I read a few weeks ago of an effort to collect signatures for a petition that was intended to influence wildlife conservation and tourism policy in Tanzania.
The petition was to be presented to the Tanzanian government, and its purpose was to ask the Tanzanian authorities to stop sport hunting in the wildlife conservation areas in Tanzania, adjacent to Kenya’s Amboseli Game Reserve.
And what gave rise to this petition was that some of Amboseli’s celebrated super tuskers – older elephants with exceptionally large tusks – had wandered across the imaginary line that separates Kenya from Tanzania, and ended up in a Tanzanian wildlife reserve, where they had been shot: big game hunting being perfectly legal in Tanzania, and a valued source of tourism revenues.
I have not heard much about this collection of signatures in recent weeks. But I believe it is doomed to fail.
I have met enough Tanzanians (as well as Ugandans, Rwandans, etc) to know that Kenyans are not universally loved in neighbouring countries.
Rather, even among ordinary people, we Kenyans are considered to be arrogant and overbearing – and, above all, inclined to interfere in the affairs of our neighbours.
Unless this attitude towards us has changed, not even millions of Kenyan signatures could possibly have any impact on Tanzanian policies on tourism and wildlife conservation.
Roughly 20 years ago, I was exhaustively briefed by a wildlife conservation NGO working in Tanzania, of just how beneficial sport hunting was to the Tanzanian communities who live next to the conservation areas where these “hunting blocks” are located.
It was therefore clear to me that unless the well-intentioned effort to save these Kenyan super tuskers (or any other elephants living near the Kenya-Tanzania border) included a clear plan for alternative revenues for such Tanzanian communities, it was not likely to get very far.
We only need to consider how various tourism and conservation groups have managed to increase the amount of land set aside for wildlife right here in Kenya, to know that economic incentives must necessarily lie at the heart of any effort to preserve the wildlife population in East Africa.
I refer here, of course, to the concept of 'conservancies'.
These conservancies are large tracts of community-owned land, set aside for the exclusive use of the wild animals in the areas adjacent to the borders of a game park.
And why would any community willingly set aside a parcel of land, usually about 5,000 to 10,000 acres, to help provide a habitat for wild animals, over and above the national park’s already huge acreage?
Well, it is not done out of pure altruism. There are tourism stakeholders who specialise in organising elite safaris to just such conservancies where their very choosy clientele can be certain that they will not find themselves as one of a dozen SUVs, surrounding a family of cheetahs or lions, for example.
I have visited conservancies in the areas just outside the Samburu National Reserve and the Maasai Mara, many times. Of particular value is that I got to talk at length to both the 'village elders' who had given their consent to the creation of a conservancy on their land, and also the younger and well-educated members of such communities, who understood something about alternatives for land use.
They generally had a very clear idea of why they had leased out their land for the purpose of creating a conservancy.
It is possible to argue about the amount paid to these communities for the lease of their land: is it enough, or should it be more?
It is also possible to debate whether the jobs created in the tourism facilities within the conservancies are plentiful enough.
But there is no doubt that given an economic incentive, these pastoral communities are only too willing to lease out part of their land for the creation of a conservancy, and the establishment of high-end exclusive tourism facilities within it.
So, in my view, appropriate economic incentives at the village level is the right way to go, in the efforts to stop Kenya’s super tuskers from being shot by trophy hunters operating quite legally, just outside our national borders.
