Poof! Thar She Goes!

June 11, 2015June 11, 2015 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

No, do not believe that the elephant population in Tanzania has declined 60% in 5 years. Read the science not the headlines.

A couple weeks ago the Paul Allen Foundation and the Frankfurt Zoological Society turned over their elephant census numbers to the Tanzanian government.

The Tanzanian Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism then held a press conference to announced the results:

A total head count of just over 40,000 elephant. Actually I had to add up his numbers which he released piecemeal, but not even clever Tanzanian politicians can alter arithmetic.

The last census, also conducted in part by the Frankfurt Zoological Society, put the country’s 2009 elephant population at around 110,000.

A 60% decline.

Some of the more sexy conservation organizations like NatGeo reacted like a London Daily Mail:

“100,000 elephants killed” NatGeo reported in 72-pica type (or its relative equivalent in my 13″ CRS).

Still believing that some NatGeo products are better than the “Alaskan State Troopers,” a few reputable news media like Britain’s Guardian echoed the “catastrophe.”

The Washington Post cited the press conference as proof of a “catastrophic decline.” (This one really bothers me.)

Moving a tad closer to the truth, some better organizations were more measured:

The Wildlife Conservation Society in its ‘Response to … Elephant Census’ first noted the hefty increase in elephant numbers in the north of the country before three paragraphs down reporting the numbers in Ruaha, which is the component that brought the overall census numbers so low.

The Frankfurt Zoological Society, the lead organization for almost all wildlife conservation in Tanzania, was equally measured in reporting the results.

Like WCS it noted the success with elephant populations in the north before reporting the dire figures but further qualified them by suggesting there was hard evidence from the “carcass ratio” in The Selous that indicated “unnaturally high mortality“ not necessarily related to poaching.

Oooooo….

“Government, Wildlife Experts and Conservationist [are] baffled by the sudden disappearance of more than 12,000 large elephants from Southern Tanzania even though they were neither poached nor died,” reported the Arusha Times.

Oh, my goodness, it’s Babu at work. This is getting spooky isn’t it?

Here’s what’s happening, folks.

These elephant statistic are at long last some of the most reliable numbers ever obtained in elephant counting. I have often written about how confused and contradictory elephant censuses have been.

Many other more credential organizations have, too.

Maybe now, thanks to the Paul Allen Foundation, we’ll start getting it right.

It was Allen’s $900,000 which paid for this census, and it was the most exact, most scientific census of African elephants north of the Zambezi ever done.

But there are 2 major problems with concluding “a catastrophic decline” from the first set of reliable numbers we’ve ever had, beyond the simple common sense that reliable numbers can’t be compared with unreliable ones to make any conclusion:

First, this well done census was confined to protected or near-protected wildernesses. There are vast areas of Tanzania, particularly not far from those characterized as having the most “catastrophic” decline, that are not densely populated and perfect habitat for roaming elephants.

Second, the areas of Tanzania that have been very carefully studied pretty well for almost a century, the northern wildernesses, showed an increase in populations in the same study period.

Those northern areas are much more densely populated by people, with all their problems and daily activities and everything else that contributes to human/elephant conflicts. If there is any place where poaching can be documented, it will be in these areas.

I disagree vehemently with those who claim the human unpopulated vast wildernesses of Ruaha and Rukwa are prime poaching areas because nobody can see you do it. Balderdash. They can’t see you do it in the middle of the Serengeti National Park, either! At least not when you do it with the skill of a real poacher.

These guys aren’t going to waste their resources on the long-distance, sparsely populated, thorntree forests of the vast interior. They may, in fact, be less watched there, but it will be exponentially harder to poach then transport the goods to market from Ruaha than from Tarangire.

So thank you FZS and Paul Allen for at long last starting us on the right track, but those flashy so-called scientific organizations with their hands out … time’s up.

I just can’t wait for the 2019 census!

Coastal Conundrum

May 4, 2015May 4, 2015 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tourism is collapsing in East Africa. It began with terrorism but terrorism is down yet it continues to collapse.

Today you can get breakfast, dinner and a decent sea-view room in Zanzibar for $27.50 per night per person sharing.

These absolutely ridiculous prices can be found for a thousand miles from northern Mozambique to Lamu in Kenya, among some of the finest and most beautiful beach properties in the world.

“Officials on Friday warned that tourism at the Coast was on the verge of collapse with 30,000 to 40,000 staff set to lose their jobs,” Kenya’s main newspaper reported today.

Occupancy at most coastal hotels is hovering around 20% and major properties are closing down weekly.

Kenya and Tanzania’s white sand coral coast is also one of the most pristine in the world. Yes it is suffering the same coral destruction that climate change has foisted on the oceans around the world, but it’s better here, for example, than in most of East Asia.

What’s going on? Should you go?

Well, that’s the problem. Every western government in the world, plus Australia, says, ‘No, you shouldn’t go’ because of potential terrorism.

The northern border of this paradise is Somalia, and real trouble began there when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2002 sending all its most vicious criminals into Somalia.

Things weren’t so bad in the beginning, because it seemed like all the bad stuff happening in Somalia was staying in Somalia.

But then there was the election debacle of 2007 in Kenya with widespread violence that took nearly a half year to settle down. When it finally did, the U.S. began drone strikes in Somalia.

Then in 2011 Kenya, acting as a proxy for Obama’s growing wars against fleeing terrorists, invaded Somalia and all bets for a stable coastal tourism industry were off.

More drones killed more Arabs from Dar to Lamu, internecine warfare among the Arab sects in the coast heated up, prominent Arab leaders were assassinated in Mombasa and Zanzibar, and if ever there had been a stirred up cauldron of discontent and chaos, it was the East African coast.

Didn’t somebody say on TV this weekend that we’ve learned an important lesson from Baltimore? Didn’t someone say that we’ve got to do something more than just add police to stem crime?

Is that why Secretary Kerry is in Kenya, today:

to “discuss ways to more effectively deal with threats posed by the militant group al-Shabab”?

To get permission to fire more drones? To give Kenya more personal armored vehicles?

There haven’t been any serious terrorist incidents for months on the coast. (The Garissa University attack was considerably inland, far from tourist areas.)

But that’s the Catch-22: bring in more tourists and that will attract more terrorists, because terrorist attacks on tourists are always more powerful than local attacks.

I wonder if there were any businessman who invested in Belfast apartments in the late 80s? If so they’re making a killing, today.

Snow Ball from Hell

April 20, 2015April 21, 2015 by Arusha ♥ 10 Comments

My nine weeks in Africa convinces me the most pressing issue of our time is climate change.

I’ve returned from a series of safaris with some of the most memorable moments of game viewing in my career. I met some incredibly wonderful new people and reacquainted myself with a number of dear clients.

From South Africa through Botswana into Tanzania, new political and conservation initiatives gave me optimism, but unfortunately the common theme dominating every single day was how destructive climate change has become:

To the animals, to the veld and most of all, to the people.

Of course negligence, corruption, bad politics and dysfunctional science also provide plenty of negative influences as well, but there is nothing – nothing more threatening to Africa’s future than our unprecedented global warming.

Cape Town normally has a mean high temperature in March of 77̊F. On March 3, while I was in Johannesburg, the temperature reached 108̊F, a whopping ten degrees higher than ever seen there before.

An alarming two percent of the precious Cape Flora Zone, the most unique and smallest of the six such zones in the world, was lost to fires.

We toured the wine country on highways with fires on both sides.

In Botswana a quarter of the unique Okavango Delta was lost this year to drought and fire. This is unheard of.

I arrived in Tanzania at the end of a six week drought. That drought came after record rainfalls in December, amounts that exceeded half the entire season’s normal precipitation in places like Ndutu.

The drought ended with devastating downpours. The Serengeti Super Storm that we experienced just a few days ago may be unprecedented.

The flip-flopping of extreme climate: droughts to floods to droughts, decimates animal populations as we discovered this year with the wildebeest. It endangers and enrages animals, as we discovered with several elephant events.

But most significantly, it’s destroying people’s lives.

Though my second safari saw a Tanzania as pretty and green and lush as I have ever seen, the withered and stunted crops that had survived a traditional schedule of planting at the beginning of the rainy season had already succumbed to the drought.

Not just agriculture is disrupted. In my own industry, tourism, extreme weather and unpredictable flip-flopping of season terribly disrupts property management that has until now depended so much on predictable seasons.

Building and renovations – particularly on the exteriors of lodges and camps – have traditionally been done at the end of the rainy season, which coincides with a lingering low tourist season: May and early June.

Landscaping, tempering of murramed walkways and gravel paths, sealing of tarred thatching … these depend on a wetter environment that have traditionally occurred at the beginning of the rainy season.

But now it’s anyone’s guess as to when it will rain or not. And when it does, it’s so severe that traditional construction methods are jeopardized.

You can’t understand global warming by any one moment. Senator Inhofe’s foolery on the Senate floor challenging the veracity of global warming by heaving a snowball is the basest of stupidity.

The main result and symptom of global warming is radical changes in climate. Yes, the world is slowly warming and that has many long term effects.

But short term devastation is not the result of warming, but of extremes: more violent weather, more cold then more hot, more drought then more floods, following on the heals of one another quicker and quicker.

That’s the horror I witnessed this season in Africa, and I felt ashamed and embarrassed at how my society at home seems so insensitive to this and therefore terribly inhumane to the less fortunate of the world.

We’re much more capable of protecting Brooklyn from the violence and rising of the sea than islanders can protect Honiara. We can react more immediately to changes in our fishing seas, to threats to our agriculture and even just to the disruptions of our commute to work than any place in Africa can.

So we kick the can down the road with greater confidence that the road spans a long enough period of time that something can be figured out: that new technologies, or new political alliances or who knows what will ultimately come to our rescue.

Africa can’t wait. The wilderness, the animals, the people … they don’t have the luxuries of our development.

Climate change is killing them far more effectively than ebola or ISIS.

Change of the Upper Hand

February 9, 2015February 9, 2015 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The row between Kenya and Tanzania over tourism last week is a strong indication that Kenyan security has improved and tourists are returning.

This little tiff has absolutely no effect on any but the most budget-minded tourists.

Nairobi has 20-25 times more international airline service than Tanzania’s northern airport, Kilimanjaro. Deal seekers who bought a $200 better air fare into Nairobi than Kilimanjaro until Friday were able to fly into Nairobi, then arrange Tanzanian transportation from the airport into Tanzania with a net savings of about $100.

That’s over. If you want a safari in Tanzania, you now either have to fly into Tanzania or take Kenyan transport from the Kenyan airport to a bus station or other transfer point.

Travel and tourism pundits, always the poorest of pundits, exclaim that Tanzania has done itself a great disservice by stonewalling the negotiations over the last three weeks aimed at finding a compromise.

Sort of, but not really given the current governments.

Obviously any easing of travel restrictions anywhere in the world can increase tourism. This year, for example, numerous countries in southern Africa began easing the restrictions for travel between them. With this incident, East Africa is moving the other way.

Here’s the essence: Tanzanian tourism suffers any time Kenyan tourism is given an entre. This is because Kenyan tourism is bigger, better and less corrupt. I find this, by the way, remarkably ironic since my own assessment is that the Tanzanian tour product – i.e., the game parks – is better than Kenya’s.

But Tanzania has squandered its treasures more than Kenya has. This isn’t to say that Kenya is lily white, hardly. But the level of corruption in Tanzanian tourism is considerably greater. The actual laws on the books in Tanzania regarding tourism, conservation and game parks, are the most complex, messed up pile of regulations this side of Riverview Park in Chicago’s mafia days.

This discourages foreign investment and that, above all, keeps business actors in the Tanzanian tourism sector small, ripe for the picking so to speak.

If the two countries opened their borders to one another, Kenya’s much better run tourism sector could virtually subsume Tanzania’s. It’s one example of the virtues of well run capitalism. I can’t think of many, but this is one.

I don’t doubt that Tanzanians will be sorry about last Friday’s outcome. Above all it shows that Kenya feels increasingly confident about its own tourism situation. Kenya had been acting unilaterally by not enforcing the 1985 agreement, seemingly only to Tanzania’s advantage.

But in the recent dire days of terrorism in Kenya, any business they could muster was helpful. Now as things are looking, Kenya realizes it’s time to muster its advantages, recognize that the better air service and lower air fares into Nairobi are reasons travelers might choose Kenya instead of Tanzania for their game viewing safari.

So why make it any easier for them to go to Tanzania, than Tanzania allows its incoming visitors to go to Kenya?

The fact is, of course, that were Tanzania to get its house in order it would have no problem competing squarely with Kenya. At that point it would greatly benefit Tanzania to ease as many restrictions between the two countries as possible.

That day will come right after we successfully sell ski vacations to Saudia Arabia.

Shush! You’re in Tanzania!

January 27, 2015February 8, 2015 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Tanzania government is inviting violence as it cracks down on all dissent prior to two upcoming elections.

Tanzania has never been a model of transparency. European governments suspended aid more than a year ago because of shady, under-the-table mining deals, and despite some demanding young mavericks in Parliament, the government continues to stonewall all requests for basic information.

But now it’s getting very serious. For the first time the government has banned a major newspaper.

In times past the government has banned smaller papers and blogs, but the East African newspaper is a large regional publication that has been popular in Tanzania for twenty years.

The paper is one of the most aggressive in East Africa. Its investigative journalists recently published details of the government’s fraudulent passing of a new proposed constitution to ready it for a national referendum in April. This is likely what provoked the ban.

The outcry was immediate and from all points in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yesterday evening in an unusually harsh statement, the European Union condemned the move.

The Media Institute for Southern Africa further reported that the East African’s principal bureau chief in Dar-es-Salaam was detained and questioned by police.

The government is running scared. National elections are scheduled for October, and a referendum on the disputed new constitution is scheduled for April 30.

Neither are expected to go well. The proposed constitution was approved by a Parliament that was boycotted by virtually ever member of the opposition. Critics are especially angered by mechanisms intended to keep the party which has ruled Tanzania since independence firmly in control.

Among the mechanisms that would do this is the subjugation of Zanzibar, which was one of the reasons a new constitution was to be considered in the first place. It was presumed that a federal system would give Zanzibar considerably more autonomy and that would help calm the civil disobedience afflicting the island.

The East African aggressively reported these criticisms by the vocal and youthful opposition.

Last October the fractured opposition to the government announced a coalition to oppose the government candidates in the upcoming national elections. Today that appears to be evaporating, and in this moment of weakness I think the government wants to regain control.

It won’t work, of course.

As one of the comments to the story in Nairobi’s Daily Nation pointed out, most everyone reads the East African today online. The government has no way of banning that.

So the act of trying to do so is likely to do little except further inflame the situation.

At the same time if the opposition is unable to reconstitute its coalition I think it deserves to lose. There could be no better opportunity than right now to dislodge the ruling party. If this moment is missed, expect Tanzania to grow more and more repressive.

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.

Can You Be Too Right?

November 18, 2014November 18, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Wildebeest survive, but Maasai must move on.

As worldwide petitioners against a Loliondo Maasai eviction approached two million, an important meeting with government officials ended today without resolution.

Last May I blogged about this sad story in partial error, resulting in my concession that the blog had enough misleading information to be adjusted. The incomplete discussion of the problem remains a serious part of this story.

The controversy remains: the Tanzania government wants to evict 40,000 Maasai from traditional lands to increase a hunting concession for Dubai businessmen and princes.

The error so many of us participated in last May was reporting the controversy as an immediate crisis.

And that escalation of reportage has worsened. Respectable media reported today that the evictions have already begun. They haven’t.

We were led to our mistakes last May by the organizers of a very successful petition campaign on behalf of the Maasai, which has exceeded its wildest expectations by the way.

In May the organizers of the petition broadcast an urgent appeal for signatures based on an exaggerated claim that the government was imminently prepared to forcibly oust the Maasai.

Several of my readers pointed out to me this wasn’t true. The problem was real – and continues – but the immediacy was overstated and the government had set no deadline for forced eviction.

The situation is the same today.

Numerous legal maneuvers have been going on in Tanzania for some time, long before the petition campaign began. These continue today.

This past weekend, a report in London’s Guardian attributed to another report from Survival International elicited comments from the organizer of the petition which were exaggerated and went viral.

The story even emerged as a headliner in America’s normally very careful electronic media, Salon.

This is a complicated and serious story, and the media (including at first, me) just doesn’t seem to know how to handle it correctly.

Survival International, in fact, has a good time line of the real story. Click here.

The government’s policy came to the fore five years ago. There have been ups and downs, and based on today’s useless meeting in Dodoma, I’d say the government is losing the battle of waiting it out, and that’s good.

And it’s so good that many of my readers and others worldwide have signed the petition. But like a previously exaggerated social meeting campaign, Save the Serengeti, the movement starts to become more important than the issue.

Save the Serengeti absolutely contributed to stopping the building of the Serengeti highway (when it was in its first iteration, Stop the Serengeti Highway) but in no way alone despite its self-promoted appearances. Moreover, when building the highway was stopped, the campaign didn’t.

The real development of this Maasai story is simpler. Under increasing pressure to abandon once and for all the government’s policy to evict the Maasai from Loliondo, the government has offered a cash payment in compensation to 40,000 Maasai.

The offer is for approximately two-thirds of a million dollars or about $15 per person evicted, in addition to previous offers of new land that theoretically equals or exceeds the land that would be confiscated.

Today’s meeting in Dodoma was to discuss this new offer, and as expected, Maasai leaders rejected it.

Undoubtedly this new emergence of the controversy benefits the Maasai, and that’s good, too. It’s just not … well, exactly right to think of it as immediate to this prolonged problem.

Meetings occur all the time between government officials and Loliondo Maasai. Ridiculous moves like $15 per Maasai evicted should hardly be considered starting new or more serious confrontations.

Yet even in Arusha some thought so. Last night an arsonist started a terrible fire in Arusha that caused some to wonder if it was in protest of the Dodoma meeting about the Maasai eviction.

I received several requests to write this blog. I’m extremely thankful for my readers’ sensitivities to this problem. I’m glad that we’re all “on the side” of those benefiting from the exaggeration of the problem.

But ultimately it’s the facts that matter. It’s the facts we need to be vigilant about, not the hysteria.

Tanzania Tittering

November 7, 2014November 7, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tanzania’s power cabal is pressing the lid tightly on a pot of boiling discontent, but young revolutionaries are up to bat. Game on.

Three issues are exploding: fraudulent mining contracts, authorities complicit with smuggled ivory, and the ramming through of a bad new constitution.

Tuesday, Dar police surprised the world much less Tanzanians by actually arresting the country’s two top gas and oil officials for failing to comply with a subpoena issued by young bloods in the Parliamentary opposition.

There had been a delay between the actual issuing of the subpoena and the ultimate arrests, and in Tanzania’s Shakespearean politics it’s hardly more than speculation as to why. Here’s my best take:

Serious pressure on Tanzania started in mid-October when the consortium of European Union donors suspended more than a half billion annual dollars of development aid.

This was no surprise. A year ago I suggested it would happen.

I believe foreign aid from the EU and the U.S. is often given for political reasons much more than for the development reasons championed, and huge amounts of cash for which there is no accounting is the reason there is so much corruption in Africa.

(That’s changing. It’s embarrassing that the U.S. has not yet joined the EU in the suspension of aid.)

We aren’t sure when the subpoena was issued, but the crusader who pushed it through Parliament is a powerful, young business educated progressive from the main city on Lake Tanganyika, Kigoma.

Zitto Kabwe set up a website in his name devoted to the fraudulent mining issue in July. The subpoena was probably issued sometime shortly thereafter.

That particular controversy – one of a dozen such fraudulent stories coming out of Tanzania’s incredible new-found wealth in gas and oil – was of a secret government agreement to cede more than two-thirds of all oil and gas revenue to the foreign investors.

That’s at least twice the norm and when compared, for example, with several contracts that neighboring Kenya has issued with foreign mining companies, almost three times the regional average.

Kabwe said his crusade opened up when a local blogger, Ben Taylor, discovered the fraudulent deals which had been held secret by the government.

Taylor’s account was immediately published in an excellent Africa wide media publication, African Arguments that got continent-wide attention.

Then, new reports of increased ivory smuggling facilitated by the same officials who engineered and profited from the fraudulent mining contracts hit the news this week.

The lid on the boiling pot of discontent might still be pressed tightly down, but it’s getting hotter. The gas and mining officials were hauled in this week. The kingpins will likely be out on bail by tomorrow.

“This scandal is too big. We are not ready to see all this money end up in the pockets of a few officials,” opposition politician David Kafulila told Deutsche Welle.

Add to all of this a growing controversy over Tanzania’s so-called new constitution. Widely opposed by the public because it really isn’t new, doing little more than enshrining the ruling party’s near autocratic power, the government has vowed to move ahead with the national referendum in April.

That controversy has spilled over into the streets and Sunday one of the principal architects was almost stoned and beaten in a forum held in Dar-es-Salaam to promote the government’s position.

The government doesn’t appear to be backing down. Today, the unpopular prime minister condemned the protesters, maverick legislators but mostly the EU for withholding aid, arguing it would hurt “the common man.”

We’ll see who it hurts sooner than you think.

Alaska Like Tanzania?

July 14, 2014July 13, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Last week I chastised Tanzania as a singular polity that squanders its natural resource wealth. I was wrong. So is Alaska.

I’m preparing for my once annual Alaskan trip and as always I’m in Fairbanks a few days before my clients arrive. I had no idea how similar it is to Tanzania.

Election mania is everywhere. Billboards, signs, TV ads – I couldn’t understand why compared to my own very political state of Illinois, Alaska seemed so hyped up.

Turns out it isn’t the November election of candidates that’s garnered so much interest. It’s the four referendums forced onto the ballot by grass roots signature campaigns.

Three will be on the general November ballot: legalizing marijuana, raising the minimum wage and banning further mining in certain salmon spawning grounds.

The Big One, though, comes up August 19 and is what made me realize Tanzania doth not stand alone. Ballot Initiative One repeals Senate Bill 21 which has halved the state’s oil tax revenues.

If Tanzania lived up to its IMF optimization, more than three-quarters of its revenue would be from natural resources. Today, 92% of Alaska’s revenue comes from natural resources.

In 2012 the Republican governor Sean Parnell called his predecessor, also Republican Sarah Palin, wrong for reenacting a state tax plan for oil that had been in place for decades. So Parnell, the banks and oil companies, then pushed through a bill in 2013 that reduced the maximum tax (linked to the wholesale oil price) from 75% to 35%.

Now from what we’ve been able to learn mostly from leaks of Tanzania’s strictly secret mining agreements, Tanzania is happy with 3 or 4% and opposition activists in Tanzania are screaming for 15%. So in fairness, the pie graphs aren’t very similar. But here’s the thing:

Alaska has a much, much smaller population and is dependent almost exclusively on mining for state income. And even more important than this, the previous tax plan has worked since the 1970s. Alaskan government, Alaskans who earned on average $1700/month in dividends, and even the big oil companies have been pleased as puddin’ pie.

But as seems to happen everywhere today, Republicans who are so out of touch with their electorate and in the pockets of big money (like oil companies), will do anything to stay in power. They seem to know getting elected on policy isn’t going to work.

Alaska, which has been a poster state for balanced budgets, went $2 billion in the red for the first time, this year. It didn’t even go in the red during the Great Recession!

It went in the red because the Republicans gave half their revenue back to the oil companies!

Here’s the public Republican argument: oil revenues are declining because competition is growing from places like the Dakotas which have virtually no or very little tax on the oil companies.

Here’s the truth: oil revenues have been declining since 1988 as the major oil fields that were first developed in the 1970s mature and dry up. New oil fields are being developed just as fast if not faster in Alaska as in the Dakotas.

Alaska remains the most inexpensive place in the world to develop oil fields.

There is a difference with Tanzania: Tanzania’s revenue due its people is likely being pocketed by politicians. Alaska’s revenue due its people is being given back to the oil companies!

In both cases, I call this stealing. That makes the two polities much more similar than different.

Alaska’s beginning to act like … Tanzania!

Money Money Everywhere

July 10, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Have you ever known anyone who’s sitting on a gold pot that they just can’t figure out how to open? Meet Tanzania.

Africa’s poverty has a real chance of being erased by major recent discoveries of natural resources, and no country has more new discoveries than Tanzania.

I know first-hand how fast Tanzania is developing. We operated a safari in just the last few weeks for a dozen Chinese managers of a new uranium plant in Dar.

Titanium and coltan have also been discovered recently, and Tanzania continues to sit on an unexploited massive vein of gold that is reckoned to be the second largest in the world after South Africa.

And most recently was the discovery of natural gas.

Just a few months ago, the IMF published findings that Tanzania could be earning $5-6 billion annually by the end of the next decade from an estimated 51 trillion cubic feet.

That’s where the good news ends.

Tanzania has botched exploitation of almost all of its natural resources, gold being the best example. Since its discovery near Lake Victoria nearly two decades ago, multiple companies have traded ownership and management, and reasonable production has yet to be attained.

Uranium is the next best example. The Chinese are successfully mining it, but the squandered tax revenue from it, and the corruption involved in the land that was swapped and sold for the mines is unbelievable.

And now there’s natural gas.

Lo and behold some observers think that the successful bidder to start developing the resource, the Norwegian company, Statoil, has ripped the country off royally.

The Production Sharing Agreement that Tanzania signed with Statoil “could [cost the government] hundreds of millions of dollars a year” according to a principal of the East African watchdog organization, Taweza.

It’s truly a mystery why Tanzania, which could be one of the richest countries in Africa, continues to be one of the poorest.

Some suggest corruption, and to be sure there’s a lot of that in Tanzania. Particularly with mineral rights transparency is easy to avoid. There is no legislative committee – as there should be – which oversees mineral right negotiation. It’s the Minister and his cronies.

That would be easily remedied by a better legislature, and it is coming round but terribly slowly.

In a confusing tweet last week Tanzanian opposition politician, Zitto Kabwe said, “not a single developing country that derives the bulk of its export earnings from oil and gas is a democracy.”

Is Kabwe suggesting he must trade his ideology, his outspoken democratic opposition to the current Tanzanian regime, to eliminate poverty? In other words: the current Tanzanian regime portraying itself as a democracy facilities wanton corruption?

Is there a Marxian dialectic here?

I’m not sure but it’s the handful of people like Kabwe who might be able to force Tanzania into some kind of meaningful grappling of its very rich resources.

But don’t pop the champaign just yet.

Arusha, Chicago & Kenya

July 8, 2014July 9, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

Coastal Kenya, Chicago and Arusha suffered terrible acts of violence these past several days, and it leaves us wondering if it’s safe to walk out of the house.

The violence along Kenya’s coast just seems to get worse and worse. Although 28 of the 29 deaths this past weekend occurred outside established tourist areas, one fatality was a Russian tourist in Mombasa town who resisted an attempt to rob him of his wallet.

In Arusha, the hub for Tanzania’s famous tourist industry, a third violent attack this year happened Monday night when an IED was thrown into a popular Indian restaurant in the center of town.

No one was killed but eight people were hurt. The Verma Indian restaurant is attached to a popular city gym and is frequented by Arusha’s more affluent residents, including many foreigners.

In Chicago 16 people were killed and 80 others seriously wounded in gun battles that raged through the city’s south side for most of the weekend.

What are we to make of all this?

The Kenya violence is a continuation of the Muslim/Christian world war, a specific retribution by al-Shabaab for Kenyan occupation of Somalia.

Kenya has suffered three such attacks monthly for more than the last year alone. The Kenyan invasion, encouraged and outfitted by the Obama administration, has done much to pacify Somalia and reduce the terrorism threat to the United States, but at Kenya’s peril.

In Chicago the violence strikes me as a result of increasingly lax gun ownership restrictions. Chicago’s top cop said this to CNN. Of course why there is such anger and frustration that utilizes the available guns is the more profound question, and unlike Africa, it isn’t a Muslim/Christian war.

It’s more akin to a poor/rich war, which in fact could be the explanation for the Arusha bombing last night.

Tanzania has not participated in the war in Somalia, and so unlike Kenya and Uganda which have, Muslim groups have not claimed any responsibility for attacks seen on the Tanzanian mainland.

But the three attacks in Arusha over the past year have been political or religious. A prominent and popular Arusha politician and his wife were hurt at a political rally, and a Catholic church was bombed in a second attack.

Monday’s attack in Arusha targeted what’s considered an expensive restaurant, owned by Indians, in one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. Throughout the last several centuries Indians in Africa have often been the brunt of attacks against political systems that favor business and the rich.

This suggests three completely different motivations for the violence in Arusha over the last year.

In the end, the simplest explanation for all the attacks is that weapons are too easily available. The next level of explanation is that identifiable groups of people feel marginalized:

Muslims in Africa. Poor in Africa. Poor in Chicago.

Some believe this in insoluble: that there will always be poor feeling marginalized, that there will always be one or another religions that feel oppressed by other religions.

I disagree. There are not enough poor in Sweden or Denmark or many, many European countries for there to be a problem of rich vs. poor in those countries.

Recent progress in Ireland proves that enmity between religions isn’t eternal. And even when some friction continues, as in Quebec, it rarely if ever becomes violent.

But taking a vacation is different from social activism. I’ve said for some time, now, that I feel the danger to vacationers in Kenya has broken at least the threshold of perception of visitors’ safety, so I can’t recommend traveling there for most people.

But to Chicago or Arusha it’s simply a matter of knowing where and where not to go. Don’t visit Chicago’s south side. Don’t eat in a downtown Arusha restaurant. Those are fairly simple tools for staying as safe as one has ever been.

The point is that this violence so far has not been random: The perpetrators are motivated by ideology, and their footprints are clearly tracked.

Visitors are not the intended targets. Only in Kenya is the violence so widespread that visitors have in fact been victims and this specifically because the focus of much of Kenya’s tourism is the coast where the religious conflict is centered.

There is still good news and bad news, and this is the bad news, today.

On Safari: Roundup

June 30, 2014June 30, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Kisiel Family safari ended with great drama this weekend. Here’s what happened and how future safaris might also achieve such success.

The sheer numbers were impressive: 90-95 lions (we had some controversy regarding counting cubs), 4 leopard, 4 cheetah, African Wild Cat (somewhat unusual); thousands of elephant; dozens of thousands of gazelle and antelope; hundreds of giraffe; and possibly more than a hundred thousand wildebeest and zebra.

And there were five or six specifically dramatic events that really made the trip stand out. Why?

I’m afraid the most important answer may be a very simple one: the Kisiel’s arranged a safari that was a third longer than the average. They were on safari for 13 days and nights. The mean today is just around ten days.

That small additional time, in my estimation, is worth far more than it seems. It relieves the pressure on our planning and means that optimizing opportunities is much easier.

Enthusiasm. You’ve got to have enthusiasm to do a safari right, and the Kisiel’s did! Every time I offered a long day or a short day, they chose a long day. Quite simply, this like the length of the overall safari increases our opportunities.

Almost as important was global warming, and that of course, will continue. In the tropics in Africa global warming means far more severe weather, and that means when it rains it rains more. Tanzania’s northern safari circuit is a rainy circuit and so in an ironic way, it benefits from global warming.

(It’s also suffering. Flooding is taking a serious toll: see my blog last year about the destruction of Lake Manyara’s national park entrance.)

Finally, there’s luck. Yes, it’s true to some degree that you make your own luck, and I guess the Kisiel’s are masters!

STAMPEDING BUF
At least 650 literally stampeding African Buffalo stopped our attempted quick exit from Tarangire National Park as they stormed in front of us just before the main road bridge around 9 a.m. one morning.

Buffalo numbers are hard to come by since conservation organizations grew disinterested as their populations increased throughout the last quarter century. But in the last five years or so, populations have stabilized or declined and led to some troubling research about viruses and other diseases the African Buffalo seems to be spreading.

At the beginning of the noticeable decline, lion researcher Craig Packard identified a virus that was weakening if not killing many buffalo (which subsequently led to lions dying that were taking advantage of the weakened population and succombing to the same virus).

Packard’s study inspired other research and more recent findings by the National Institute’s of Health and veterinarian scientists at the University of Pretoria have documented both viral and bacterial infections that seem to be spreading continent-wide among the Buf.

Large groups of buffalo are common because they are a close herding animal. But we have come to presume a large group is around a hundred, and this was six or seven times larger.

In addition to just the great drama of seeing this it motivates us to return to current research to try to determine if this was simply a very rare anomaly or something more meaningful.

FLAMINGO FLYING CARPET
East Africa has both the greater and lesser flamingo, the latter being more pink but considerably smaller. Throughout the continent the lesser flamingo is considered “near-threatened” because of habitat degradation and erosion. (The greater flamingo has a much larger range and considerably greater numbers and is still considered healthy.)

I recall in the 1970s a number of East Africa lakes were completely saturated with lesser flamingoes: Nakuru, Baringo, Elementaita, Bogoria and Manyara in particular.

If you’ve seen the 1985 movie Out of Africa and sat through the credits at the end of the film, you’ll see an unending stream of flamingoes overflown by the camera aircraft.

But flamingo are very sensitive to the alkalinity of the water they require. Their entire food source is a small shrimp that feeds on a certain type of algae. Too much rain or drainage of their lakes alters this sensitive dynamic. Global warming and agricultural development have noticeably impacted what we’ve seen on safari lately.

Until this trip! We pulled into the south end of Lake Manyara and witnessed one of the greatest collections of flamingos I can remember since the late 1970s. At one point a mass too large for me to estimate took off coloring nearly our entire field of vision.

This end of Lake Manyara has undergone a radical agricultural transformation in the last ten years that has led to an explosion of rice and sugar cane farming. Because it has so positively transformed the communities here, it was hard to criticize. Has global warming actually balanced out this dynamic, at least in Lake Manyara?

CHEETAH ON CAR
If global warming and the resultant more rain in the highlands is helping Manyara, it may be harming parts of the Serengeti.

Global warming isn’t just more rain as the ice caps melt. It’s also more severe droughts. Really, it’s better to recognize global warming as making weather more severe, rain and drought. And that’s what happened to us in the Serengeti. It was particularly disappointing for me when a completely unusual dust storm in the southeast Serengeti prevented us from visiting the area.

But the karma was with us, and the extra time we had to game drive in the park’s southwest led to a young male cheetah jumping on our car. In the car was Camden Reiss and it was his birthday!

It’s not unusual for cheetah, mostly male, to do this. They want a better view and I believe are among the most inquisitive of the big cats.

THE MIGRATION
Everyone wants to see the migration, of course, and the amount of disinformation in the media and travel industry constantly dumbfounds me.

I’ve written so much about this, rather than link you to a dozen previous blogs simply click the Index tab to the right for the list of posts. Historically at this time of the year the migration would mostly be in Kenya, and in fact Kenyan lodges and hoteliers reported a mass arrival very early this year, in late May.

But when we arrived the central Serengeti about a week ago, bingo!

Now it’s very hard for any first-time visitor to judge if they’ve really seen the migration or not. Even those of us guides with decades of experience struggle with estimating large scenes of animals.

I figured we saw about 20,000 animals, and that was plenty enough to fill the plains in our view. Steve Taylor, guiding for EWT at the same time, reported the same situation when he was in Seronera a couple days before us.

Why? That was simple. There had been unusual rains and the grass was green. Wilde do not hard-wire migrate like birds. They move where there’s food, and there was plenty in and around Seronera.

But it wasn’t over when we moved north! On our last day we saw considerably more wilde and witnessed crocs pulling down two wildebeest from a daring and dramatic file of animals trying to cross the Mara River.

Excitement unbelievable, but for me, confusion, too. Were the Kenyans bluffing?

No. I spoke subsequently to both tourists and hoteliers and I believe the Kenyans, and I believe that the great majority of the migration is in Kenya’s Mara right now.

But the rains have been extraordinary and the population is healthy, and right now a large and visible part of the migration is strung all the way from northern Tanzania back to Seronera in the center of the park. It probably won’t stay much longer, as the rains do seem to be subsiding in the south. But I won’t be surprised if next year’s Frankfurt Zoological Society estimate of the population breaks records.

LION SOCIOLOGY LESSON
On that same day that we saw the river crossing, we also witnessed what to me may be the highlight of the trip. I wouldn’t expect my clients to embrace this conclusion, but this was a very rare and important experience.

We watched first-hand a mother lioness trying to kick out one of her sons from the pride. It’s a long understood part of lion sociology and biology that the mother has to do this before the son gets bigger than she is. Full grown male lions are 50% larger than females.

And there are plenty of documented videos to show it. But I had never personally witnessed it in the wild.

It’s always difficult to predict anything in the wild. But with sufficient time and patience, together with careful planning, most safaris can achieve the wonder and drama that the Kisiel family enjoyed!

Safari Njema!

On Safari: First Impressions

June 17, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

What do kids do the first morning after arriving in Africa at 2 a.m.?

Normally, sleep. In fact sleep so deeply, whether they’ve slept or not on the planes, that they wake up completely disoriented.

But not so my Kisiel Family! Playing the numbers, I slept a little bit more than usual, since I met them on the now very popular Turkish Airlines flight that daily arrives Kilimanjaro at 1:10a.

Immigration and customs is pretty easy at 1:30a at night in Kilimanjaro, and so we were on our way to Serena’s Lake Duluti Lodge hardly a half hour after the plane landed. It was about a 40-minute drive … in the dark … but young Nicholas positioned himself in the front seat, stiffened his back and followed the car’s headlights on the pavement for any trace whatever of lion.

Fortunately for Arusha residents there aren’t any, but that didn’t deter Nicholas from his half-hour vigil.

The two-lane paved road from the airport is fine, with numerous speed bumps so no one feels the least uneasy except that it’s so dark.

Turning off into any of the lodges in the area right around Arusha, though, means the first experience on a very badly kept dirt or gravel road. And that wakes everyone up. Our experience, though, lasted all of a few minutes.

I already had the keys to the room so quickly assembled the 14 in the family, aged from 6 to … well, grandparents’ age … and explained simple things like having to double-flush the toilet and keeping a flashlight at your side at all times because of Arusha’s constant and troubling power outages.

And I sent them to bed telling them not to be scared of the hadada ibis in the morning, whose sunrise call sounds for all the world like Napoleon’s charge at Waterloo.

Three a.m. rarely needs more encouragement for hitting the sack, but it was in the middle of the American/Ghana world cup match. I watched it for 13 seconds before falling asleep.

It’s always a delight sharing my clients’ experiences of their first waking moment in Africa. More and more flights are arriving at night, so there really isn’t a lot of orientation available until after you’ve gone to bed, slept, and then are awakened by the honking of the ibis.

The word most clients use to describe their first lighted scene is “jungle.” It’s not wholly accurate, of course, since it’s much colder than a real jungle. Today we woke up to temperatures in the lower 60s.

That’s because this area around Arusha, the foothills of Africa’s fifth highest mountain, Meru, are a mile high. But looking out over your room’s deck, it does look like a jungle.

Our particular view is of a beautifully landscaped hedge of hibiscus, bougainvillea, and forget-me-nots, separating the wild and thick bush beyond from the individual rooms.

And that includes lots of wild bananas, massive mango and mahogany trees, a peppering of acacia (we get many, many more of those on the veld) and every once in a while a glimpse of the crater lake Duluti.

I was enjoying my coffee on my deck, trying to delay going too early to the breakfast room since I expected they would all come quite late.

But not most of the Kisiel family! They were down early, eating and enjoying their first morning long before I expected!

On to Tarangire! Stay tuned!

On Safari: Off to Nairobi

June 12, 2014June 11, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

As I head to Nairobi here are some last-minute news bits about safaris in East Africa.

First, the Kenyan tourism sector is collapsing because of the bad publicity of last month. Several British tour companies evacuated guests from the Kenyan coast only a day before a large bomb went off in Nairobi.

And just this week, a moderate Muslim leader was assassinated in Mombasa.

As a result the Tanzanian circuit is chock-a-block full. We were even having difficult booking space for February, 2016! Yes, I didn’t say 2015, but 2016.

Upmarket properties, which are usually much smaller than the larger tourist lodges, are being deluged with requests.

Second, global warming is really effecting the circuit. The great wildebeest migration normally stays in Tanzania’s Serengeti until the middle to end of June. This year it the first of the great herds crossed into Kenya the end of May, three to four weeks early.

The reason is that the rains are good in the north, spurning the herds onwards. I also remember there were many early births this year, for the same reason, and that could also move the cycle forward.

I’m looking forward to a wonderful trip with a wonderful family from Boston. (Well, actually, the grandparents are from Boston. As with many families today, the children and grandchildren are scattered hither and yon!)

I’ll be trying to post blogs of our safaris as often as I can.

Stay tuned!

An Ugly Goose

June 5, 2014 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tanzania has some of the largest deposits of gold, uranium and other precious metals in the world, and Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world. Go figure.

And now, they’ve found gold in Ngorongoro. The rush has begun.

For the last month rumors have grown out of one of the most besmirched areas of the country, the far northeastern area of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, that there was gold in them thar hills.

At first it was put aside as just another “Wackie Waso.” Waso is one of the larger towns in the area where several years ago “Babu,” the Lutheran pastor turned herbalist, began dispensing a brew that reportedly cured everything from diabetes to AIDs.

Lots of people raced to Babu, literally in the thousands from as far away as the Emirates. And lots of people died.

The area is just south of Loliondo adjacent the Serengeti and due north of Olduvai Gorge. It’s been in all sorts of controversies in the last several years, including a main stop on the proposed Serengeti Highway.

This is a rich agricultural area with a rapidly growing population. The place has all the makings of a real “Wild West” community.

So when gold was reported in a seasonal stream about a month ago there were two distinct reactions: run to the place or laugh. The government tried to stem the tide, but to no avail. The rush is on.

Reports today have more than a thousand individuals panning a stream hardly a kilometer long that at its best is 2 meters wide.

Yet this week government agents confirmed it is gold. Not surprisingly, authorities announced that they would not allow any major commercial exploitation, but let the local people “enjoy the windfall.”

That may strike outsiders as strange, given how valuable a real streak of gold could be to a poor country. But Tanzania already has the world’s second largest seam of gold and has been trying to benefit from it for the last 15 years.

The Lake Victoria gold mines have been a mess for years. Mismanagement, corruption and lack of security have meant that Tanzania has been unable to benefit from what is clearly Tanzania’s greatest single “pot of gold.”

According to this week’s Arusha Times, government experts “verified that the mineral being scooped in Samunge is actually gold, but that should just be windfall for the residents of the surrounding village as well as other artisan miners because the government won’t allow large conglomerates to start excavating the newly found treasure.”

Woe is luck. Without good commercial exploitation, the Wild West Samunge Gold Rush will make a couple folks rich but most of them just miserable, especially children.

The continuing inability of Tanzania to get it together and benefit from the luck of being one of the richest natural resource countries on earth is enough to start a revolution.

But the days just go on and on. A few politicians and disreputable businessmen get rich from time to time, and the masses race for seasonal rivers in them thar hills.

Africa Answerman

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

Category: Tanzania