Joel Bendera

Joel Nkaya Bendera is a Member of Parliament for the Morogoro Region, in the National Assembly of Tanzania. He has worked as the deputy Minister of Information, Culture and Sports since 2006.
As Morogoro Regional Commissioner, Mr Bendera has worked on numerous initiatives to improve various farming sectors in the region. In 2013 he worked with tobacco companies, and praised them for being 'job creators' in the local area, and the next year he attempted to push initiatives to allow farmers better access to weather reporting systems as a measure to reduce disasters cause by flooding and climate change. In the same vein, he called for pastoralists to be forcibly evicted from the region after an order to voluntarily relocate was ignored. He cited conflicts with local farmers and environmental issues caused by illegal grazing as the main cause of the evictions.