The Sunday News
Butler Tambo
IN my last instalment on Campfire I looked at some of the economic benefits of the programme for rural communities surrounding national parks.
As usual I got a lot of feedback especially from people in Hwange and Binga who agreed with my article but added the fact that in the past few years they have not received any financial or infrastructural benefits and if anything Campfire proceeds are being utilised more by Rural District Councils (RDCs) and not being remitted to the communities.
I then had to change take and decided to look at the flip side of the poverty faced by communities in wildlife rich areas and their conflicts with the RDCs.
In Zimbabwe, sadly the poorest districts are the wildlife-abundant areas, namely Hwange, Binga and Nyaminyami. Of course this result is to be expected since these communities live in agriculturally less productive areas that are largely only suitable for extensive livestock production and wildlife conservation.
Controversy of Campfire gains
Significant gains have been recorded in Campfire, such as the increased share of land devoted to wildlife management, building up of institutional and administrative capacity at RDC level, development of social infrastructure and influencing sensible regional wildlife policy reform,
However, it has been seen that an array of problems have emanated from or have not been resolved by Campfire.
These include the paternalistic tendencies of RDCs towards local villages and wards, elite capture by both traditional and democratically elected authorities, the failure of the programme to incorporate local knowledge and practices, the continued prohibition of local use of wildlife resources, continued subsistence and commercial poaching, and failure of the programme to resolve human-wildlife conflict.
It is important to note that if the local communities are to take an interest in managing the wildlife resource they must be able to get a reward for their conservation efforts.
A direct link between reward and provision of conservation is established by aligning appropriation and provision rules.
Wildlife is a unique resource that does not require the usual provisions.
However, the damage that people put up with, guarding fields from wildlife intrusions, protecting fields with thorn-bush fences, and looking out for poachers constitutes some kind of provision. Ideally those who render the highest proportion of provision should reap a greater proportion of the benefits. Over and above that, the local communities may need to be compensated for foregoing some opportunities for economically more rewarding uses of land within their territory.
Non-involvement of communities from wildlife value chain
The market orientation of Campfire precludes the use of indigenous knowledge, customs and strategies of resource management thereby relegating the role of RDCs to that of providing services to the private safari enterprises (Murombedzi, 1992).
The RDCs have had to ensure that a viable resource base exists for exploitation by the private safari operators by policing local insurrection such as poaching, haphazard expansion of arable agriculture, human settlement in wildlife habitats, livestock population expansion and non-acceptance of the status quo.
The programme primarily seeks to produce a financial dividend and thereby curtails the ability of the local communities to define their own resource management objectives. In most Campfire areas the communities are not in contact with the actual resource for as far as monitoring, marketing and harvesting is concerned.
This reality does not give them an opportunity to contribute in the making and modifying of operational rules. Under Campfire, after receiving the quotas from the DNPWLM, the RDCs as the Appropriate Authority (AA) decides how many animals to put under trophy hunting, cropping, live animals sales, culling and local hunting with most animals usually being put under trophy hunting because of the need to produce a financial dividend.
The RDCs will then market and sell hunting concessions or leases to private non-local safari operators. The safari operators will find clients of their own so that they make profit on the hunts that they have claims to.
The clients then carry out the actual hunting through the engagement of a Zimbabwean registered professional hunter. If communities were to harvest the resources in the concession area that would be illegal because the rights would have been surrendered to the safari operator through the lease agreement. The RDCs collect the trophy fees and concession/lease fees as the benefit from the resource.
The local communities rarely get resource allocations for cropping and local hunting. At times they may get some meat if large animals such as elephants are hunted because the safari operator or client does not have use for it apart from the parts collected as trophy. The communities will get the benefit from the use of their resource when the RDC disburses revenue.
Communities have always charged that resource utilisation is an RDC-safari operator affair and it leaves the communities out. In general, RDCs have been accused of being too “paternalistic” in that they usually ask the communities to identify viable projects/programmes in which they would want to invest their shares of wildlife revenues before the revenues are released.
Even though the objective of Local Government in Zimbabwe is to provide accountable and democratic Government for local communities, it is because of this possibility of lack of downward accountability (and presence of upward accountability) that the RDC and the communities could be thought of as different entities that optimise in different ways.
Conflicts between RDCs and Communities
The potential conflicts in Campfire involve property rights over wildlife, designation of buffer zones for wildlife, the nature of acceptable use of wildlife versus compensation for damages, representation in wildlife committees, distribution of revenues and the nature of acceptable use of revenues. There are competing property claims to the wildlife resource between the RDC and communities. The RDC derives property claims to the wildlife resource from the AA status that it has been accorded by the Parks and Wildlife Act (1975, 1982).
Citing instances of corruption and embezzlement of funds that have been engaged by officials, dissatisfaction about the transparency of the elected councillors deliberations with local officials through the District Wildlife Committees (Hasler 1999) and exclusion from direct household management and utilisation of wildlife (Murombedzi 1992), communities emphasise the dichotomy between them and their RDC hence derive property claims to wildlife from traditional heritage, proximity to wildlife and suffering wildlife perpetrated damages. In most areas this is an unresolved conflict, whose only solution lies in the RDCs emulating the good gesture done by the Central Government and surrendering their AA status to the relevant sub-district communities by means of by-laws.
While the RDCs have usually designated some areas for the benefit of wildlife conservation some traditional leaders such as chiefs and headman have counter-designated such areas for human settlement. A notable feature of communal lands in Zimbabwe is that inhabitants do not possess titles to land. The land is communally owned and allocated to households for arable farming and settlement. Historically, allocation of land was the preserve for the chiefs.
At independence in 1980, the traditional leader system that had dominated Local Government during the colonial era was not removed but in terms of the supposedly democratic District Councils Act (1980, 1981, 1982) the traditional leaders’ powers of adjudication and land allocation were transferred to the District Councils. Since the passing of the Rural District Councils Act (1988), purported to end the dual system of Local Government in rural Zimbabwe through amalgamation of the Rural Councils (formerly representing large-scale commercial farming areas) and the District Councils (formerly representing the communal African farming areas), the traditional leaders in the affairs of RDCs have the role of an interest group together with the commercial farmers.
Interest groups participate fully (have power to vote and can be voted for). In many areas there is conflict between RDCs and chiefs with regards to power over land allocation.
Communities as well as modern sub-district institutions such as villages and wards have to a large extent continued to recognise the chiefs’ authority over land and other local natural resources (Murombedzi, 1992).
The Government has recognised the indispensability of traditional leaders and enacted the Traditional Leaders Act (2000) that seeks to give the traditional leaders incentives to work in unison with the RDCs but this has been further complicated now especially with the land reform programme that has created new centres of power in land redistribution which now includes war veterans and other officials thereby leading to further problems.
Campfire influenced resource management in the neighbouring countries but ironically Botswana and Namibia have long left Zimbabwe by putting in place legislation that empowers local communities to manage and benefit from wildlife directly.
Zimbabwe’s national political environment and the prevailing political culture have been cited as the key obstacles to real devolution of management functions to villages and wards and if only Chapter 14 of the Constitution on devolution of power and resources can be fully implemented then communities bordering national parks can meaningfully benefit from their wildlife resources.
-Butler Tambo is a Policy Analyst who works for the Centre for Public Engagement and can be contacted on [email protected]
