Meet Conor Godfrey

February 26, 2010March 3, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

337.ConorGodfrey
I’m heading to Africa. Conor recently returned.

So we’re switching roles slightly for next 7 weeks while I guide several safaris, search out new places and complete some unfinished business in East Africa.

I’ll blog as I can, and certainly detail as I have before the safari experiences my groups are having. You can follow these experiences, here. The posts will all be titled, “On Safari.”

But to maintain the blog’s topical news about Africa, Conor Godfrey has agreed to fill in for me.

Conor recently left the Peace Corps where he was stationed in the boonies of Guinea. The only volunteer for miles, Conor taught, managed community programs and developed a peculiar passion for mangoes.

As he was preparing to celebrate Christmas in 2008, the Guinea military announced the dissolution of parliament in a bloodless coup d’etat.

Things went downhill after that.

I met Conor when his parents extracted him from the wilds of Guinea to join us on an East African safari last June. But except for that brief interlude, Conor became more and more enmeshed in his remote village. He rarely spoke English except to teach it, become proficient not only in French but also in the local Pulaar.

After a brutal massacre of an opposition demonstrators on September 28th, 2008, the country’s political situation became more and more unstable. On extremely short notice Conor and his fellow volunteers were picked up at their villages and driven to Mali.

A parent myself of children whose adventures often terrified me, it’s hard to recommend that kids thrust themselves to the fate of such unforeseen circumstances.

But reflecting on what one knows best, oneself, I know that the adventures of the sort Conor has just returned from are not just invaluable but absolutely indispensable for anyone who wants to truly understand the world outside their own upbringing.

Not until you’ve pressed the envelope to an uncertain edge are understandings that others politely call insights created. Conor graduated cum laude from William and Mary, but the reality of his recent life in West Africa is anything but academic.

I’m alive. My kids are alive. And Conor’s alive. And thanks to all of that, for the next seven weeks or so you will have the unique pleasure of a younger, fresher perspective than my own.

So enjoy Conor! I’ll be back full-time in mid-April.

France Apologizes, America’s Turn

February 26, 2010October 24, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

President Sarkozy at Rwanda's Genocide Memorial

Apologizing is hard and noble. It’s America’s turn.

Today, France apologized to Rwanda for its actions that contributed to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Like the Belgian Parliament’s historic apology to the Congo for its ancient king, Leopold, (which included substantial reparations) these are difficult and noble acts.

“What happened here is unacceptable and …forces the international community… to reflect on the mistakes that prevented it from anticipating and stopping this terrible crime,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told Reuters today.

It’s now America’s turn; Bill Clinton’s in particular.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 could have been stopped. Numerous books and hundreds of pages of oath-sworn testimony, not to mention popular films, have documented the neglect of western countries, mostly the U.S. and France, from taking action earlier enough.

The UN general on the ground commanding a pitiful 500 troops saw it all coming. He pleaded with the General Assembly to do something.

The U.S. and France blocked his requests.

The genocide began.

France’s explanation was born of a long colonial involvement in the area. In a nutshell, there have always been little Hutus; they were the aboriginal hunter-gatherers of the area. In about the 6th or 7th centuries, the tall Watutsis (Tutsis) invaded the area.

The Tutsi herders represented about 15% of the population; the Hutus about 85%, but for more than a millennia the Tutsis over lorded the Hutus in a remarkably European feudal system.

During the colonial era France wanted to remedy this. That, too, was noble, but a half century of colonial rule is not enough to change the life ways of thousands of years.

The European colonial era ended not on any noble proposition. It ended because the colonial powers, Europe, were devastated by World War II and could no longer afford their colonies.

Belgium and France were the colonial powers in this region, and they raced to end their involvement with little recognition that all they had done during their occupation was make matters worse between the Hutus and Tutsis.

The first major massacre was 1972. Six more followed before the catastrophic genocide of 1994. Even today in Hutu/Tutsi conflicted Burundi, war rages. Not even Nelson Mandela’s decade long involvement in Burundi has stopped the fighting.

But in Rwanda it could have been stopped. But France ever championing the underdog, talked itself into believing that the event which started the genocide, the missile strike of the Hutu President’s plane returning to Kigali from a peace conference, was a deliberate act of the Tutsi.

Until today, in fact, France contended that the current President Paul Kagame of Rwanda was principally responsible for the missile strike.

He may have been. I don’t think we’ll ever know, several lower judges in France continue to bring charges against Kagame and others. Recently, a Rwanda government official was arrested when she entered Rwanda and charged with events leading to the genocide.

But French President Sarkozy is cutting to the chase. Whether it was Kagame’s gang or not who shot down the plane, France and the U.S. could have stopped the genocide, and they didn’t.

France contended for too many days after the fighting started that it was the Hutus fault, and it blindsided itself to the fact that in the beginning it was the Hutus who were the murderers.

Sarkozy has now admitted all of this. And apologized.

And America?

Well it was different with us. Bill Clinton was burned beyond belief by the defeat of Blackhawk Down in Somalia. We know much less about Africa than France. The one defeat-fits-all syndrome made Clinton believe we could be burned again in Rwanda.

We wouldn’t have been. The UN on the ground could have stopped the genocide. I think that some critics who claim Clinton was just being mean are ridiculous. I think he was just… dumb.

The world is grossly interconnected. We need our leaders to be aware as much of tiny places of trouble like Tblisi and Kigali, as they are fixated on Tehran.

After the genocide, France spent $900 million dollars in helping Rwanda recover. The U.S. spent $1.1 billion. Even from the crass business cost perspective, we both made very bad decisions.

Thank you, France.

And now, America? I wouldn’t hold your breath.

War in Ngorongoro?

February 25, 2010February 25, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

WhoseSide Education is fine if you’ve got something to do with it. Is there going to be war in Ngorongoro?

The great experiment known as the “NCA” in what ABC’s Good Morning America christened one of the world’s Natural Wonders is coming apart.

Most tourists know it as “The Crater.” But Ngorongoro Crater National Park is just a tiny 100 sq. mile circular caldera sunk into a much larger wilderness area twenty times as big, officially known as the NCA (Ngorongoro Conservation Area).

The crater’s unique ecology collects more water than virtually any other part of the NCA, and its deep flat sedimentary and volcanic substrata – like the Serengeti – creates areas of grassland plains perfect for Africa’s great herbivores.

So the crater itself attracts a larger concentration of animals than the surrounding NCA. But there’s plenty out there in the NCA, too, on the gorgeous highland hills that ultimately descend onto the Serengeti’s prairies. And if wildlife couldn’t flow between the sunken crater, the NCA and the Serengeti, there wouldn’t be any wildlife in the crater.

Yesterday, the Parliamentary Committee in Dar assigned to the area began moves to forcibly evict Maasai from the NCA.

It spells trouble.

Committee member Dr Raphael Chegeni claimed there were now more than 60,000 Maasai living in the NCA with “unsustainable” numbers of cattle. This is well beyond the 25,000 Maasai Parliament authorized as sustainable.

You see it was presumed that as Tanzania developed, so would Maasai, and that they would choose to abandon traditional lifestyles for modern opportunities, and so while technically their population would grow, they would leave the wilderness.

And to its credit, the Tanzanian government, Italian NGOs and even the American Peace Corps have spent years building schools and dispensaries to get Maasai healthy and educated and ready to be a bank clerk.

But graduating from primary school in Ngorongoro didn’t turn out to be the magic wand intended. There aren’t any jobs for fresh school leavers. Modern Tanzanian bank managers don’t like Maasai kids.

Tanzania is an increasingly corrupt society, its superficial democracy immune from ethnic troubles but dominated by a small cadre of rich and educated.

Maasai in the main are neither rich or educated.

Recently, actually, things looked promising. Several years ago Tanzania’s Prime Minister was Maasai, and he was a fabulous Ben Nelson! But alas, he got implicated in several huge corruption scandals and lost his job and his clout. He’s headed for jail.

Before foreign hunters or tourists there were Maasai. Maasai and wild animals have always lived together just fine. And this is the heart of Maasailand. But over the years (starting in 1921) the Maasai have been squeezed into smaller and smaller areas, reserving larger and larger areas for foreign hunters and tourists which bring in much more revenue than hut taxes.

Besides, who in their right mind would want to spend their lives in a straw hut? Chief Blackhawk was last photographed in a suit talking to President Grant!

In 1972 Maasai were bumped entirely out of what is now the Serengeti, and theoretically, out of the 100 sq. mile crater.

It was a contentious act, and the “treaty” with the Maasai allowed them to continue to live in the NCA provided they didn’t alter their lifestyles from traditional herding into, for example, planting sweet potatoes (which is exactly what many do, today). Another caveat in the treaty allowed them to bring their livestock down into the crater during times of drought.

Those concessions were clearly humane, but they have led to uninterrupted tension between the Ngorongoro Maasai and park authorities ever since 1972.

To begin with, who was going to define a drought?

I became quite good friends with a really sharp Ngorongoro Maasai in the 1980s who was the third most important son of the most important Maasai headman near Olmoti. When his two elder brothers died, he became the chief area spokesman.

There were several droughts during those years, and tension grew as the Maasai brought more cattle into the area. Rangers tried to evict them. Maasai are great spear throwers, but they turned out to be terrific rifle shooters, too.

Rangers and Maasai were killed in these gun battles. I remember camping with a group in Lemata on the crater rim when we were awakened by this gunfire in 1993.

My friend negotiated an end to the battles in the mid 1990s. Several Maasai, including him, were trained then hired as rangers. It was a brilliant move. Until he was killed in a war when he and other rangers were trying to evict Somali from the eastern Serengeti.

And since then, the area’s Maasai population has more than doubled.

Tanzania has some fabulous crusaders for human rights which have tried in the past to mediate between the government and the Maasai.

The Lawyers’ Environmental Action Team is among the best. But they tried and failed to mediate a dispute with Maasai in the northeast Serengeti last August, and they are now overwhelmed with work in the areas of Tanzania’s new gold mines and seem uninterested in the current dispute.

The conflict between animals and people is not the only conflict in the wilderness. The more important, and deadly, is the conflict between people and people.

Bipartisan with China, against Eles

February 24, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Two weeks from Sunday the Obama administration will finally let the world know what they think about elephant conservation. So far, they haven’t.

The silence is deafening. I’m afraid the whales and elephants are being negotiated away for sanctions against Iran.

This will be Obama’s first world forum on conservation. The last CITES convention held in Santiago under the Bush administration was a terrible embarrassment to all Americans. (See my blog.)

We were all hopeful that a very public and forceful presence by the new Obama administration this time would do much to recoup the deficit of trust in America that last conference produced.

But so far, nothing from Ken Salazar’s office. I called his press assistant, Tamara Ward, yesterday and she has not replied.

Many items are on the table, and the Obama administration has announced their position on some of the less controversial ones.

But the main act is a huge fight among African countries as to whether elephants should be downlisted from “endangered” to sort of “endangered” or “protected.” Any downlisting would then allow certain countries to sell stockpiles of ivory.

Zambia and Tanzania are leading the march this time to downlist the elephant, while Kenya and 26 other African countries are mounting the defense.

Zambia and Tanzania have huge stockpiles of ivory. This is collected from naturally dead elephants and confiscated from poachers.

Kenya, too, has stockpiles, but it knows that allowing any sales of ivory will stimulate the trade and motivate poachers. And Kenya has the foresight to know that a healthy elephant population will bring in much more revenue from tourism in the long term than one-off sales of tusks do in the short-term.

The scientific argument as to whether the elephant population is currently healthy enough to withstand increased poaching, or whether increased poaching could actually lead to extinction, is more arcane.

Like everything, today, the countries are actually inspired by money, not science.

It was hoped that the Obama administration would join the European Union in trying to bring some light to the scientific argument, which heavily suggests that increased poaching cannot be withstood.

The silence is deafening.

The conference opens March 13 in Doha, Qatar.

Led and founded by the United States and Kenya, among a few other concerned countries, CITES mirrors the U.S.’ own truly august Endangered Species Act (which preceded the international convention by more than a decade), and is a worldwide agreement on what forms of life can be passed through international borders.

By listing certain species from threatened to endangered into five different categories, the countries signing the convention agree to various regulations that are placed on their trade.

This could be as little as enhanced scrutiny, to as is currently the case with elephants, an outright ban on trade.

Scientists generally agree that prior to the corporate poaching of elephants which began in the late 1970s, that there were as many as 1.3 million. Today, there are 470,000.

But at the nadir of the long history of elephants, the population probably dipped to around 200,000 by the mid 1980s.

When the first CITES convention met to specifically deal with elephants and banned their trade, the black market price of a kilogram of ivory declined from $300 to $3 in one year. Poaching dried up.

By 1988, Kenya’s population of elephants had declined from 167,000 fifteen years earlier, to only 16,000. (Today it is around 30,000.)

As the situation improved throughout the continent, the irritated southern African countries (where poaching had always been better controlled) insisted they be allowed to sell legally harvested ivory.

The first sale after the treaty banned all sales in 1989 was allowed in 1999; 50 tons were exported to Japan. Poaching immediately started up, again. In June, 2002, the largest shipment of illegal ivory since the 1989 ban was seized by Singapore authorities. DNA analysis showed the ivory originated in Zambia. The cargo was destined for Japan and comprised 532 elephant tusks and more than 40,000 already cut pieces of ivory weighing more than 6.5 tons.

Nevertheless, the trend continued to allow more selling, in part because of the Bush administration’s tacit approval.

In November 2002 at a CITES convention, it was agreed that Botswana, Namibia and South Africa could export 60 tons of ivory.

Then, a second CITES-negotiated sale occurred in 2008. Zimbabwe sold108 tons to Japan and China. Predictions that this sale in particular would fuel an increasing appetite for ivory among the rapidly growing Chinese middle classes proved true.

In 2009 China opened 37 new government “ivory” stores.

Today, a kilo of ivory sells for $1500 in the Far East. In Kenya a poacher gets about $40, but even a small pair of 20-kilo tusks brings a poacher the equivalent of $800, just below the average amount a Kenyan worker earns per year.

It seems, though, that the Obama administration wants to be as namby-pamby with regards to conservation as it is to health care.

The U.S. delegation is supporting a handful of “listings” including a nearly extinct cockatoo in Indonesia and the very popular polar bear which impacts Eskimos and few others. Inuit are not party to trade agreements.

And, of course, “bipartisanism” with China is as important as with Republicans on health care.

We know where that got us.

You got it Coming, but you can’t Go!

February 23, 2010February 23, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

BA strike imminent

If you’re planning to travel in the next few months, the chances are you’ll be effected by an airline strike. It’s your fault.

There have never been so many major airlines in strike mode, and it reflects the recovery in only the way the travel industry can.

Yesterday, the Lufthansa strike temporarily ended. Today, air traffic controllers in Paris are striking. British Airways is set to strike within a few weeks. Within the next month or so, American Airlines could be on strike.

The disputes are varied but basically represent the end of the World’s Worst Recession (WWR) as people begin however slowly to travel, again.

Airline’s unique accounting registers profit with forward sales. Airlines and most of the travel industry are one of the few things that you pay for before you get. So that right now things aren’t exactly beautiful clear skies, but down the line, it looks that way.

So while today British Airways can claim it is still losing nearly one million dollars a day, that’s pittance by airline standards and it obviously suggests what the unions already know: a year from now they’ll be waddling in cash.

Airlines are doing well, both in terms of announced earnings and stock prices. Their employees are not doing as well.

I began to write this blog hoping I could quote a lot of figures, but frankly, the airline game is a complicated one. What the United Airlines’ annual report says is much different than CNN or Business Week about the airline’s true operating profit and important to me, workforce numbers. And those are the two issues butting head-to-head in these upcoming strikes.

But I believe I have a grasp of the general state of things.

Nine-Eleven came on the heals of a little recession. It tanked the airlines. It set United Airlines ultimately into bankruptcy. Nine-Eleven marked the end of minimum decent service on the airlines and began to threaten air safety.

But I trace the problem to a much earlier date: 1984, the end of the “CAB” – Civil Aeronautics Board, the government agency which until then heavily regulated the airlines as a strategic national industry.

Prices, sellers, even seat widths at one time, were all government regulated. Thanks mostly to Jimmy Carter, but started by Gerald Ford, the death of the CAB marked the beginning of America’s infatuation with smaller government. We are now discovering the true “benefits.”

The airlines were thrust into a competitive environment the likes of which had never been seen. Here are some interesting numbers:

EWT’s first safari with the Sacramento Zoo was in July, 1983. Under regulation, groups could achieve a slight discount on regulated, government-mandated air fares, and so the zoo’s air fare of roundtrip San Francisco/Nairobi of $1323 represented about a 12% discount over published fares.

Today, that is February 22, 2010, 26 and one half years later, during which I’ve had three cats and one dog die, three homes, two children born, educated and out on their own… the best roundtrip air fare from San Francisco is … $1357.10!

Give or take $20 or $25 depending upon the combination of airlines, and that’s the problem. The American consumer will spend the better part of a weekend lowering his fare by $10. So the pressure on the poor airlines has been almighty to keep fares low.

So weakened by throwing the industry to the ravages of price pressure Nine-Eleven was the nail in the coffin. In and out of bankruptcy, reduce pay and benefits, reduce seat size, charge for bags.. Do anything at all but increase the price!

The last to suffer, of course, are the stock holders and upper management who designed this whole cockamamy system. Believe me, they have not retained the same salaries they had in 1983!

Fares are WAY too low. Imagine buying a new fully loaded Ford Taurus for $18,000!

Or a new home at $75,800 that today costs $215,900!

Coming up: plane crashes. We’ve already begun to see them, and discover they are caused by poorly trained and poorly paid … pilots. See the details on Continental #3407 on February 9, 2009.

The system, like a lot of things lately (read: Congress) is broken. And we notice the cracks in our broken things when we have fewer things and each one of them that remains becomes more important.

Air service to places like Cleveland and Memphis has been drastically reduced; to cities like Dubuque it’s almost gone. We are strangling the infrastructure for growth.

So plan ahead. Beware. And be PATIENT. You’re probably not going to get to where you want to go exactly as you had hoped.

And most importantly, it’s your fault. Realize that. You who reduced the size of government and put hundreds of thousands out of work and jeopardized the safety of air travel and the future of nice cities… all to save $10 on that air fare to New York.

Bringing Iraq to Africa

February 22, 2010April 20, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Are Bush, Blair and Condy sending the right message to Nigeria? No.

There is tension in Nigeria at the moment, as if there isn’t always tension in Nigeria, but Africa’s rich oil producer is technically without a president. The elected leader is either very sick or dead (no one’s sure), and the Nigeria’s Parliament has given his powers to an Acting President.

Nigeria’s long and labored post-colonial history is rife with horrible violence. Remember Biafra? Well there have been demonstrations and police repression lately reminiscent of the horrible days that led to that terrible conflict.

So presumably to delay what some believe is the inevitable, former leaders Tony Blair and George Bush jetted into town with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, ostensibly to honor Nigeria’s freedom fighters at an award’s banquet.

Although I’m not sure this is anyone’s idea but theirs.

Problem was that the lead awardee of “freedom fighters”, former anti-corruption investigator Nuhu Ribadu, had fled the country for his life.

Ribadu had been ready to indict several top ruling-party politicians, including the one that George Bush was sitting next to, former dictator Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari was one of Nigeria’s most feared generals, detaining government critics without charge and afterwards pushing through laws that allowed him to hold the detainees indefinitely without trial.

Ribadu once estimated corruption cost Nigeria — a nation where most people live on less than $2 a day — over $380 billion since independence.

And another famous Nigerian human rights champion, Shehu Sani, who was to actually be seated near former President Bush, couldn’t, because he’d been jailed the day before.

I kind of now understand why nobody in the Obama or Brown administrations attended.

Sani, who was freed on bail but then denied entry to the event, told the BBC that “It was a peaceful protest. I was officially invited to the banquet – so I wasn’t going to throw any shoes.”

“But the police came and used force to shove me into their vehicles along with about 80 others.

“They said we needed a permit – but according to the constitution all we have to do is write to the police and tell them about the protest. We had done that.”

So Bush, Blair and Condy are the west’s representatives to an award ceremony for freedom and liberty in Nigeria except the awardees are either in exile or jail.

Peaceful Kenyan People Power

February 17, 2010February 17, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

protes The coalition government in Kenya was fraying at the seams last week, but a large public demonstration may have stitched it back together.

Wednesday several thousand protesters took to the streets of Nairobi in what many of us feared would be the end of the “Grand Coalition” which has held Kenya together in a fragile alliance since the terrible civil turbulence of early 2008.

How wrong we were.

The police actually protected demonstrators, they didn’t incite them as Nairobi police most often do. The protesters were a major mix of ethnic groups, not just Kikuyu or Luo. They marched through town and even shouted outside the President’s office.

And hardly disturbed the traffic in the city.

After tremendous media coverage, and politicians running to the microphones to lend their support, President Kibaki drew down his latest incendiary move. He agreed to the effective suspension of two ministers in the government which had been ordered by his rival and partner in government, Prime Minister Odinga.

I think this bodes very well for Kenya, but we’re still at an extremely fragile moment. I also think the events of the last several weeks have defined the good man and the bad man. The good man is Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The bad man is President Mwai Kibaki.

Kenyans have moved foward with deliberate and hopeful speed a new constitution which must be put in place before the election cycle for 2012 begins next year. As the details of the compromise began to leak last week, a rift opened up between these two power-sharing behemoths.

As the proposed constitution now stands, it is likely that the cause of the last dispute – the extremely close and fraudulent election between Odinga and Kibaki, could occur all over, again. Previously it was widely hoped that Kibaki would not stand for re-election, or effectively would not attract enough support in the way the electoral process would be implemented.

That changed, corruption in the government (which is endemic on both sides) exploded in the local media with regards to funds for schools and misappropriation of grain stockpiles. Neither is a new issue, but both gained new traction because the “bad guys” are all in the president’s camp.

And in the ever present background are the international trials set to begin momentarily in The Hague against yet to be named government officials accused of crimes against humanity in the violence of 2008.

It all came to a head last week when the Prime Minister suspended two of the ministers (both in the president’s party) pending resolution of corruption charges against them.

Over the weekend the President revoked the Prime Minister’s suspensions.

Monday, the Prime Minister appealed to Kofi Annan, who orchestrated the Grand Coalition in 2008, to return to the country to resolve the dispute.

Tuesday, the people took the streets.

And it was peaceful.

And it worked!

Wednesday, the President agreed that all responsibilities in the offices of the ministers who the Prime Minister suspended would be taken over by their permanent secretaries. An effective suspension.

Peace? Working in Kenya? Congratulations, Kenyan people power!

We’ll have to see where it goes from here. But so far, so good.

Panthers in Tanzania

February 16, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Jaguars and mountain lions don’t exist in East Africa, but Black Panthers do.

While some names like Huey Newton, Edlridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale are still recognized in the U.S. with the historic Black Panther Movement, in Tanzania there’s an even more famous panther, Felix “Pete” O’Neal.

Like many panthers, Pete sticks close to his territory, a village (now suburb) of Arusha. He fled there as a fugitive who jumped bail in 1970, and he’s never left. His wife has traveled for him, and recently he hosted an alumni party of sorts for the American Black Panther Party.

But like all hunted cats, he stays in the shadows.

It would be nice to believe his story, that he was completely framed by a racist, viper vengeful FBI. In fact the same FBI that hunted down Pete nailed several of my close friends in the anti-war movement. So I have no doubt that every Dicky Trick in the book was used to get him.

I believe him completely, though, about why he fled bail. He had been convicted of a relatively minor felony of transporting a gun across state lines. As head of the Kansas City Black Panthers, that would have been easy. The state line runs through town.

He was out on bail awaiting a maximum sentence of 4 years when he overheard one of his FBI minders say that the only way he was going to leave jail was in a coffin.

He was a kid; in fact a kid from the bad part of town who had been energized by the 1960s revolution, just like I was. We all really believed in the power of the people, and in fact, we won most battles in the end. (Only to watch the emasculation of progressivism, today, by Obama, but that’s another blog.)

But the most feared institution in America was the FBI, and J-Edgar was known to take the law into his own hands. His henchmen were lynchers. Pete fled, first to Switzerland since that country was still giving asylum to anti-war protestors, and then to Algeria, which was at the time incapable of giving up anything to anyone, and finally to Tanzania in 1970.

Tanzania welcomed nearly 800 Afro-Americans fleeing American oppression. There weren’t many – like Pete – who were actually fleeing the law, rather they were mostly fleeing racism and the draft.

At the time Tanzania was fervently socialist. China and the Soviet Union were paying its bills. The Afro-American community fit right into the socialist, Marxist ideas of Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa and other communist-like credos.

[Blog Footnote: Mwalimu Nyerere was one of the greatest early African presidents which existed. He bankrupt his country by paying lip service to his East-leaning paymasters, but by so doing he educated the population and broke down ethnic schisms. It’s the reason that today, although Kenya and Tanzania share a lot of failings, Kenya can erupt in ethnic conflicts and Tanzania won’t.]

So the black kids fleeing America fit right in, and despite most of them coming from pretty impoverished backgrounds, they were still rich by Tanzanian standards. They started a number of community projects.

Containers started to arrive Tanzania with books, shovels, building materials, water pumps and all sorts of things to help one village after another start developing. The Afro-American community gained enormous respect from local Tanzanians.

“There was a huge population. It was amazing,” O’Neal recalled recently to the Arusha Times. “There was an excitement here. There were so many African-Americans here and everybody had at least some kind of vague sense of revolution.”

Then, they blew it. It was called the Big Bust.

May 24, 1974: I was back in my village in western Kenya having returned from a probably ill-advised trip into Idi Amin’s Uganda. We had seen some horrible things, there, and the rumor was that Tanzania was getting really fed up with Idi. Everyone was preparing for war.

I was listening to the radio and Kenya (which at the time was no friend of Tanzania) re-reported a Tanzanian broadcasting report that two young African-Americans had been detained in Dar trying to enter the country with guns.

One of the containers that Pete and others were using to develop Tanzanian villages had been laced with guns and ammo. Bad idea.

Tanzanians went ballistic. It was a six ton container filled with predominantly farm implements… but also two guns and a “few” bullets.

The Tanzanians felt double-crossed, and also vulnerable. The U.S. was viciously anti-Tanzanian at the time (because Tanzania was friends with the east, and the friend of your enemy….). It’s uncertain that Nyerere himself agreed, but the official Tanzanian line was that the Afro-Americans were a CIA plot to overthrow Tanzania.

Probably 600 of the 800 Afro-Americans living in the country were jailed and virtually all the others were put under house arrest.

About four months after the initial arrests, no more evidence that the CIA was involved could be presented, and everyone started to be released. Almost all of them went home.

“The exodus started [then],” Pete told the Arusha Times. “And you compact that situation with the war with Idi Amin and the falling economy; by the early 1980s, nearly everybody was ready to leave. ”

Pete O’Neal didn’t. He stayed and literally became Tanzanian. He rarely leaves his little village outside Arusha town, and he’s warmly accepted today by the community.

When asked if he would ever want to return to the U.S., he affirmed that endless legal battles being waged for him in the U.S. continue, but right now, if he set foot in the U.S., the next day would begin a minimum 15-year jail sentence.

“And I’m an old man,” he explains.

A Very Lonely Planet

February 15, 2010February 16, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

lonelyplanet Arusha is NOT one of the 8 worst cities in the world. It is the 8th most HATED city, so there!

In October Lonely Planet published a list of the world’s most hated cities, and Arusha was 8th. As for lists, this was about the 8000th mistake Lonely Planet has made about East Africa.

First, a reality check. Arusha is one of my favorite African cities. It’s a modern, fast growing city doing just fine, in fact superbly by African standards. You’d never know it was so large, because it’s so pretty. It has some serious crime which you can avoid by not walking the streets at night, and a lot of conmen which you can avoid by not being conned.

Sound familiar? Sound like, well maybe, Chicago?

I love Chicago.

One of the authors of the original list, Vivek Wagle, tried to create a conundrum but instead just revealed poor journalism.

A Lonely Planet connundrum it is not. It’s a mistake, no complex idea.

By the way, here are the other cities that were more “hated” than Arusha at 8th:

Detroit, Accra, Seoul, Los Angeles, Wolverhampton (England), San Salvador, and Chennai (India).

That list is, of course, a conundrum because those cities have little in common with one another except that they are cities (well, not sure about Wolverhamwhat?), but reduced to the little we know about the big ones (Detroit, Accra, Seoul and LA) it’s really not a bad group to find yourself in.

Lonely Planet is becoming very lonely. More and more astute travelers know to politely acknowledge it but never take it to the café.

In the beginning, the LP idea was a pretty good one. It was detail on the cheap. Find some inveterate, young (and necessarily poor) traveler who was spending a lot of time in some foreign place, and pay him/her outrageously poor wages to write a chapter.

It worked when Americans just began their love of traveling the world. There were many really good young explorers with a bit of their own capital who loved the exposure that publication provided.

But there was never any fact-checking. It was basically all opinion. Fortunately for the idea, the opinion was usually positive, because these were kids awestruck by a new place, energized by a feeling of discovery, and elated by the idea they were now an author.

Lonely Planet pays about $500 for a chapter about a country. In the old days, some of that was extremely good stuff. I particularly liked the condensation of history, for example. But it’s still pitiful wages.

But as time went on, and book sales zoomed, and the owners got profitable and there were lots more people traveling everywhere, journalism crept into the credo.

Are you sure that that tented camp didn’t have a bathroom attached?

Fact check. Holy smokes, who’s going to find that one out?

So more and more scrutiny developed and in the 90s LP submitters had to spend at least one cycle of regularity in each place they reviewed.

That was expensive. Paying for that might eke into the outlandish profits of the publisher! Two nights in a tented camp in East Africa costs an entire chapter’s pay!

Unless…

The camp comps you. That means takes you free, because the camp knew it would then appear in Lonely Planet.

Get my drift?

All of us began to know this. I remember during my close association with Hoopoe Safaris of Tanzania that the marketing manager’s main call to arms was sounded each time a Lonely Planet editor came to down.

We wined and dined and put him/her up free at every place we owned or might soon.

And guess what else? We bought adds in some Lonely Planet publications. It was called “synergy in marketing.”

And we got rave, rave reviews, and it paid handsomely. I never thought the marketing manager was very good, but he claimed in one meeting that a quarter of our bookings came from Lonely Planet.

In today’s internet world TripAdvisor has replaced Lonely Planet.

Lonely Planet still has great background. As a Cliff Notes guide to a place you’ll be traveling, it’s still worth the buy. But as far as its recommendations and opinions about the cities or places you might stay, forget it. It’s all staged.

But then, you know that. Lonely Planet is lonelier than ever.

It Takes 2, or 3, to Tango.

February 12, 2010February 12, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

This man, Dick Olver, is corrupt. His clients, the US & UK, are corrupt.

The deal struck last week between a major world’s arms manufacturer and the UK and US governments explains why African leaders are corrupt.

Corruption doesn’t start with an evil black man’s hand out. It starts with a white man.

BAE Systems is the world’s second largest weapons manufacturer. It’s so big that it doesn’t just manufacture the weapons, it even manufactures the defenses against those weapons!

Unshackled from the Bush and Blair administrations, the U.S. and U.K. governments moved to meaningful indictments against white men. In those public indictments we learned that BAE had bribed with hundreds of millions of dollars government officials – many of them popularly elected – in a host of countries including Saudia Arabia, the Czech Republic, Hungary…

And South Africa and Tanzania.

In South Africa, it includes the current president, Jacob Zuma.

In Tanzania, it was the once Attorney General, Andrew Chenge.

BAE paid Chenge a million dollars into a hidden bank account in Britain, and bingo, Tanzania bought…

A RADAR DEFENSE SYSTEM FOR DAR!

The system is a modern, high-tech if cold warish circle of radar around the capital of Dar-es-Salaam to protect this armpit of Africa, from … incoming missiles? Who the hell would send missiles at Dar?!

But, anyway, it can’t work! There isn’t enough electricity in all of Tanzania! The government would have to choose between electricity for televisions and light bulbs or defense against… missiles?!

Young, aggressive Tanzanian politicians skinned Chenge’s hide and in fact, forced his resignation as well as the resignation of the existing Prime Minister. But since the case is now settled, Chenge might not be prosecuted, because there will be no witnesses and no allowable evidence …

Where the law is more respected, South African Jacob Zuma’s spokesmen simply said there will be no comment.

It takes two to tango. And the referee of these ballroom 1-2-3, 1-2-3’s is that all-important third beat, the world’s Super Power. The U.S. settled probably because it was bribed, too. Bribed that a public trial would reveal too much secrecy about … weapons of mass destruction.

BAE is not too big to fail, it’s too big to accuse.

Is there too much too big around at the moment?

In a statement, BAE Systems Chairman Dick Olver said his company “has systematically enhanced its compliance policies and processes” in the past several years and “very much regrets and accepts full responsibility for these past shortcomings.”

Right. His stock than rose 1.6%.

The penalty paid was less than the stock rose, less than was paid out in bribes, and a fraction of the profits earned from the corruptible sales.

Your “shortcomings,” Mr. Olver, include corrupting some of the most talented and skilled individuals in Africa, ruining ten-year economic plans, casting shadows over entire cadres of political parties and good ideas.

Your shortcomings have doomed Africa to more poverty and castigation. How horribly corrupt are African leaders! I’m sure you, Mr. Olver, would never take a bribe. You only give them.

“We have been shafted by the decision to reach a plea bargain agreement and not to prosecute BAE,” South African opposition Democratic Alliance spokesman David Maynier said yesterday. “The details of the various investigations will remain hidden as a result of the plea bargain agreement and nobody – whether they bribed or whether they took bribes – will be held to account.” (Washington Post, February 5, 2010)

South African politician, Patricia de Lille, said the U.S. and the U.K. are “No better than any of the rogue leaders in Africa who have used funds from bribes in arms deal to stay in power.”

Right. On.

MADIBA 20

February 11, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Early Mandela It’s hard for me to believe that it 20 years ago to the day Nelson Mandela walked out of the Drakenstein Prison after 26 years.

We all mark our lives with significant events. My generation often asks, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” – “Where were you when Apollo landed?”

When Madiba was released I was watching it live on television early morning in Chicago; later in the day I would fly to New York for meetings with the American administration of South African Airways.

Things were not going well for SAA at the time. They shouldn’t have. The American administration was racist to the core; most of their superiors in Joburg were of a like mind, with a few very notable exceptions who I remember fondly.

Mandela’s release was the death bell for their jobs, and I couldn’t have been happier. The two martini lunches were laced with sexist and racist jokes, many about Mandela, and always ended with a somber and inebriated prognosis that the there was going to be a blood bath.

We made good deals in South Africa in the years running up to Mandela, because it had nothing to do with business facts and figures. The management of many South African tourism companies were running scared to death that when Mandela assumed power, all would be lost, and so they were anxious to give away the store for whatever they could get.

Oh, how wrong they were.

In March, 1993, I was in my small shared office in Joburg selling advertising for my guidebook. I couldn’t understand why no one else had come in that morning. It was in Kempton Park, not a particularly nice part of town, but I still decided to walk down the street to see what was going on.

I found a little grocer who was closing his store, at 10 a.m. in the morning! He told me it was THE election day, and that when the tally came in that evening, there would be blood on the streets, so laddy he said, you better get home.

Home was a hotel room in the luxurious Carlton in the middle of beautiful downtown Joburg. My wife wasn’t with me, but the hotel was offering a businessman’s special and that “armed guards will accompany your wife on her day’s shopping.”

So sequestered back in my room I watched SA TV. The election was the last all-white election called by the then President de Klerk asking for the electorate’s final permission to dissemble the final bits of the apartheid state – to prepare for the first true, democratic election of 1994.

Joburg was a ghost town. Everyone – like me – was watching TV in locked hotel rooms and boarded up homes. All the polls, headlined by America’s own “Gallup Poll in South Africa” cited continuously throughout the day, said de Klerk was going to be snubbed. The white electorate was not going to accept a New South Africa. Apartheid would prevail.

That night the results were in: 3 to 1 to support de Klerk’s dissembling of the old South Africa. The streets were quiet. There was no blood bath. It was eerily silent. I suppose the oppressed – if they were primed to revolt – were stunned and confused, perhaps disbelieving.

But it was true.

The next day at the office was the first day of new business for me. There was peace where all the white folks had expected chaos and oblivion. We closed our business shortly thereafter in South Africa. The white folks there just didn’t know what to do.

Back at home the American management of companies like South African Airways began frantically looking for new jobs, even while pretending that they were indispensable.

They weren’t.

The only indispensable person in my life time in South Africa was Nelson Mandela.
MADIBA 20

Would you like a zebra or a petunia?

February 10, 2010February 10, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

zeb flowers Or both? Animals are being frantically transported out of the Kenyan cut flower farms back into Amboseli National Park.. pretty much under the radar.

Wednesday, the Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS) began a massive relocation of nearly 7,000 animals into Amboseli National Park. KWS has issued no press reports on the move and there are growing suspicions that it may be haphazard and poorly managed.

According to Simon N’Donga of Nairobi’s FM Capital Radio, the animals are being trucked from the Great Lakes area back to Amboseli. Thousands of herbivores had fled Amboseli during the last dry spell, and this would have been a decent place for them to have fled.

It’s where Kenya’s cut flowers are grown for export.

Last August I watched dozens of zebra, wildebeest and giraffe lining up on the edge of the dangerous Nairobi/Mombasa highway, frantically trying to leave the areas south of Nairobi where the drought was serious. Similar reports came from the Nairobi/Arusha highway.

All headed to the petunias.

The rains have returned big time and most of the country’s wilderness areas are very healthy, if too soaked. Likely the animals would return on their own, eventually.

But there are growing complaints in Kenyan society of the costs of wild animals in your corn patch and elephants in your church. There are also concerns that tourists will abandon the country for Tanzania if the country’s national parks don’t put on their Sunday Best for the upcoming season.

Capital FM Radio (I believe one of Kenya’s best investigative news sources) quoted a KWS senior scientist, Charles Musyoki, justifying the lightning fast operation “to make sure that Amboseli as an eco-system does not collapse.”

Seven thousand kicking zebra and blarting wildebeest is a huge number of animals to move. We’re talking about thousands of trucks. And probably not well insulated or padded. Certainly not your everyday wild animal-moving truck.

Capital FM said that a single helicopter was being used to herd the animals into 18-wheelers. The journey to Amboseli from Naivasha can take about 12 hours by truck. (Note that the Maasai Mara is only about 3 hours away from this area.)

When asked where the funds were coming from, Musyoki suggested it was directly from the Ministry of Finance, Kenya’s Treasury Department.

“We are actually doing this in the interests of Kenyans because Amboseli is one of the key protected areas in this country that generates a lot of income for the public,” Musyoki said.

The last reliable figures out of Kenya were in 2006 before the political turbulence of the 2007 election. Tourism was then Kenya’s largest foreign exchange earner, generating about $803 million, followed closely by cut flowers (then tea and coffee).

One out of every three flowers purchased in France, the Netherlands and Belgium comes from Kenya.

Almost all Kenya’s cut flowers come from the great lakes region, the area from which the zebra and wildebeest are now being taken.

If you hate deer in your rose garden….

KWS said the project will cost about $12-13 million. That’s not very much for 7000 animals. Earlier this year, KWS was relocating elephants from the coast into Tsavo at a cost of about $14,000 per elephant.

Forgive my natural cynicism which may have impeded my careful analysis of this, but it’s happening so quickly!

Kenya needs the cut flower industry. Kenya and all of us wishing to save the planet need Amboseli. So get those beasties out of my flower patch quick?!

Amboseli is Kenya’s third-most visited park (after the Mara and Nakuru), but one of its most fragile. It is a very unusual giant soda lake sitting under mighty Mt. Kilimanjaro, pumped to life by underground rivers off Kili that create a series of swamps and wetlands.

The herbivore population of zebra and wildebeest eat good old crab grass, not lotus flowers or swamp grass. They have always moved in and out of the park with erratic rains, and they have never constituted as important a part of the ecosystem as they do in the Mara, for example, a great grassland park.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t important; I just wonder how advisable it is to begin to control natural animal migrations with 18-wheelers that normally haul iron pipes and helicopters that have a shaky safety record in Kenya.

Just doesn’t seem like a sustainable long-term, carefully constructed plan.

Want a deal at the kill?

February 9, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

So you’re ready to make a killing in East Africa? And I don’t mean lions.

The savvy investors are gathering like vultures and tiny predators at the kill. Next month in Berlin several deals may consummate at ITB, one of the two most important tourism conventions each year. It’s sort of the tourism calendar’s January and comes right after the World Economic Forum’s tourism competitive report is released.

Investors are usually from Europe, less often from America, and recently, China. They are less likely this time to come from South Africa, because South African tourism has been less effected by this downturn than East Africa.

When civilian and diplomatic workers are excised from U.S. travel, Africa is the area which has experienced the greatest growth last year (over 26%), and I’m presuming the bulk of this is to South Africa.

So while South Africans have played an important role in tourism investment in East Africa in the past, I don’t think that will be the case this time. They’ve got to tend the farm and the rains are good.

My ripe pickens are the property collections of &Beyond, Sarova, three or four pieces of the 6-piece Fairmont hotels, the Selous Safari Company (SSC) and some or all of Heritage. All of those except SSC could be managed into some stellar quick returns by the right team getting a fire sale price and then exploiting the current upturn.

&Beyond in East Africa is currently a financial sinkhole. It’s also the mostly luxurious and arguably the best-known consortium in East Africa. But it has complicated ownership in South Africa, has come to or is coming to the end of its tax exempt statuses, has invested heavily in its South African properties and none in East Africa, and the signs are all there: buy me!

&Beyond is a classic case of becoming too big too fast at just the wrong time. It will take some clever group to turn it around, but I think it’s possible.

A possible player is Geoff Kent’s Sanctuary Lodges, although it probably doesn’t have the capital required even in this depressed environment. It might also create a conflict with Sanctuary’s alter-ego personality to &Beyond. AND there is still a lot of bad blood over the litigation between the two companies over the & (the Ampersand used by both companies’ marketing).

Local interests, like Cheli & Peacock, could make a good fit, but C&P has expanded pretty quickly over the last two years and taking on something so big could sink the ship.

The irony with &Beyond is that it is so big and so good that it might have conceptualized itself right out of the East African market altogether. If South Africa itself weren’t doing so well, there might be South Africans like Colin Bell who would expand their experiments in East Africa by sweeping up &Beyond’s remains, but that looks unlikely this year at least.

Sarova has invested heavily in the last few years and upgraded some quiet little properties in the Mara and Nakuru, only to suffer the world economic collapse at the end of the business plan. Their properties are good, but the company is a neophyte in the industry with poor marketing. The rumor is that Asians (and not from Biashara street) likely from Hong Kong are looking hard.

The Chinese are the mystery players. Their heavy investment in Tanzania’s TAHI properties through one of their discarded oil company practioners went bad, and right now they continue sending lots of tourists but seem indifferent regarding investment. But the pressure for Chinese vacations is explosive. This just might be the fit.

Fairmont is the old duke trying to figure out what to do with his unused castles. Although a Canadian company, it was the team in Dubai who pushed for and orchestrated the purchase of the Lonrho properties, and they now know better than ever why Tiny Roland had such a hard time off-loading them in the first place.

The Norfolk is performing, and dreams persist with the Mt. Kenya Safari Club. But the Aberdare Country Club and The Ark have been taken off the Fairmont website, and the Mara Safari Club will be axed shortly.

I actually love these properties but I couldn’t advise anyone to buy them. The safari dynamic is changing quickly, and properties like these that rely on a road circuit rather than a flying circuit will become poorer and poorer performers. If anyone knows how to move the Aberdare Country Club lock-stock-and-barrel into Udzungwa National Park, they’ve got a winner!

But I have a feeling that the price might be so low that even local Kenyans might make the buy.

It would take an investor with great patience to offload the SSC from the long-time Tanzanian business family of the Dobies. It’s a great small set of properties which enjoyed a monopoly for years, but the area in and around Dar and the Selous has suddenly built way too much capacity. In ten years that could change. And it could be a steal if the Dobie family realizes it should return to its root business of transport and car sales in the exploding Dar market.

And Heritage, well that’s a mystery, a mixture of passion, local Kenyan ownership, and miserable returns. It’s too big, its attempt at a two-tier marketing level (kids/families and the older luxury market) just isn’t working and yet it continues to present a happy face. Its new website is dynamite. Reduced to its best performers I think it could be a really good company.

Individual holdings that may change include the unopened Chem-Chem in Tarangire, the new Kempinski Bilila in the Serengeti, Saruni in the Mara and certainly a couple properties up in Laikipia and beyond where the drought was so bad.

Potential buyers for these are very small investors who love Africa, and there are plenty of them.

It’s an exciting time if you love Africa, want to invest and think you know how to manage very unique and often disparate properties. As we say, we’re thundering out of the valley and the peaks look quite attractive not too far down the line!

Quick investment in East Africa?

February 8, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

There are incredible deals available for tourist investors in East Africa right now, but everyone is sitting on their hands waiting for a crucial report due out in the next couple weeks.

The world famous Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) ended several weeks ago with headliner Bill Gates announcing the “Decade of Vaccines” to help Africa.

But the East Africa tourism industry is still biting its nails waiting for WEF’s 2010 report on the risks of investing in their economies.

WEF considers there are about 130 countries in the world where tourism investment shows the greatest potential. The East African countries have always been in this list, mainly because the return on investment is so high in East Africa… when things go well.

When things don’t go well, well, it’s a bottomless well. We call it “peaks and valleys,” and while that dynamic is unlikely to attract George Soros, it’s great for small investors who gauge the entry and exit points correctly.

This annual report has been a deal-breaker in East Africa in years past. The large Fairmont Hotels chain made their historic investment in Kenya after a positive report. Fickle Sheraton Hotels has been known to buy and sell its management contracts days after the report was issued.

And smaller investors, often from South Africa, have plunged in and out in Spring time right after the reports were issued.

The tourism industry in East Africa is seriously depressed right now. No way but up? This is a situation ripe for the bottom feeder investor, someone with some ready cash to sweep in and collect near bankrupt properties.

Kenya has always been WEF’s best bet in East Africa, except in 2008 which followed the incredibly turbulence of the 2007 elections. But it quickly regained its position as one notch above Tanzania for 2009 (97 in the list; Tanzania was 98; Uganda was 111).

WEF looks to the investment environment more than the investment potential. It’s up to the investor to gauge the potential. But what WEF has consistently said for more than two decades (except for 2008) is that Kenya provides the best investment environment in East Africa.

Part of that might be that Kenya has the largest industry, and also the most accessible. Twice as many tourists visit Kenya annually as Tanzania, but an average week’s trip in Tanzania costs $1600; in Kenya it’s only $800.

(Those figures, by the way, are NOT what the consumer pays, rather the revenue collected locally.)

The difference in large part has to do with Kenya’s large beach vacation industry: half of Kenya’s tourists never leave the beach, and that’s a much less expensive routine.

Nevertheless, Tanzania’s prices have increased much more quickly than Kenya’s in the last three years. That figure alone will discourage an investor who much prefers a gradual but sustainable price increase over the mid-term.

So presuming that both Kenya and Tanzania will hold their own in the 2010 report, what companies in East Africa will investors be looking at?

I’ll discuss that in tomorrow’s blog.

Ivory Jubilee!

February 5, 2010February 5, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Officials from CITES were in Dar last week to inventory the ivory stockpile that Tanzania wants to sell. It looks more and more likely that Tanzania will prevail in Doha next month.

The only hope that the momentum for the sale will be derailed is with Tanzania’s tourism minister, Ms. Sharmsa Mwangung.

It’s not that Ms. Mwangung is against the sale, quite to the contrary. But her recent remarks to local journalists might just reveal Tanzania’s true reason for wanting the sale, and it isn’t a nice one.

In one of the most remarkably ridiculous arguments any conservation official could make for selling confiscated ivory Ms. Mwangung, told the East African, that Kenya’s argument that a one-off sale of Tanzania’s stockpile of ivory would increase poaching “does not hold water, because the number of elephants in the country has increased.”

That mind twister defies gravity.. There it goes!

Now being generous and retrieving that argument from the stratosphere before it finds a black hole, it could be that what she means is that poaching is OK for Tanzania, because they’ve got more elephants than they need. So that it doesn’t really matter if poaching increases, because the elephant population is growing fast enough to sustain the illegal culling.

Well… let’s try to tackle that one.

First, she’s right about the numbers. The elephant population has increased considerably in East Africa over the last decade. It’s still below what it was before the rampant poaching of the 1970s, but most would agree it’s pretty healthy. That doesn’t mean it’s too many, though.

But second, she’s wrong about the conclusion. Doing anything to encourage poaching – of anything, not just elephants – is madness. You’re basically telling criminals to get on with it! Support your country! Get us more ivory, there’s plenty of elephants!

Third, she’s ignoring the region as a whole for the selfish interests of Tanzania. That’s bad but understandable, (since it’s what South Africa does practically every day, anyway). Kenya is seriously going to suffer major increased poaching if Tanzania encourages the market.

This is mainly because Kenya shares a 500-mile long porous border with Somali and Ethiopia, easy conduits for the market of illegal ivory.

If Tanzania truly felt it had too many elephants, then like South Africa, Tanzania would officially cull elephants and argue for the sale of that specifically culled stockpiled ivory, not the sale of criminals’ successes!

But unfortunately perhaps, I doubt Ms. Mwangung is really that mercenary. It’s really probably much simpler.

Tanzania’s tourism minister has absolutely no idea what does or doesn’t cause poaching, and similarly, she probably has only one idea of why they should sell ivory: to get money.

And we can take it pretty easily from there. To get money for what? Whether it is gold in Mwanza or unnecessary radar equipment for the capital or unused trash trucks in Dar, large blocks of money tend to never show up in Tanzania where they’re supposed to.

So if we can just have Ms. Mwangung giving a few more press conferences, there’s hope!

Africa Answerman

Sharing the beauty of African life today. Adventurer. Conservationist. Owner of Explorers World Travel.

Month: February 2010