The Sunday News
THE dust around Cecil the lion has blown and ultimately settled with lots of heat generated and cash perhaps for the conservationists and overnight lion advocates.
Accusations and counter accusations were traded with reckless abandon.
Temporary noise was made for a permanent problem.
Recently I had a chat with farmers around Mabale and surrounding areas which border the great Hwange National Park and their most common worry is the losses they have encountered at the hands of wild animals.
One farmer said he lost seven goats in one raid by the lions. Seven goats is a lot of investment by any definition.
At $50/goat this translates to $350 and by local price trends this amount can buy a cow.
However, what was encouraging was that the generality of the farmers have accepted their predicament of sharing boundaries with the wild animals but wanted the powers that be and the conservationists to find a way of compensating them for their losses.
It is not a secret that the Community Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (Campfire) programme has not produced the desired results in so far as compensating community members who are affected by the wild animals.
While there are a lot of explanations for the failure of Campfire programmes, the main reason is the inherently defective model which emphasised communal benefits for personal losses.
Livestock and at times human losses due to predation are by nature a personal loss and any compensation/benefits in lieu of livestock losses should therefore be personal not communal.
The import of this installment is therefore not to lament Campfire failures or livestock predation but to advocate for a revisit of the model of addressing human-wildlife conflicts.
This model whereby the conservationists and the Government bury their heads in the sand and leave farmers to count their losses while they count their tourism revenue is not going to hold for long.
Besides it is blatantly cruel and insensitive for both Government and conservationists to be merry making on funds generated by wildlife tourism and donor funding while farmers continue to suffer.
Why is it painful for the conservationist and Government to compensate the farmers who are losing crops and livestock to wildlife?
In this day of GPS technology and collared lions it is very possible to pin point where the lion(s) was and at what time and as such validate the claims of predation.
I am in no illusion that all lions are collared and I also know that predation comes from many other carnivores which are not necessarily lions but a start has to be found as we work towards finding a lasting solution to human-wildlife conflicts.
It is a fact that people are not going to relocate their homes and neither is the park going to be relocated and hence a co-existing mechanism has to be found. As a departure point we have to craft a model that does not relegate farmers to wildlife aesthetic benefits but one that recognises and addresses their losses.
Surely if conservationists can write project proposals to fund GPS tracking of animals which is clearly a not so cheap exercise, they can build in a variable of compensating victim farmers.
A new model with a human face simply has to be found so that when another Cecil is gunned down farmers moan more than they celebrate.
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