The Sunday News
Butler Tambo
Introduction
POVERTY remains of serious concern in Africa in absolute and relative terms. The number of people living on less than $1,25 per day in Africa is estimated to have increased from 290 million in 1990 to 414 million in 2010 (United Nations, 2013). This is because population growth outweighs the number of people rising out of poverty. Moreover, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per African was around US$2 000 in 2013, which is around one-fifth of the level worldwide (IMF, 2014). Poverty in Africa is also multidimensional, in the sense of limited access to education, healthcare, housing, potable water and sanitation. This situation puts the loss of more than US$50 billion a year in illicit financial flows (IFFs) in better perspective.
The resource needs of African countries for social services, infrastructure and investment also underscore the importance of stemming IFFs from the continent and Zimbabwe especially if the figures I raised last week of revenue leakages (revelations that our cash-strapped Zimbabwe could have lost around $3 billion through IFFs in mining, wildlife, fisheries and timber industries between 2009-2013) are to be considered. This therefore, brings me to look at the historical human-wildlife conflict in Zimbabwe and how this as a factor outside of corruption and many other factors I raised last week has led to IFFs in the wildlife sector but firstly I will briefly look at some of the reasons for IFFs and capital flight in Africa in general.
Summation of other causes of IFFs, capital flight and natural resources
Professors Léonce Ndikumana and Mare Sarr in a paper entitled, Capital flight and foreign direct investment in Africa: An investigation of the role of natural resource endowment note that the management of the natural resource sector is characterised by high discretionary control by the central government, which yields substantial economic and political power and this weakens mechanisms of control and it undermines accountability of the government vis-a-vis the public. The fact that natural resources generate high revenues also weakens accountability of the government vis-a-vis taxpayers and donors. This implies a high risk of embezzlement of government revenue due to corruption and rent-seeking in the management of natural resources. As Kolstad and Søreide (2009: 214) put it, “corruption is the development problem in resource-rich countries, rather than just one of a number of problems.” Second, limited competition in the natural resource sector facilitates capital flight and other tax-evasion motivated outward financial flows. Third, the complexity of technological and financial processes involved in natural resource exploitation creates an imbalance of expertise and technical capacity between the governments of resource-rich developing countries and multinational corporations. This creates opportunities for export under invoicing, export smuggling, and other forms of unrecorded outflows of resources from resource-rich countries. Finally, the complexity of multinational corporations with regard to ownership structure and residence facilitates capital flight especially through trade misinvoicing. These reasons and my focus for today that I will now jump to which is human-wildlife conflict have led to IFFs in Zimbabwe.
Wildlife management in pre-colonial Zimbabwe
Prior to European settlement in 1890 in present day Zimbabwe, African traditional methods of resource management imposed little stress on the natural environment (Gore et al, 1992). Wildlife was plentiful, largely because of low human population density and low technology hunting methods. Also people had incentives to hunt sustainably because they depended on wildlife as a food supply. Authority over wildlife use was vested in village chiefs, and cultural taboos limited the types and numbers of wildlife hunted (Hulme & Murphree 2001a). Religious respect and superstitious fears protected many species. For example, in traditional culture it is taboo to eat the meat of an animal that is the totem of one’s tribe. Thus, even though the regulatory mechanisms were weak, they were adequate for the protection of wildlife (Child et al. 1997).
Colonial era wildlife management
During the colonial years blacks endured one of the most extensive land alienation policies implemented on the African continent. The colonial government expropriated land from locals on a large scale with additional takeovers continuing through the 1960s (Munro, 1998).
Areas of high agricultural potential were transformed into large commercial farms. Only European settlers were allowed to own these enterprises and by the mid-1970s, whites occupied the majority of the land in agro-ecological regions I-III. Blacks, constituting over 95 percent of the population, were driven primarily onto land categorised as having low fertility, regions IV-V. The 1930 Rhodesia Land Apportionment Act divided the land along strict racial lines with whites’ land being held under legal private title and black occupants of communal land retained usufruct rights only.
These restrictive racial land apportionment measures disrupted indigenous traditions of natural resource management. Authorities also set aside protected areas to preserve game populations for white hunters or respond to other environmental management concerns. The restructuring of land-use traditions resulted in negative impacts on wildlife populations and also created human-wildlife conflicts (Murphree, 2001).
Colonial governments instituted British concepts of wildlife protection under which wildlife did not belong to people but became the responsibility of the Crown on behalf of the people (Hulme and Murphree, 2001b). Legislation designated wildlife as the “King’s Game.” The new wildlife management strategies therefore alienated black people from wildlife as a resource and prohibited rural farmers from hunting on the meager lands allocated to them (Mombeshora, 2002). These laws exacerbated African resentment toward wildlife since rural community members had to suffer the consequences of living with dangerous animals while reaping no benefits from their presence and having no control over their management (Chaumba et al, 2003).
After independence, the wildlife conflicts continued, demonstrating that this problem had salience for local residents independent of resistance to colonialism.
As communities during the colonial period were no longer proprietors of land and wildlife, they no longer had economic motivation for effective collective management of the resources (Jones and Murphree, 2001). The result was opportunistic, illegal use of wildlife in and around national parks and other state game reserves. Similarly, white private landowners had little incentive to protect wildlife. They typically converted range land to livestock land, to the detriment of wild animal populations. In response to the decline of wildlife outside of national parks, the Rhodesian Government in 1975 passed the Parks and Wildlife Act. This act gave freehold land owners “Appropriate Authority” to manage and use wild animals found on their land. The intent of the policy shift was to promote sustainable use of wildlife by devolving rights for commercial exploitation of game animals from the state to private landowners, who at that time included only white farmers and ranchers (Matzke and Nabane, 1996). This policy effectively meant that owners of private land became the proprietors of the wildlife. The new law did not apply to the rural black majority who held land in common without individual or group legal title (Murphree 2001). This legislation led to the development of lucrative private game ranching activities on white owned land. On communal land, however, wildlife populations — which were both more diverse and potentially more economically valuable than those on private lands — continued to decline.
Post-colonial wildlife management
After independence in 1980 the problems of wildlife management and human-animal conflict were partly solved by the introduction of Campfire programmes which sought to give benefits to communities in wildlife rich areas through infrastructure development and cash disbursements from tourism receipts and game hunting but with time these benefits have almost but ceased to come through and this has been seen with the recent cases of poaching and the lacing of water bodies with cyanide by villagers in areas near Hwange National Park leading to the deaths of hundreds of animals massive losses of revenue to treasury.
Zimbabwe has one of Africa’s biggest surviving elephant populations, since herds in neighbouring regions of Eastern and Central Africa have been severely damaged by poaching, and half of the country’s estimated 80 000 elephants are thought to live in Hwange. Conservationists say the African elephant is so much under threat from habitat loss, conflict with humans and illegal poaching and hunting that on present trends it could die out within 50 years.
In 2011, at least 17 000 African elephants were killed for their tusks, according to Cites, the international body that focuses on endangered species.
Ivory is highly prized as a “white gold” in Asian countries where a growing middle-class is seeking safe investments, and United Nations wildlife experts say the trade in illegal ivory has more than doubled since 2007. Sadly natural resource-rich countries like Zimbabwe exhibit high levels of poverty and lag behind in development goals including access to social services such as health, education, water and sanitation. This raises a serious concern regarding the sustainability of the resource-led growth and therefore in next week’s article one will try looking at how wildlife can be effectively utilised for the development of communities that surround game reserves and for effective revenue generation for the Government.
-Butler Tambo is a Policy Analyst who works for the Centre for Public Engagement and can be contacted on [email protected]
