Let’s speak for the hyena, it pays the rent
Story by MUTUMA MATHIU
The Nation
A policy is being formulated to define how Kenya approaches the management of wildlife. A draft policy, which has faced a wall of opposition, was prepared on March 5 by the ministry of Tourism and Wildlife.
A Sunday Nation editorial, dismissed in sections of the South African press as “ridiculous”, denounced the draft as deserving to be thrown out, together with the committee that wrote it.
There has been a delay in the publication of the draft for discussion by the public.
But wildlife policy is one of the most critical processes facing Kenya today and there is absolute need for an immediate and robust public debate.
And here is why: Wildlife accounts for 70 per cent of tourism earnings, or 10 per cent of our GDP as at last financial year. Wildlife and related activities employ more than 10 per cent of Kenyans in formal employment.
That means if you see a zebra crossing the road, please stop and wait for it to get across safely. Because you will be looking at the most important resource in your country.
I have been reading two documents which have left me a little bothered. One is the draft policy, the other is a 2001 report titled Kenya Wildlife Service: Evaluation of the Wildlife Pilot Cropping Project.
There are two ways of making money from animals. You can show them off, hence tourism, or you can shoot them for pleasure or their meat or skin and, therefore, “consumptive utilisation” or “cropping”.
Generally speaking, Kenyan landowners find showing off a zebra does not bring as much money as killing it and selling the skin in South Africa.
Since the early 1990s, KWS has been experimenting with “cropping” — “harvesting of free ranging animals for a range of products including meat and wildlife trophies” — and an evaluation of that experiment produced some troubling findings.
It makes sense to allow landowners to harvest some of the animals on their farms, particularly if populations are growing to the extent where they damage the habitat. In any case, it is a business, right?
Animals declining
Reading these documents, I collected a number of facts. One, animal numbers are declining. Two, poaching is on the rise. Three, croppers “are known to abuse their licences by injuring both target and non-target animals, indiscriminately shooting species not included in the allocated quotas and killing animals beyond the scheduled boundaries”, according to the evaluation.
Four, there is inadequate information on animal numbers and the characteristics — age, sex and distribution — we need to understand to ensure conservation. In other words, it is possible to “crop” species very close to extinction without being the wiser.
Six, wild animals might be accounting for a quarter of our income and 10 per cent of the jobs, but only eight per cent of our close to 600,000 square kilometres is reserved for them.
I don’t know how much is allocated for wildlife conservation in the budget, but I am willing to bet that it is not as much as we pay in MPs’ allowances, for example. Or pruning the lawns of State House.
Seven, the Draft Wildlife Policy is a prime example of a document drafted by a committee. It arrives at no radical findings and makes no original or visionary proposals.
It seeks to please conservationists, landowners and communities, whose interests in wildlife are, if not exactly anti-thetical, then worlds apart.
A wildlife document that arrives at such policy statements as “mainstream gender and youth issues in wildlife conservation and management” exists in a vague, non-specific, NGO world all of its own. It is an all frills and no skirt sort of document.
We need a clearer vision
I think we need a clearer vision, based on stronger resolve. Off the top of my head, I can think of one or two things that need to be articulated in policy and implemented to secure wildlife and hence tourism.
First, we need to allocate an extra 10 per cent of our land to wildlife in the next 10 years. There is a lot of land in the Northern Circuit which can be set aside for that purpose, so long as we can get our act together in terms of getting communities to co-exist profitably with wildlife.
Second, we should aim for 100 per cent autonomy in policy formulation and implementation. There is no reason why 10 per cent of the revenue from wildlife cannot be re-invested in conservation and management.
We need to get the science and the enforcement right. We need to put money in range management education and research. We should not allow people to shoot animals if we do not have the mechanism to ensure that they are shooting the right animal and that doing so does not threaten the sector as a whole.
We need to understand these animals and their ecosystem so that we can protect them effectively. In a word, put money, a lot of money, in this thing.
Third, we need to build strong, devolved, corruption-free institutions to take charge of the management of wildlife. There is no point of devolving authority to institutions which do not have the capacity to exercise it, just like there is no sense in leaving the authority in the hands of an institution that is not exercising it right.
Fourth, we need to arrive at the finding that Kenya is eco-tourism country and, therefore, the benefits we expect from our wildlife are largely non-consumptive.
That is another way of saying that our animals are for show, not for shooting, and, therefore, businesses whose focus is not that should be encouraged to shift to countries such as South Africa, which have a more sophisticated regime.
Five, since our hyenas and giraffes are contributing their bit to the national till, we should talk a little bit more about their welfare and rights. Without them, we are lost.
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Mutuma Mathiu is the managing editor, Sunday Nation
