Pay rangers to shoot poachers and stop blaming the Chinese

By Edward Indakwa

If our elephants are that important to us, then we have no business waiting for a donor to give us Sh70 million to buy cameras

There were whoops of delight when the Zoological Society of London won a Sh70 million grant to instal state-of-the-art camera traps for poachers in the vast expanses of Tsavo National Park.

For as long as I can remember, foreign researchers have been coming up with all sorts of hare-brained gimmicks to deter poaching, halt human-wildlife conflict and ‘save’ our elephants and rhinos.

But all those clever ideas fail, get binned and forgotten because they neglect to factor in the KWS game ranger, by far the only potent and effective pesticide against poachers.

When rangers arrested all manner of poachers in the past month, did they use high-tech gadgetry from donors? They simply gathered intelligence, laid an ambush, posed as buyers and aimed and fired in the old cloak-and-dagger way that served them so well in the early 1990s when they were hailed as one of the finest field forces in Africa.

So if we want to exterminate poaching, let’s stop allowing foreign researchers to think for us. Let’s stop dreaming about deploying drones and camera traps. Let’s stop blaming the Chinese. Instead, let’s ask ourselves why our rangers suddenly seem incapable of beating the crap out of poachers.

If our elephants are that important to us, then we have no business waiting for a donor to give us Sh70 million to buy state-of-the-art cameras. For heaven’s sake, we waste millions annually on per diem for foreign travel where government functionaries go napping, yapping and window-shopping overseas.

Not too long ago, the US government was reported to be constructing a multi-million forensic laboratory at the KWS headquarters that will serve as ‘a national referral centre for molecular diagnostics of wildlife related crimes’.

Molecular diagnostics? Poachers are killing our elephants and rhinos and we are thinking about molecular diagnostics? By the time you are doing ‘molecular diagnostics’ my friend, the bleeding elephant is dead. Dead, you hear? By the time those state-of-the-art cameras in Tsavo photograph a poacher, the idiot will be inside the park aiming at an elephant. Besides, that expensive camera cannot arrest a poacher and by the time rangers arrive on the scene an hour later (Tsavo roads are not Thika highway), your elephant will be dead.

If you want to keep that elephant alive, if you want to keep that poacher out of the park, invest in deterring wildlife crime, not investigating it. So, you had better blow that Sh110 million for the diagnostics thingies on intelligence gathering, jungle boots and uniform, food rations, field allowances, better pay for rangers and diesel. If you do that and send a ranger into the bush, he will bring you a dead poacher, not a dead elephant.

Note, I said ‘he’. One of our more hare-brained ideas has been to insist on something called gender balance even when it does not make sense.  So when we hire 1,000 rangers, 300 must be women. That’s all very nice for a constitutional lawyer chewing croissants and wagging a finger at a committee sitting funded by donors in Nairobi but absolute bollocks on the ground. Killing poachers is a man’s job because poachers hang around the remotest places in this country, not Nairobi.

In fact I would be very pleased to meet a human rights activist who can convince me to deploy female rangers to Sibiloi National Park. Women are mothers and there is nary a kindergarten, a dispensary for dispensing cough syrup or a salon in that hot, snake-infested place. But I bet the ‘gender balancers’ had not figured that out.  In the same manner, it is madness to pick up a guy in Nyamira, who has never seen a wild animal apart from a mongoose, and send him to fight poachers near Mandera in the name of reflecting the face of Kenya. Dr Richard Leakey won the war by hiring warrior-rangers from pastoralist communities who know the terrain. We thought he was a fool.

Where poaching is concerned, we insist on figuring things out the wrong way and barking up the wrong tree. In the 1990s when our rangers used to send poachers peeing in their pants, they were, barring the army, the best kitted of our disciplined forces. What’s more, their pay was better than that of the police. That’s what motivated them to fight. So if we pay them just as much as we pay the police, why the hell would we expect them to work harder than the police? More amusing is that instead of raising their pay, we want them to work with demoralised policemen. Awful idea. Those flying squad people may eat nails and ballast for breakfast but they are scared silly of wild animals. Ask them. But the most annoying thing is that we have all taken to blaming the Chinese for elephant and rhino deaths. As someone pointedly asked in a letter to the editor of a newspaper, is it the Chinese who kill elephants in our parks, spirit them past police roadblocks and smuggle them through our ports, harbours and airports?

We have been whining for years that penalties handed out to poachers were merely a slap on the wrist yet the new Wildlife Act, which hands out stiffer penalties, has been gathering dust on the shelves since 2008 or thereabouts.  It is like we expected the Chinese to order that quarrelsome coalition government and its tax-averse MPs to expedite its passage into law.