Charity Begins At Home 2014

December 29, 2014December 29, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 7 Comments

Charity begins at home: In my estimation that means creating good government.

At this time of the year I get numerous requests from my generous and truly sensitive clients regarding charities I recommend in Africa. They are often surprised.

There are two reasons I discourage charity, whether to Africa or anywhere.

First, especially in Africa, charity is often a massive con game. There are many excellent not-for-profits doing heart warming work in Africa, but unfortunately there are many, many more that cause more problems than they solve.

Second, charity by its very nature coopts the responsibility that any reasonably moral society should take on its own. So by your act of charity, you are perpetuating the immoralities of your society.

The second reason is a contentious one, I concede. So for those who disagree with me on moral terms, my basic message changes to “stick close to home.” Charity is meaningless if wasted. All it does it make you feel good while possibly doing serious damage.

You must be able to do due diligence before giving, and you must be able to follow up to assess performance. Accountability is much easier the closer to home you get, and of course by “closer to home” I don’t mean simply proximity. You must be familiar with the situation, and you’re much likelier to be familiar with something near to you, geographically, socially and culturally.

Besides, we are rapidly approaching the time when poverty caused disadvantages like illiteracy are greater in parts of America than in the developed world.

I do due diligence in Africa. Good African charities are extremely few in number. They include Catholic Relief, World Vision and Médecins Sans Frontières.

Donations to many other large Africa involved organizations like National Geographic or the World Wildlife Fund are nearly useless. Their projects have become so massive they rely on their endowments to survive, diluting any individual giving to the point of meaninglessness.

Donations to smaller often locally created charities in specific countries, or to smaller church-based foundations, are usually destructive and anti-developmental. They are so mission focused that while they may indeed be helping a small group of people, more often than not they conflict with the greater social and governmental policies of the area.

One of America’s largest youth-based volunteer organizations, DoSomething.org, reports 11 facts about current America that are likely more egregious than in many parts of the developing world.

Consider this. Morning Edition reported today that in clustered communities of 10,000 children in Philadelphia there were only 33 books.

Literacy is difficult to specify, because different parts of the world define it so differently. UNICEF is the best mediator of literacy statistics worldwide, but the problem is that UNICEF does not generate literacy metrics for the United States. But clearly, literacy in that Philadelphia community is not good.

According to UNICEF, Kenya’s literary rate is just above 72%.

Why, then, would you send books to Kenya and not to distressed Philadelphia?

The conundrum of wanting to do good but being unable to do so will only be remedied when we create a society with a government that is trusted and moral.

That should be your greatest goal of the new year, not getting a tax credit.

Christmas Week – No Winter

December 26, 2014December 26, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Galena Main Street usually covered with snow by now.

I met an Australian family in the elevator of a mall in Chicago on Christmas Eve as we were all frantically shopping the sales.

They were so disappointed that there was no snow! In a way, so are we, but the mild temperatures and lack of precipitation makes traveling during the holiday so much easier…

The week ends with more feasting, as Friday is “leftovers day.” The Christmas feast usually includes turkey and “trimmings.” The trimmings change from family to family but in ours include sweet potatoes (yams), green beans, oyster stuffing, cranberry cornbread, cranberry compote, heaps of white mashed potatoes, lots of turkey gravy and my favorite, rutabaga!

The feast ends with lots of different pies: pumpkin is traditional but in my family the younger generation loves apple, raisin, pecan and cranberry/walnut as well.

Then, when everyone is totally stuffed, out come the holiday cookies!

So the weekend is spent sleeping off the feasts!

Christmas Week – Xmas Eve Shopping

December 25, 2014December 24, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

For our Christmas week holiday we travel into Chicago for a big family gathering. Many of the normal display windows of the city’s large stores are transformed into holiday scenes like the one photographed above by Chicago blogger Caroline Siede… I enjoy last-minute shopping on Michigan Ave, because as the clock tickets towards the end of Christmas Eve Day, the sales get bigger and bigger!

Christmas Week – Is Warm Good?

December 23, 2014December 23, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Christmas week continues to be unusually mild and that’s good for many of the animals found here. Rabbits, for example, don’t hibernate like bears, and large numbers of them die over the winter. In an unusually warm time like this, many more will survive. That could mean a spring with a lot of jumping cottontails! (caution, of course: Putting the environment out of balance is tricky. With so much more food, coyote populations may also explode and that in turn could reduce deer populations.)

Christmas Week – Green December

December 22, 2014December 21, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Today begins the Christmas Week, and for all of late fall and early winter we’ve had unusually mild temperatures and little or no snow. The holiday week actually began this weekend with our little town of Galena brightened at night with “luminaries” or candles in paper boxes… Few of us can remember the last green Christmas, yet the scene below of country near my home suggests that will be the case this year!

Africans Praise Cuban Initiative

December 19, 2014December 19, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

South Africans echoed most of the continent yesterday in praising Obama for normalizing relations with Cuba.

In my lifetime Cuba has been active in Africa and seems to have chosen the right sides to support. The current Tanzanian regime, the current South African and Angola regimes, were all receiving aid and support from Cuba when they were considered outcasts by much of the rest of the world.

It was no surprise, then, that the current South African government issued a very positive statement of support for the Obama initiative.

Cuba sent cash, arranged and sometimes housed African revolutionaries and after most independent movements were over, hugely supported public health initiatives.

It seems odd now to hear our own press and officials speak of how small and poor Cuba is. I don’t doubt it. It’s just that few “small and poor” governments figure prominently in aiding and assisting other (possibly even smaller) poor governments.

Cuba’s medical reputation is considered stellar by most African governments. It was among the first to offer AIDS assistance and recently help in fighting the ebola epidemic.

Personally I remember walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Cubans in the 1980s in … you’d never guess, Cape Verde.

In the 1980s South Africa was a strict apartheid regime and Cuba was still fiery and revolutionary. Because the two diametrically opposed regimes were at the very fringes of their ideology, most of the world kept them both at arm’s length.

Cuba was sending money and military equipment to revolutionary movements in places like Angola and The Congo. South Africa was trying desperately to break the United Nations sanctions that were crippling it because of its apartheid policy.

So the two crossed paths, every night about 1 a.m., in the Cape Verde Islands, just off the coast of west Africa.

South African Airways was banned from landing in any other African country, and in those days long-range aircraft couldn’t make the U.S. without refueling. Cape Verde was and is one of the smallest and least developed countries in Africa. South Africa bought them, built them an airport and used it every night to refuel on its way to the U.S.

One airline per day could hardly support the South African investment, so with tacit approval from the communist hating, fascist regime in South Africa, Cape Verde also allowed the airline from Cuba to land to refuel its missions of revolution and contraband into the continent!

And to economize, it only made sense to work as little as possible. So both airlines converged at right around the same time.

And all us passengers got out and stretched our weary legs on these very long flights by walking together in circles in a gym that seconded as the Cape Verde terminal!

I wouldn’t be surprised if I was rubbing shoulders with African revolutionaries, and more to the fantastic point, if some of South Africa’s horrible apartheid officials were doing the same!

So go the ironies of the world and the vagaries of excessive ideologies.

Now, finally, some of this nonsense is coming to an end.

Free Kenyan Collapse?

December 18, 2014December 18, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

Kenya democracy is on the brink of collapse, because … of democracy.

Facing imprisonment if the bill in Parliament he is criticizing is passed, popular Kenyan journalist, Kwame Owino, wrote today that Kenyan society “is bound for a democratic recession, with the possibility that its constitutional journey will come to an abrupt and painful stop.”

At immediate issue is a Security Bill that is so draconian if passed that if will effectively stop debate in the Parliament that passes it.

This afternoon Parliament grew so disruptive that fist-fights broke out, media cameras were smashed and the police ordered to surround the building.

“The changes are retrogressive and their cumulative effect could return Kenya to the police state of the 1980s and 90s and reverse gains made in protecting human rights,” Amnesty International Regional Director told local media.

Human Rights Watch said the Security Bill would “limit the rights of arrested and accused people, and restrict freedoms of expression and assembly.”

The bill’s details include holding “terrorism suspects … without charge for 360 days, compel landlords to provide information about their tenants and punish media organisations for printing material that is “likely to cause fear or alarm”.”

This is not a new development. There are already a series of horrible new laws, particularly against free speech, that this Parliament has already passed.

Bloggers around the country are being brought in by police for “impolite” or “disrespectful” remarks.

One of Kenya’s most political and followed tweeters, Robert Alai, was yesterday released on $2,000 bail and will be tried for having tweeted that Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta is an “adolescent president”.

Here’s the thing:

The reason that Kenyatta had the new Security Law introduced (or more correctly, many draconian amendments to the proposed law) is because of terrorism, mostly in Kenya’s far northeastern provinces which are adjacent Somalia.

Kenya with the aid and abetting probably of America invaded Somalia in October, 2011, and remains as an occupier. Somalia has achieved some peace and stability for the first time in more than a generation as a result, but Kenya has suffered terrorist retribution.

Kenyatta’s slow but methodical increase in security measures has seemed to work in stemming what had been a growing increase in terrorism.

Terror attacks in Nairobi, for example, happening last year at nearly one per month, are now rare.

But the cost of this has truly been the democratic rights protected by its fabulous young constitution.

It’s fair to surmise that every new tourist who comes to Kenya because of its new security sends an additional Robert Alai to jail… if the new laws work.

I don’t think they will. They didn’t in America. The Patriot Act did little to protect us. Under the Patriot Act a bevy of new terrorist attempts came to the surface, including the shoe-boot and underwear-pants bombers, the cargo planes and much more.

Not until we backed off draconian measures like the Patriot Act, began ending the wars of retribution in Afghanistan and Iraq, did our own security truly improve. That is if you exclude Sandy-Hook, the Black Knight bombing and maverick terrorists like the Boston Marathon bombers.

My point exactly. What is security? Three thousand people and the exponent of their families were seriously hurt by 9/11. How many in the exponential pool of marathon runners, parents of grade schoolers and movie goers have been hurt by domestic terrorism?

There is real equivalence, here, and the Patriot Act probably did more to increase this aggregate terrorism than it did to reduce it.

Once a power center like a government gets it into their noggin that they should fight terrorism, they begin to think they should fight until they win.

That is the recipe for certain defeat. Terrorism cannot be defeated. It has existed forever and it will forever exist.

European nations are the best examples of how to live with and manage terrorism.

America after 9/11 … and now Kenya, are about the worst examples out there.

Shape up, Kenya. There’s still time.

Pretender or Defender

December 16, 2014December 16, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Once upon a time going on safari meant two weeks in a Landrover TDI110 “Defender” literally in the bush: no roads.

You found trails, usually elephant paths, and plowed your Landrover TDI110 “Defender” into the wild.

With roads and government tariffs and mercantile competition and especially, with tourists who are terrified that traveling off roads is what al-Qaeda wants you to, who need room for 30 pounds of cosmetics and hair shampoos, who schedule their spinal epidurals depending on air fare sales, who are allergic to Wonder Bread and need additional room to bring their sleep amnea machine and additional plugs in the cab for their kids’ Xbox …

… the “Defender” has died. “Long live the memory of the Defender!”

I still manage to slip real bush into some of my safaris, although I often play it by ear because many of my clients today would have a heart attack if a little cricket jumped on them.

But in the main I don’t. Nobody does. You don’t fork out ten grand to feel like you’re riding a jackhammer.

Once upon a time, we didn’t mind, but no one would tell you that the Defender was comfortable – it wasn’t. But that was a machine! You could drive it up a boulder. (Coming down was the problem.)

The Defender was expensive. Being so tough meant that we constantly challenged it, and so often man the ultimate defeated the machine and the machine had to be fixed. That was difficult: it was soooo expensive.

Even 20 years ago a simple universal joint exceeded most safari’s net costs. And it was hard to explain to clients that it was noble that, in fact, they couldn’t move for a while.

I mark that as the point at which Landrovers began to decline in popularity. It was about 20 years ago and spare parts were so expensive that clients would often get into the car and then not be able to go on safari because it wouldn’t start.

So in comes the New World, that is the new world of automotive mercantilism which in English is “Toyota.”

And shortly after “Toyota” came “Nissan.”

And Defender was overwhelmed by Pretender. They were so cheap. And besides, there were now roads, and the Toyota stretchie does pretty well on roads and it can easily be modified to carry cosmetic cases.

Modified is the key. Yes the Defender could be modified, but it was hard work, because it was thick metal. Toyota’s and Nissan’s metal is a tad better than aluminum foil, and there are a myriad of things you can do with such pliable material: origamy, for instance.

You can also add extra seats and stretch the sides and stretch the length, ergo the nickname “Stretchie.”

You can cut out the roof then put it back on extenders so people can stand up and pretend they’re on the subway.

You can have all sorts of kinds of seats: pillows and cushions and even ones that warm themselves.

Windows is a problem we’re working on. When a vehicle is changed so much, the preformed window sometimes doesn’t work so well, but not to worry, stand up and look out.

So what has happened to my Defender?

Landrover is not to be displaced from modern times. It began after World War II, a copy of a military jeep, which farmers needed in Wales to defend themselves against Northumberlers. Ever since that courageous moment of birth, Landrover has evolved with the times.

So today, you’ll find these legendary machines mostly in mall parking lots, because it is today what the Landrover does best, defend its owners against obscurity.

On safari, we’ll make do with the “Pretender.” Bring on that Lacombe! We can handle it!

But ode to awesome, what a machine that was!

Boom or Bust?

December 15, 2014December 15, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

An extremely dangerous economic situation portends tremendous global unrest, especially in Africa.

Obama’s energy policy has put American front and center, and while Americans are reaping enormous relief from falling energy prices the developing world is poised to suffer considerably.

That may seem counter intuitive, because energy is needed by everyone. It isn’t only Americans that are benefitting from lower energy prices, is it?

Yes.

Europe, India and China have unique problems restricting them from benefiting from increased global oil and gas production.

Developing countries in Africa have an even more unique situation making it even worse for them:

African governments have long subsidized their citizens’ energy prices, especially gas and oil, because without natural resources and without refineries, a gallon of gas would just be out of the reach of even the most successful truck driver/owner.

So a gallon of petrol in developing Africa has cost $5 to $6/gallon for the last 20 years, regardless of the actual cost to the governments holding that price for their consumers.

But, you may ask, the governments win or lose depending upon the price, right?

Of course, but over the last decade an unexpected factor entered the equation. New technologies allowed a boom in oil and gas exploration in Africa. Reserves previously too difficult to get were unleashed.

Previously considered resource poor, countries like Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania now consider themselves resource rich.

Oil is being pumped from the deserts of Kenya like never before. The government has benefitted much more from the taxes on these natural resource extractions than it has expended to keep the consumer price of oil and gas at stable levels. A net positive increase.

America is unwittingly changing that.

Kenya was ecstatic when 600 million barrels of oil reserves were established in its northern deserts, and this year it celebrated a remarkable 3 million barrels of extraction.

But …

… Texas is right now extracting 3 million barrels of oil every day. This year Texas produced the entire estimated Kenyan reserves in 9 months.

America’s energy boom has crushed world oil prices. Kenya’s tax revenues are plummeting. That’s not even the worst part of the story.

Kenya’s main oil exploration company, Tullow Oil Plc of Britain, announced this week that it was massively reducing its exploration in Kenya. This was a polite way of saying, Goodbye Folks.

The net result of the loss of new revenue over the last ten years against the benefit of reduced energy prices worldwide is a net loss for Kenya and virtually every developing African nation that had recently discovered new oil and gas reserves.

This is a perfect illustration of the gap we talk about so often between the rich and poor. If the rich and poor are equated, and by that I mean subject to identical economic laws and their results, then they benefit or suffer by the same percentages.

If a big society like America grows by 6% annually and a small country like Kenya grows by 6% annually, the difference between them gets bigger and bigger.

When that dynamic is accelerated because the bigger society, America, benefits from a global price reduction in energy (because the net result of cheaper asset value is offset by even greater increases in production), while the smaller society, Kenya, suffers enormously … the gulf widens even more.

No one had predicted the size of the energy boom in America. It’s absolutely unbelievable, and it has widened the gap between America and the rest of the world in near exponential ways.

This is a terrible conundrum that seems out of control. The answer can’t possibly be to restrict production? Isn’t there something inherently correct to presume that if things cost less we’ll all be better off?

If by “we” you mean Americans, absolutely! If the “we” includes Africans, absolutely not. Africans will get poorer more quickly than they ever expected, and I think that will set off another and much greater Arab Spring.

There is a solution to this. It’s a nasty term called redistribution of wealth. It’s even more nasty than Republicans in Congress believe, because I’m not just talking about recalibrating America’s tax code.

This one is about the whole wide world.

Ivory Ends

December 12, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Only ivory can be so minutely and intricately carved yet remain so tough and durable.

There may still be too many elephants in East Africa, but Tanzania is acting so irresponsibly with regards to increased poaching that the scales may soon tip.

This week a group of environmental organizations led by the EIA petitioned the U.S. government to withhold aid from Tanzania until elephant poaching abates.

It’s unlikely that the appeal directed to Secretary of State John Kerry will be seriously considered. Tanzania is on the front-line of the Obama administration’s war on terror, and the “elephant problem” is considered incapable of trumping “homeland security.”

The flaw in this reasoning is simplistic and ultimately fails because our homeland security policy with regards to terrorism is failing.

The explanations for Tanzania’s “elephant problem” also reveal why the country is so incredibly corrupt, why it has grossly mismanaged its treasure of natural resources including oil and gold, and why its powerful oligarchy can with abandon relocate thousands of Maasai to appease a few Dubai hunters.

Recently Dick Cheney agreed that enhanced interrogation techniques were a means to an end and were justified.

Facilitating if not outright supporting Tanzania’s corruption is also a means to an end that the Obama administration apparently feels is distant enough from public understanding to be acceptable.

I’ve often written that the elephant poaching problem is serious but exaggerated. Increasingly this year, though, the situation has grown more troubling. I hesitate to cite specific numbers, because they’re all over the place.

The EIA report looks sound to me, but I’m subsequently infuriated that they introduce it on their website with an ITN video that grossly misstates acceptable numbers. I just wish for once that these good environmental organizations working to save elephants would be more scientific and less evangelical.

London’s Guardian newspaper is probably the best resource in the world for accurate news on current elephant poaching. The Guardian contends that “Chinese demand for ivory is devastating Tanzania’s elephant.”

I agree, but what is missing from the hysteria is the fact that the growing development of Africa has enormously constrained elephant habitat in just the last ten years: not just national parks, but more importantly the vast areas peripheral to the national parks as well as the quasi protected corridors that connect distantly separately massive wildernesses to allow for elephant migrations.

These “corridors” and “donut edges” are often private land or land in trust, and demands for their development have grown exponentially. Farming, mining as well as simple village growth now impinge on what was only a short time ago elephant bush.

The tension between the needs of a growing and developing human population with the enormous amounts of land required for wild elephants is at the highest ever.

Until that tension is squarely addressed, corrupt officials will play god. Local communities engaged in ivory poaching will be given a pass, since the government is inept or incapable of giving them work, instead.

This is the real problem. Distant foreigners’ hearts may break when pictures of poached elephants appear on their TV screen. The world should continue to encourage China’s incremental movements to change a thousand-year culture that covets ivory as no other collectable.

And as the Guardian brilliantly pointed out, the disconnect between westerners’ campaign to stop endangered animal poaching and their allowance that these same animals may be legally hunted and harvested, has to be closed.

So the problem is not as simple as hysteria presents, but the problem is getting worse. It may not be the extinction of elephants that looms any more likely than the end of enough larger wild areas to support families of such a large wild animal in East Africa.

For the first time in my opinion, that is a plausible claim. Whatever the remedies, they certainly do not include ends-justify-means tests of what’s right to do.

Fighting Terror with Terror

December 11, 2014December 11, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Like father, like son: Kenya has now joined its military father, the U.S., using illegal force in failed attempts to fight terrorism.

The Senate committee report released Tuesday is a shame on America that will follow our empire to its ultimate grave, but the extra-judicial killings of 500 detainees by Kenyan security forces is simply mindless.

My novel, Chasm Gorge, explains how a terrorist in Kenya succeeds by provoking America to react with excessive force. That’s exactly what’s happening in Kenya today.

And it’s fair to conclude that because America did it, Kenya does now. America planned, financed and helped managed the Kenyan invasion of Somalia.

The Kenyans are simply doing what their teachers did: Actions speak louder than words.

Yet there are words, too:

The Kenyan operatives told London’s Guardian that “they have received training and intelligence from Britain.” So add Britain to this terrible mix.

Why is this happening? Why did America torture? The evidence is strong that torture doesn’t produce useful intelligence, and even if it did it would be immoral.

Hypothetical cases suggesting that torture could reveal and thereby prevent an ultimate apocalyptic attack are ludicrous. Nothing yet in the human arsenal is more apocalyptic than the immorality of torture.

In today’s world and any future hi-tech world I can imagine, torture does nothing but escalate a conflict. So why pursue such inane policies?

The answer is the same as to why the Kenyans murder their detainees.

Revenge. It’s that simple. Revenge is short-term relief. It’s old testament equalizing. There is, in fact, some logic to revenge if a conflict is considered irresolvable, when compromise at any point is impossible. In this case only one side wins, and revenge is a move on the chess board that allows no draws.

If we truly believe certain conflicts are irresolvable, then as righties for years have argued, pull out all the stops! Let the nukes fall!

Fortunately, we’ve retain enough sanity to avoid doing this yet, which reveals the deeper truth that we are prepared to compromise, but that flies in the logic of revenge.

That’s the devilish duality of the American psyche: whatever our education and intellect tells us battles with our machismo. Our ego is deadly.

Many Americans are beginning to realize this. Terrorism wins when the terrorized over-react in fear, essentially defeating themselves.

When the U.S. spends trillions of dollars in retaliation to 9/11, it loses the battle of 9/11. When in reply to the several thousand soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan battles the U.S. kills and displaces fractions of millions of people, it loses the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We, and now Kenya, are doing exactly what the terrorists want us to do.

And so, we’re both losing. For gods’ sakes, Kenya, learn from your failed teacher.

Fat Children Starving

December 9, 2014December 9, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Comedy conveys reality to Americans today better than straight facts, and last Friday’s ‘The Daily Show’ masterfully presented the real Africa.

Jon Stewart introduced his new correspondent from South Africa, Trevor Noah, who conveyed to Americans a lot more successfully than I and dozens of other bloggers have:

(1) Eric Garner and Michael Brown demonstrate more police brutality in America than in South Africa.

Moreover and more importantly, police brutality in South Africa was once much worse and is now much better, and this is not the case in America.

Noah pointed out that police brutality in South Africa was a construct of apartheid, and that when apartheid ended this brutality began to reverse.

In America, where there’s never been apartheid as such, brutality has remained high if not increased.

(2) There is more ebola in America than South Africa.

True and undeniable, but no matter how many times we say this it’s forgotten until carried in a comedy routine!

Noah said his friends warned him against going to America for fear of contracting ebola, and he replied “just because they had a few cases of ebola there [America] doesn’t mean we should cut off travel, there.”

(3) Americans believe they can “save Africa” by small charity donations. Noah remarked, “for just five cents a day.”

This sarcasm is powerful stuff. It reveals the ignominy of American charities and the naivete of American donors in the much fuller arguments that I and many others have made for years about the mistake of so much American charity.

(4) Americans think almost exclusively that Africa is a vacation destination for big game safaris. While Africans absolutely don’t, of course.

Noah then presented a game, “Spot the Africa” which was phenomenal.

A series of two paneled photographs came up multiple times contrasting Africa with America, and as you can imagine, the horrible ones were America.

This wasn’t just nitpicking. It was real.

Stewart then asked Noah, “You aren’t saying that things in America are worse than in Africa?”

And Noah replies, “No, I’m not saying that, you guys are saying that.”

I’m one of those guys.

And Noah ended with a brilliant observation that knits the reality of sarcasm to the troubled conundrum of American life:

“You know what African mothers warn their children, about, Jon? Be grateful for what you’ve got, because there are fat children starving in Mississippi.”

Lion Realities

December 8, 2014December 8, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Excellent photo by Rich Mattas on my March Great Migration Safari.

Never ‘in my life’ would I have expected to be concerned about declining lion populations in Africa, but despite grossly misunderstood and badly used statistics, they are definitely in decline.

I always thought of lions, I suppose, like kitty cats: They’re ubiquitous! In fact, they are more of them than my birder friends think there should be, and where I live feral cats likely outnumber deer.

At the top of the food chain, what could possibly threaten lion?

The framing of my question reveals the mistaken notion of trying to figure out what’s happening to a wild animal strictly by what’s happening in the wild.

What threatens lions is development: people, roads, buildings, dams … all the things that make for a modern world.

Development impinges on lions directly, but by also constricting the freedom and growth of lion food – other animals – it’s a doubly whammy.

I’m astounded by the inability of research organizations to get a firm number on lion declines in Africa. It ranges from popular charities like NatGeo’s low balling to many others suggesting twice the number. Either way it’s a serious, rapid decline, but why no consensus on actual numbers?

The best researchers, like Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota, refuse to deal with the issue in the aggregate, assuring me that compiling trusted aggregate numbers is too difficult.

LionAlert was my guide for many years, but they’ve been unable to make a prediction beyond the 35,000 they published for 2012.

NatGeo among many other organizations is appealing to your pocketbook to fund their missions to stem the decline. It’s a waste of money.

Although the actual numbers in decline might not be known, the reasons are.

Craig Packer’s many scholarly articles and popular publications sum it all: His 2004 study in Ngorongoro started the news that lions were in serious decline, building on an earlier 1996 study about how lions were growing increasingly vulnerable to viruses.

By 2005 Packer had the lions in the Serengeti well understood, and it’s really on the basis of this detailed although localized research that I think we can generalize to the continent as a whole.

Subsequent reports and studies would confirm that serious human/animal conflict was the driver of decline, not just building roads.

By 2009 researchers were no longer reticent about blaming the Maasai’s poisoning of lion as a major contribution to decline in East Africa.

Don’t put too much emphasis on that, though, because it’s really all a part of the same problem. Lion attacking livestock occurs not simply because lion have decided it’s easier than pulling down a wildebeest.

It’s as much because there are fewer wildebeest and the lion’s range is declining because of overall human spread.

Maasai poisoning lion is identical to Montana farmers poisoning wolves.

This decline will not stop by contributing to NatGeo, and once again I’m infuriated by so-called conservation organizations driving their general fund with appeals of imminent catastrophe that they claim to know how to stop.

Much better to support the more difficult-to-understand but lasting attempt by Kenya to list lions as an endangered species.

That was set back this summer when efforts to do so were curtailed, in this case mostly by NRA-driven hunting groups that would be most effected immediately. As a result, South Africa – a powerhouse in determining African conservation policy but also one of the last easiest places to arrange a lion hunt – declined to support the listing.

But Kenya battles on and so should we. I can’t suggest that human development be held hostage to protecting lions. But I can definitely tell hunters to go take a walk.

Broken or Manipulated?

December 5, 2014December 5, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Justice, fairness, equality – “legally” lost today around the world. Uhuru Kenyatta, Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo are today uncharged, and they should not be. What’s wrong?

Uhuru Kenyatta, the President of Kenya, was indicted for crimes against humanity by the World Court more than a year ago. Today the chief prosecutor dropped all charges.

Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo are white police officers who exceeded their professional protocols while apprehending unarmed black men and killed their victims, but both were released of any charges by local grand juries.

All of this is legal and lawful.

And wrong.

The debating if bickering as to why these major miscarriages of justice occurred will go on for years and ultimately it will be concluded — exactly as it’s understood at this very moment — that modern systems of justice are easily manipulated by those in power.

In Kenyatta’s case, the prosecutor issued a statement blaming the Kenyan government for gross intimidation of witnesses and refusal to cooperate in the search for evidence.

The white police officers were exonerated because of prosecutors’ unusual granular involvements in the deliberations, and law that has become badly interpreted to vindicate virtually anything that a police officer does.

All three men are most likely guilty of the crimes for which they had been considered or in the case of Kenyatta, charged. Without a completed prosecutorial investigation, this certainty will never exist, of course, so we’re forced to speculate if justice was served.

If any of them is truly not guilty, that too will never be known, now. In the public mind it grows more and more impossible that they are innocent.

So justice, whatever it really is, will never exist in these cases.

The only valuable outcome I see is the fact that the world is fast recognizing that these three men are but representatives of a much larger community of possible criminals who escape justice by the manipulation of those in power.

And that power, even in democracies, is apparently absolute.

Many, particularly in Kenya but also here at home, argue that regardless of whether justice was served or not, the outcome is correct.

This is to say that justice is not always the right outcome.

Many, many Kenyans believe that the stability that Kenyatta seems to have achieved among Kenya’s brutally opposed ethnic groups, was worth a couple hundred thousand displaced persons and a thousand deaths.

The argument is that in the absence of Kenyatta’s management of violence following the disputed 2006/7 election that Kenya would have become a failed state mired in unthinkable if barbaric horrors not unlike the situation in Nigeria’s Biafra in the 1960s.

Similarly, Americans believe that police officers can break the law in order to enforce it, provided the overall outcome is a more lawful society.

I disagree. Justice and injustice are mutually exclusive. Manifesting justice does not beget injustice.

There is nothing inherently weakened in the concept of justice if the powerful who find themselves its guardians are themselves punished for injustice. In fact, it strengthens not weakens justice.

No, the explanation is not found in arguments that verge on hyperbole. The explanation is found in the larger masses of society, who are today apathetic or placated if fooled.

There is too little moral indignation than there should be among the societies where these injustices take place, and the powerful recognize this and so take advantage of it.

Justice is not something that was delivered to us by men in wigs 300 years ago, or in the case of Kenya, a convoluted global justice system in its initial stages of infancy.

Justice is there for the taking.

But today not enough people want it.

Africa Answerman

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

Month: December 2014

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