Kenya's
new front in poaching battle: 'the future is in the hands of our
communities'
In
a country hit by a devastating poaching surge for rhino horn and
elephant ivory, local people are turning the tide – but the wider
problems of demand, corruption and organised crime remain
Adam
Vaughan in Lewa and Nairobi
@adamvaughan_uk
Monday
30 May 2016 09.40 BST
It’s hard work. I
cut their tusks off with an axe,” said Abdi Ali, a northern Kenyan
pastoralist who became a full-time poacher at 14. With three other
men it took him about 10 minutes to kill each of the 27 elephants he
poached, cutting off the trunk, splitting the skull and removing the
ivory that would later fetch 500 Kenyan shillings (£3) a kilo.
But while he became
rich compared with the cattle herders, who mostly live on less than
$1 (68p) a day, he did not find happiness. “Much as I had money, it
was money I couldn’t enjoy in peace, because I was on the run.”
Men like Ali are the
bottom rung of a network of organised crime that is devastating
Africa’s wildlife. It stretches from the remote wilds of Kenya to
the port of Mombasa and out to China and south-east Asia, where an
affluent middle class buy ground-up rhino horn as a status symbol and
ivory is carved and sold as ornaments and trinkets.
This week, the UN
Environment Programme launched a global campaign to end the
multibillion dollar trade, backed by celebrities including footballer
Yaya Touré and model Gisele Bündchen.
Kenya, hit by a
devastating poaching surge in 2012 and 2013 that resulted in the loss
of more elephants and rhino than at any time in the past two decades,
is taking the problem seriously. Last month it set ablaze more than
100 tonnes of seized ivory, in what conservationists said was an “SOS
to the world”. It followed a new wildlife law that can inflict a
maximum penalty of life imprisonment for poachers.
The men who kill in
the field are relatively easy for the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS)
and private rangers to catch, compared with the middlemen and
kingpins orchestrating the trade.
Lochuch Lotak is
another who swapped the poverty of grazing his livestock in northern
Kenya for killing elephants with a gun for their valuable ivory. Like
Ali, he says it was an uneasy existence. “By the time it became
common knowledge I was a poacher, I became really scared and
suspicious of everyone, I thought everyone was telling on me. It got
to the point where I was ready to die or kill [people].”
Yet Ali and Lotak’s
route out of poaching was not via a jail cell, but an extraordinary
27-year-old woman who chastised them for their crimes and, later,
recruited them as rangers.
“She got me out of
a mud pool and into a pool of light,” Lotak said of Josephine
Ekiru, the chair of the Nakuprat-Gotu conservancy, a community-run
conservation area in northern Kenya where the two former poachers now
work.
In a pastoral
community where women are traditionally expected to defer to their
husbands and keep their opinions private, a 16-year-old Ekiru
insisted on attending community meetings that were normally the
preserve of men, and began trying to reform the men she knew were
poaching. But confronting the poachers put her own life on the line.
“First they wrote
a letter to me threatening me. The second time, they called in [five
men] to me and threatened me. That time they were pointing guns at
me. I said I was ready to die but can I tell you some reasons [why
she was trying to persuade them],” she recalled.
For 20 minutes she
told them they were being used, that they were creating conflict
between ethnic groups and were destroying the “treasure” that was
their local wildlife.
“One of them said:
‘Don’t kill her’, he dropped his gun. He said, ‘Nobody has
ever told us about this.’”
Ekiru’s
conservancy is one of 33 in a network known as the Northern
Rangelands Trust, which prides itself on being community-run and
working with local people as a way to curb poaching. The conservancy
model was born out of Lewa, a privately owned and well-armed cattle
ranch that was transformed into a safe haven for black rhino.
More than two
decades after it was established, Lewa teems with endangered Grévy’s
zebra, elephants, African buffalo, cheetah, reticulated giraffes,
baboons, warthogs, and a riot of birds including the Kori bustard,
one of the world’s heaviest flying birds. With 61 black rhino, it
also has about 10% of all the country’s remaining and critically
endangered black rhino.
Those animals are
protected by 150 rangers covering 62,000 acres, 37 of them armed,
five dogs for tracking, three aircraft, a helicopter, and a hi-tech
operations centre that plots rangers’ and elephants’ movements
across a Google Earth map. And it has the neighbouring communities,
which John Pameri, head of security, calls his first line of defence.
“If you get those people on your side, you are really winning on
poaching,” he said.
Lewa has not lost a
rhino in the past three years but 17 were killed by poachers between
2010 and 2013, before its security operation was beefed up. “I’ll
admit we were caught with our pants down in terms of our capacity to
deal with it and our understanding of the dynamic,” said Mike
Watson, its chief executive.
With a single
rhino’s two horns worth $40,000-$60,000 on the black market, Lewa
insiders giving information could earn $3,000 for tipping off
poachers, Pameri said. An internal corruption investigation led to
nine staff being dismissed or arrested.
“Any organisation
that says it is not internally compromised is living in cloud cuckoo
land,” said Watson.
Dr Richard Leakey,
the renowned conservationist whom president Uhuru Kenyatta appointed
as chair of the struggling KWS last year, shares the sentiment.
“I don’t think
anyone today would deny Kenya is a very corrupt country. The
corruption isn’t just in wildlife management, but at the ports, at
law enforcement agencies, it’s with the customs, parts of the
judiciary, it’s certainly present at many levels in the police
force, it’s certainly very real and still is to a certain extent in
the KWS. Government administration is in places, particularly in the
countryside, compromised,” he said.
Leakey, 71, who has
taken on the full-time job unpaid, discovered a national wildlife
service that had been “run into the ground financially”, filled
with middle managers instead of rangers on the ground, vehicles that
didn’t work, houses that were falling down and plummeting morale.
He installed a former banker as KWS’s director to get its finances
under control, slim down the bloated bureaucracy and weed out corrupt
officials.
But Leakey is under
no illusions as to the scale of the challenge. More ivory is shipped
out of the port at Mombasa on Kenya’s coast than anywhere in Africa
and, despite a recent staff cleanup by Kenyatta, the corruption is
still there. Cameras get switched off, or pointed briefly at the sun,
or truck scanners are deactivated. “There are too many people
employed there, something like 6,000 people. There’s a built-in
probability that a good number of people are there for the wrong
reason.”
Critics say the KWS
is only catching the bottom of the food chain, a charge Leakey does
not duck. “Inevitably, we will get the majority of people caught
red-handed with firearms or trophies. In some cases they lead you to
middlemen. The link between middlemen and kingpins is a much harder
route to follow, because kingpins are generally associated with
syndicate crime.”
Despite the tougher
penalties under the 2013 Wildlife Act, just 6% of wildlife criminals
convicted during 2014-15 received a prison sentence, according to the
respected Kenyan non-governmental organisation, WildlifeDirect. “To
date no high-level trafficker has been convicted and sentenced by
Kenyan courts,” it said in a report looking at more than 500 court
cases in 2014 and 2015.
Ofri Drori, a
private investigator who runs the Eagle Network, which has put 1,300
wildlife traffickers behind bars in nine countries, said the big
traffickers were not being targeted, and the reason is corruption.
“The poacher is
very easily replaceable,” he said of men like Ali and Lotak, who
poached to escape grinding poverty. “The ability to pull the
trigger and hunt something as big as an elephant doesn’t require
much talent. It’s organised crime, so when you are chasing poachers
in the field, you are really not understanding how organised this
crime is.”
In the field, the
battle to save Kenya’s last 32,000-odd elephants and about 1,000
black and white rhino continues.
To Ekiru, the answer
lies in having local people run the show. “The only future we have
for this wildlife is in the hands of the communities living with this
wildlife.”
For Leakey, sitting
in his office in Nairobi, the problem will not go away until the
demand in China does – and he thinks there are signs the Chinese
government is committed to ending that.
“If we can
persuade the market that it’s a shame to do this, as we did before
… there just won’t be the need for these elephants to be killed.”
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