Kenya's new front in poaching battle: 'the future is in the hands of our
communities'
The Guardian May 1016
Kenya, hit by a 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 someone who
swapped the poverty of grazing his livestock in northern Kenya for killing elephants with a gun for their
valuable ivory. 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 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 him as a ranger. “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 communityrun 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. 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.
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.
Questions:
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What has Kenya done recently show the world their commitment to elephant conservation?
What did Lotak do after becoming a poacher? What does the term poaching mean?
Describe what ‘conservancies’ do.
What type of wildlife does Lewa conservancy have?
Why are rhinos endangered?
What did Leakey find when he took over the Kenya Wildlife Service?