver of population swings among the wild herbivores. Rain, not grazing pressure, is doing the pushing.

Historical records back the same reading. In 1961 and 1962, exceptionally heavy rains produced a plague of biting flies, Stomoxys calcitrans, inside the crater. Conservator Henry Fosbrooke, then head of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, logged the event in his own files.

The plague decimated the local lion population.

That same pattern showed up in the drought of 2000 to 2001. Buffalo and wildebeest died in large numbers, independent of any human grazing pressure. In the PLOS One data set, the episode is logged as disease-and-drought driven.

Meanwhile, the government’s own numbers point the same way. In 1994, the optimal stocking level for the conservation area was formally calculated at 250,925 Large Herbivore Units. A Large Herbivore Unit is a standard measure that counts different plant-eating animals, wild or domestic, on one shared scale.

In 2017, the district veterinary officer recorded 238,826 cattle, 226,260 goats, 344,373 sheep and 22,104 donkeys. Converted through the government’s own formula in the October 2019 review, that stock came to 228,955 Tropical Livestock Units, a closely related unit based on one adult cow. The figure sits below the 1994 optimal.

The 2019 report went further still. It admitted that the dry season limit was exceeded by only 366 units. That is the government’s own number, in the government’s own file, contradicting the government’s own conclusion.

2019 Ministry Report and UNESCO Review

The 2019 Ministry file did not stop at the 366-unit number. Its October 2019 Multiple Land Use Model review report went on to recommend drastic spatial zoning and the relocation of tens of thousands of residents. A US-based policy group, the Oakland Institute, later reproduced the document in full.

Which brings us to March 2019, six months earlier.

That month, a joint monitoring mission from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, the IUCN and ICOMOS visited the site. Its report urged the Tanzanian government to take urgent action on human population growth in the conservation area. According to that report, the international advisory bodies were working from ecological data supplied by the state.

Briefing files that Tanzania handed to those inspectors have not surfaced in any archive consulted for this investigation. Nobody outside the mission and the ministry has seen the raw dataset.

In April 2021, the government announced the resettlement plan itself. Officials targeted 82,000 residents for relocation to Msomera village and described the movement as voluntary.

A 2026 report by the Iyombe presidential commission, together with monitoring by the Oakland Institute, later logged something else. From 2022, education and healthcare budgets inside the conservation area were being reduced. Community records tracked the transfer of TSHS 355.5 million in education and health funds out of the area, redirected to Handeni District, where Msomera sits.

Conflict of Interest in Commission Reports

Somewhere between the 2019 file and the 2026 report, the same name appears twice.

Dr Maurus Msuha served as secretary to the 2019 Multiple Land Use Model review commission. When President Samia Suluhu Hassan appointed the 2026 Ndika presidential commission to audit the same set of findings, Dr Msuha was named its secretary as well. The team roster is preserved in a Maasai community report and confirmed by lawyer Joseph Oleshangay in an interview with the Tanzanian outlet The Chanzo on 26 March 2026.

Oleshangay, a Maasai lawyer active in the eviction cases, argued in that same interview that the arrangement placed one official in charge of auditing files he had helped write. His view is on the record with The Chanzo.

No conflict-of-interest declaration by Dr Msuha at the time of the 2026 appointment has been found in any personnel file consulted for this investigation.

Ndika Commission Data Verification

The Ndika and Iyombe presidential commissions handed their reports to President Samia Suluhu Hassan on 12 March 2026. Ndika’s was the report dealing with land use.

Its headline number for human population growth was 3.6 per cent per year. That same figure had appeared in the 2019 Ministry review. Joseph Oleshangay, in his 26 March interview with The Chanzo, argued that the number had been copied across without adjustment.

Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Statistics had already produced a different figure. Its 2022 census recorded 117,930 residents inside the conservation area. Set against the 93,136 residents counted in 2017, that comes out at 1.6 per cent annual growth.

The Ndika commission relied solely on this outdated figure.

The extinction list followed the same route. Ndika’s 2026 report named three species as locally extinct in the crater: Oryx, Eland and Gerenuk. Oleshangay’s interview points to pages 65, 68, 69 and 85 of the 2019 Ministry report, where the same three species appear in the same order.

No independent field survey by the Ndika commission sits between the two lists. Soil sampling, vegetation surveys, fresh species counts: none has been produced by the commission to back the claim as its own finding.

Local pastoral councils and legal advocates argue that these reports were engineered to justify land clearance to generate tourism revenue. While this investigation has not uncovered explicit internal directives confirming deliberate falsification, we see a clear pattern: outdated data was recycled, the 2022 census was disregarded, and the commission’s oversight was consolidated under the same official.

The 2019 report’s list of extinct species was not verified against the crater floor. Neither was the 2026 report’s. And the ward-level 2022 census returns that would allow an independent recount of the 1.6 per cent figure remain sealed.

Source Box

Sources include: colonial administrative material described in Dorothy Hodgson’s ‘Taking Stock: State Control, Ethnic Identity and Pastoralist Development in Tanganyika, 1948–1958’, Journal of African History, Volume 41, Number 1 (2000); the BBC Radio interview with Governor Edward Twining (5 September 1958); peer-reviewed ecological data from Moehlman and colleagues, ‘Long-term historical and projected herbivore population dynamics in Ngorongoro crater, Tanzania’, PLOS One, Volume 15, Number 3 (2020); Henry Fosbrooke’s ‘Success Story at Ngorongoro’, Oryx, Volume 8, Number 3 (1965); Bruce Byers’s Oxford presentation ‘Population Growth, Environmental Degradation, and Conflict in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania’ (1994); the Multiple Land Use Model Review Report, Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, United Republic of Tanzania (October 2019); the IUCN World Heritage Outlook Report on Ngorongoro Conservation Area (2019); the Oakland Institute reports ‘The Looming Threat of Eviction: The Continued Displacement of the Maasai Under the Guise of Conservation in Ngorongoro Conservation Area’ by Anuradha Mittal and Elizabeth Fraser (2021) and ‘The Truth, Falsity and Mismanagement’ community report (2022); the National Bureau of Statistics census figures for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (2017 and 2022); the interview with lawyer Joseph Oleshangay in ‘The Chanzo’ (26 March 2026); and the Human Rights Watch report ”It’s Like Killing Culture’: Human Rights Impacts of Relocating Tanzania’s Maasai’ (2024).