I don’t know why they bother. This must be the third or fourth time over at the last 30 years that the Kenyans have constructed such a funeral pyre, invited the world’s press and the great and good of the region to watch as the flames lick the risks and everything is reduced to dust.
Does making a bonfire out of all those tusks actually do anything to stop elephants being shot down and their ivory being trafficked?
It is a good question, a fair one, and it is easy to answer.
Burning ivory achieves very little. It is no more than a propaganda party. It might make the evening TV newscasts around the world, but after the flames have died down and the smoke has settled, the killings go on as normal.
I know a little bit about ivory poaching because back in the eighties when entire groups of elephants were being mown down in the Selous, I was friendly with the late and much missed Costa Mlay who was boss of the Wildlife Department which was responsible for that gigantic wilderness area in the south of our country.
He was taxed with stopping the killings which were becoming a national embarrassment as well as a threat to our tourist industry and he saw that one way to do it was to stop the poachers at source.
He employed the talents of another Tanzanian legend, Lieutenant General John Butler-Walden, the notorious Black Mamba, the man who chased Idi Amin from Kampala, to head up a task force, Operation Uhai.
Butler-Walden was a real character. You wouldn’t meet his like today. He strutted around the bush with a Colt 45 six gun sticking out of his holster. He was very proud of this weapon. He had ‘liberated’ it from Amin’s private apartment in the Presidential Palace.
When he wasn’t fingering the pistol he was usually nursing a glass of Konyagi. His men loved him as much as the poachers feared him. He liked bush meat and once filled a Buffalo transport aircraft with game meat that his men had killed and flew the cargo back to Dar es Salaam. it was to feed a wedding party.
Butler-Walden’s men cleared the Selous of poachers. There was no doubt about that and the war was won. Operation Uhai was hailed as a success, but it was only a temporary victory.
Soon after the army withdrew, the poachers regrouped and started taking out herds of elephants once more.
There was, you see, a fatal error in Costa Mlay’s strategy. He failed to target the middle men and the bwana mkubwa. These were the people who were financing the poaching.
They lived far away from the bush, in Dar es Salaam, or Ifakara, or Iringa. Indeed, as any economic breakdown of business will tell you, the further away you are from the product, the more money you will make, and the less risk there will be.
So the poacher, the jangle, who tracks and shoots the elephant, the man who puts his life on the line, might end up with a couple of thousand shillings. The middle man who either hides the tusks or transports them from the bush to the port, will earn a hundred times as much. Of course, he has to make sure the tusks arrive at the port safely. To do this, he will have to pay off policemen, customs etc.
But the most profit will go to the fat cats, the men (and women) who sit around in air-conditioned villas and watch as the tusks are finally shipped out of the country.
Who are these people?
Costa Mlay certainly knew. Indeed he often laughed to himself as I sat next to him in his car and he drove past embassy after embassy.
“Inside there,” he said, as the car drove by, “inside there are the real villains of the piece.”
So why didn’t he arrest them? Why didn’t he use the Black Mamba’s skills against these people?
He shook his head. “Are you mad?” he said.
‘These people’, the ones he was despairing of ever bringing to justice were high profile. Most of them enjoyed diplomatic immunity and if this legal luxury was not extended to them, they could always rely on the ‘good offices’ of government to help them avoid the tentacles of Costa Mlay.
It was said at this time - we are talking thirty years ago - that it was an open secret that ivory trafficking was a ‘protected trade’.
How ironic is that! Instead of protecting the elephant, it was the exploiters of the endangered animal who were getting immunity.
Costa Mlay knew only too well that his solution was a makeshift and temporary one. His hands were tied by political ropes.
So is there anything we can do apart from making empty gestures like killing a dozen poachers here and there or burning 100 tons of stockpiled ivory?
We do have a choice. Either we attack the problem, not at its source, but at its destination point, or there will be no elephants left for people to gaze at in this continent.
What this means is that we have to fight the war in a different theatre. We have to go to the Far East, to China, and persuade our friends in Beijing that trafficking in ivory ( and rhino horn) is plain wrong.
The truth is the Chinese government could, if it wished, stop the trade at a moment’s notice. It is an authoritarian government that is well used to controlling its vast population.
A few executions in China would certainly do the trick.
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