Making the illegal ivory trade hopeless

The young men, two of them, looking typical bandits who would stop at nothing to kill someone on their tail.

They were in long worn-out coats too dirty to determine their original colours. They were covering the bodies who seemed not have recalled the day they touched water, not to speak of the shabby and dirty hair that had long declared war on combs.

Our worries were compounded by the fact that beyond 10 kilometres from the Dar es Salaam-Mtwara road at Njia Nne, there was no road, but rugged area of thickets and tall grass that threatened passage of the vehicle we had hired.

But we managed to reach the dealers’ hideout and negotiate the price for a slightly less than 10kg of ivory, an amount they called small, but managed to order for 100kg more with a promise to get the consignment in two days.

In fact what we were in need of was just information, that we could sneak out of their clutches before smelling a rat in us.

But what do we do when our team involving members of the Journalists Environmental Association of Tanzania (JET) and colleagues from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) have to tell the world that Tanzania was not doing enough to stop the wanton slaughter of her elephants? We had to take the risk.

We began with a visit to several villages around the Selous Game Reserve where wecollected a lot of information from local young men, some of whom we realized were part of the illegal trade network. Then we drove into the Selous Game reserve itself where we saw at least two elephant carcasses.

At one point near a lake we saw the remains of what might have been a make-shift boat. Our contact explained that poachers sometimes used boats to get into the lake and take a good shot at elephants when they came for water. They would then destroy the boats and take away the engines with them.

Throughout our mission, our vehicle was never searched. We went into the Selous and came out through the same gate and none of the guards did the search.

We travelled from Dar esSlaam to the Selous and then to Kilwa and back without even being stopped at any of the numerous check points, maybe because were driving a hired vehicle from a tour company and that tourists have nothing to do with the illegal trade.

In 2010 when the secretariat of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) denied the Government of Tanzania a permission to sell its ivory stockpile of about 90 tonnes, the former cited three reasons including three prominent ones.

They include allegations that Tanzania was not doing enough to protect its elephants and wildlife in general, it had failed to deal with illegal ivory traders who use the country as a conduit of their contraband and the country had failed to poachers and illegal ivory traders from inside. By March this year the stockpile had grown about 120 tonnes.

Now Tanzanian government has resorted to a pretext of using the stockpile for research in a country where the legally obtained ivory would suffice the need, rendering the government’s excuse groundless.

Kenya still conducts research on its elephants even after torching its ivory stockpiles more than three times since 1989.

Another equally flimsy excuse by the Tanzanian government is that the stockpile would be used as evidence in criminal cases. But the time has been just too long for the anticipated court proceedings. He comes also a question as to what will happen to the ivory when the cases are concluded.

Countries destroy their ivory stockpiles to suppress the illegal ivory trade. The conservationists, governments, and non-governmental organizations that endorse the strategy argue that it fosters public support for the protection of elephants and that it sends a message to poachers that they are in a dying, dangerous and futile market.

Advocates also believe that destroying ivory can influence the supply side of the ivory market by sending a strong, highly visible and well-publicized message that the ivory market is useless.

Similarly, those who would otherwise consider ivory as an investment opportunity may think twice if the market is so consistently disrupted.

As of 2016, more than 263 metric tonnes of ivory have been destroyed through either burning or crushing worldwide.

Kenya held the first event in 1989, as well as the largest event in 2016, when a total of 106.35 tonnes of ivory were incinerated.

In 2012, Gabon burned the tusks and carved ivory it had been confiscating since 1985.The Philippines, a country which the CITES Standing Committee noted as one of the major consumers of ivory in 2012, became the first to destroy its holdings in June 2013.

France was the first European country to destroy its three tonnes of the seized illegal ivory in February 2014, with tusks fed one-by-one along with other ivory goods into an incinerator.

In May 2014, Hong Kong began a systematic destruction of its 29.6-tonne stockpile, which iwas scheduled to take place over the course of two years. In Ethiopia, where the elephant population has decreased by 90 per cent since the 1980s, officials issued a National Ivory Action Plan to address poaching and ivory trafficking.

Among other strategies, the plan includes the publicized destruction of seized ivory. The first such event took place in March 2015 in Addis Ababa, where the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority's 6.1- tonne stockpile was burned.

Other ivory destruction events in 2014 and 2015 took place in Chad (1.1 tonnes, 2014), Belgium (1.5 tonnes, 2014), Republic of Congo (4.7 tonnes, 2015), and Mozambique (2.4 tonnes of ivory as well as 200 kg of rhino horn, 2015).

In January 2016, Sri Lanka became the first South Asian country to destroy its ivory (1.5 tonnes confiscated in 2012) and also the first to issue a formal apology for its role in the ivory trade.

On 30 April 2016, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta set alight the largest ever pile of ivory for destruction in the Nairobi National Park. The pile consisted of 105 tonnes of elephant ivory from about 8,000 elephants and 1.35 tonnes of horns from 343 rhinoceroses.

The pyre also contained exotic animal skins. The amount of ivory destroyed equaled about 5 per cent of the global stock. Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba was also in attendance.

So does it mean that all these countries that have burned their stockpiles don’t do research on elephants? Don’t they have cases in their courts of law that require pieces of ivory as evidence?

The point is, Tanzania is not committed to fighting illegal trade; we are not supporting the move to ban ivory trade for whatever purposes in order to save our elephants. Let us be serious with the campaign to save elephants that we are running by cutting off the buyers, believing that the killing will also stop.