Revelations on cheetah safety are only the tip of the iceberg

Where are we to find the magic that will finally move mountains by ensuring sustainable global wildlife conservation and safety, a goal the likes of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora),

World Wide Fund for Nature and Africa Wildlife Foundation (AWF) have long sought to achieve but to little avail?

For sure, we in Tanzania do not have to be told by anyone that our lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, hippos and many other species of wild fauna and flora are facing extinction – in the particular case of animals the reasons most commonly cited being poaching and invasion of wildlife habitats to facilitate ‘social and economic development’.

The appallingly gloomy situation is there for all to see: the depletion of particular species of wild animals in world-acclaimed national parks like Serengeti, Manyara, Mikumi and Gombe as well as Selous Game Reserve.

While Tanzania National Parks (Tanapa) authorities obviously feel the pinch every passing day, they may understandably desist from giving too many details about what they keep hearing and witnessing.

But they have been heard vigorously “selling” the country’s natural and other attractions to prospective foreign and local tourists – and wouldn’t the surprising facts these would come across once in the parks be enough to prove to the world that things are bad and there is urgent need for effective corrective measures?

We are saying this with reference to one of the news stories published on the front page of yesterday’s issue of this paper – to the effect that conservationists are seeing such a stubbornly steep drop in the population of the African cheetah that the world’s fastest animal on land may soon be extinct.

No lesser a Tanzanian government official than Natural Resources and Tourism minister has admitted as much, but heaping the blame mainly on “persecution, loss of habitat as well as threats from other species such as lions and wild-dogs”.

He fell short of naming poaching as a major factor, despite having witnessed numerous cases of the havoc it has wreaked in our wildlife sanctuaries.

We wouldn’t like to conclude that this amounted to choosing to look the wrong way in the face of unpleasant facts, but we definitely need to see more stringent measures to beat poachers in their own dirty game than have been put in place so far.

Conservationists warned a few years ago that only about 450,000 elephants and 25,000 rhinos remained on the African continent and that, unless there was an end to poaching, the extinction of two of Africa’s most charismatic species from some of their core habitats would be a matter of time.

This is sufficiently horrifying to attract immediate attention. But hear this, too, as quoted by AWF: Rising affluence in Asia and elsewhere has created a booming black market for elephant ivory and rhino horn and has led to a poaching crisis on the African continent.

Again, horrendous. Thus, we must work on advice from the relevant experts if we are to spare ourselves what could be an environmental and socioeconomic catastrophe.