East African Flyer Issue 6

TRAVELLER’S TALES: Ituri, place of danger - P32

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ISSUE No. 0006 July 2012

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ITALY’s BIG DAY: Festa Della Repubblica celebrated in Nairobi - P46

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Enter the

Strategist How Modern Management Wizardry Saved Kenya’s Wildlife — P16

Kenya Wildlife Service Director Dr. Julius K. Kipng’etich

Cover PHOTO | Anthony njoroge

MAASAI & MARA: How Many Wildebeest Do You Need? P8

BIG IDEAS: Redefining ‘Smell a Rat’ P32 July 2012

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This Month East African Flyer June 2012

P32 7 EDITORIAL: Our July menu

COVER STORY

8 THE MAASAI & THE MARA: How Many Wildebeest are Enough? In the final installment of our three-part series, MIKE NORTON-GRIFFITHS, Kenya’s most influential rangeland ecologist, asks a question that provides food for thought for both the conservation biologist and the free market environmentalist

16 COVER STORY: Enter the Strategist – the story of the Kenya Wildlife Service and how one manager, Director JULIUS KIPNG’ETICH, brought private sector best-practice strategies to an ailing State corporation, turning it from a KSh800 million firm to a KSh4.6 billion operation. He was interviewed by EA Flyer Special Correspondent

P16 P16

Joe ombuor

32 TRAVELER’S TALES: we follow EA Flyer Special Correspondent and photojournalist JONATHAN KALAN ‘Into Ituri’, an area once described by no less a conflict authority than Human Rights Watch as the ‘Bloodiest Corner of the Congo’.

This is as poff-the-beaten path as a trip gets in Africa

37 SAY CHEESE: In our regular FOREIGNERS feature this month, ROOPA GOGINENI brings us ‘Married to Cheese’, the story of American couple

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Andrew and Delia Stirling, who, until a couple of years ago, lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and are now cheese-mongers settled in Limuru, Kenya, producing some of Africa’s finest cheese.

P20 P8

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BOOK SERIALIZATION: from Amboseli – A Miracle Too Far, by David Lovatt Smith, former Warden, Amboseli National Reserve. This month’s extract is titled ‘Dust Clouds Gather’

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37 DISPATCHES: ‘Letter from New York’ – LARS DABNEY on ‘The Fine Etiquette of Road Tripping’ ‘Letter from Kampala’ – ANGELA KINTU on ‘Customer Service a la Uganda’

Editorial Team PUBLISHER Professional and Advisory Management Consultants P. O. Box 636 -00100 Nairobi email; pamc@aviationeastafrica.co.ke

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Welcome July 2012

THE REGION’S AVIATION LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE

A Supplement of Aviation East Africa

Editorial

By East African Flyer Chairman Eric Mwandia

The Eye-opening Story of KWS’s Turnaround Success

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elcome to our July issue, where we showcase the story of the Kenya Wildlife Service’s (KWS) amazing turnaround success.

The KWS story is a rare case of a public sector institution run on private sector best-practice with startling results. We hold it up as an example of the dramatic effects that sound management can have in running a State corporation. The KWS Director, Dr. Julius K. Kipng’etich, is the man at the centre of this success. In an interview with EA Flyer Correspondent Joe Ombuor, Dr. Kipng’etich explains his vision and his methods.

Ombuor also interviewed the KWS Head of Resource Mobilization, Mr. Edwin Wanyonyi and the Head of the Service’s Community Enterprise Development Department, Ms. Munira Bashir.

We conclude the three-part ‘The Maasai and the Mara’ Special Feature with ‘How Many Wildebeest Do You Need?’ by Edward Norton-Griffiths, Kenya’s most influential rangeland ecologist, widely considered to be the last word in land use in game parks and adjoining conservancy zones.

Norton-Griffiths poses a question which he readily acknowledges will ‘exercise both the conservation

biologist and the free market environmentalist, for what is the optimal number of wildebeest given that tourists probably only need to see some 300,000 to experience the raw majesty of the migration?’

He adds: ‘Kenya will balance the benefits to be gained from developing agriculture on what was previously pastoral land against any possible tourism losses, while Tanzania may still wish to have as many wildebeest as possible to enhance the international reputation of the Serengeti National Park. Difficult choices indeed’.

Our usual features include ‘Traveler’s Tales’, where EA Flyer Special Correspondent and photojournalist Jonathan Kalan tells us of a trip ‘Into Ituri’, an area once described by no less a conflict authority than Human Rights Watch as the ‘Bloodiest Corner of the Congo’. Kalan reckons “it may take many years before it appears on the itineraries of anyone but the most adventurous of travelers”. On behalf of EA Flyer, he is one such intrepid traveler.

In ‘Foreigners’, writer Roopa Gogineni brings us ‘Marrying into Cheese’, the story of American couple Andrew and Delia Stirling, who, until a couple of years ago, lived in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, and are now cheese-

mongers settled in Limuru, Kenya, producing some of Africa’s finest cheese.

Our Book Serialization segment this month continues with Amboseli – A Miracle Too Far, by David Lovatt Smith, former Warden, Amboseli National Reserve. This month’s extract, is titled Dust Clouds Gather’ and deals with the fact that past generations of Maasai did not harm the wildlife that inhabited their land, and the herds were left virtually undisturbed – something few other races have done, a fact he compares and contrasts with today’s arrangement of tourists actually paying for the privilege to come to see the wildlife and how the community stands to benefit from such revenue generated in its ancestral land.

Two dispatches, ‘Letter from New York’ and ‘Letter from Kampala’, have perfectly self-explanatory headlines, telling, respectively of ‘The Fine Etiquette of Road Tripping’ and ‘Customer Service a la Uganda’.

Finally, for our ‘Event of the Month’ feature, EA Flyer attended a reception on the occasion of the Italian National Day hosted by the Ambassador of Italy to Kenya, Ms. Paola Imperiale, at her official residence on Monday, June 4, 2012.

As usual, have a great time with a great read.

Special Feature Part III |

The Maasai & The Mara

How Many S Wildebeest Do You Need?

It was never the policy of the Government of Kenya to lose more than 50% of its wildlife in 30 years. No one actually set out to achieve this remarkable result, but in spite of all the effort, money and initiatives from the Government, conservation NGOs and donors, it has happened. Clearly there has been a massive failure on a truly massive scale by all concerned, and in the face of such failure one might expect policies to be submitted to microscopic examination, institutions to be overhauled and heads to roll.

But not in Kenya, writes MIKE NORTON-GRIFFITHS 8|

o, how many wildebeest do you need? How many elephants is enough? And what do you need them for? These are not trivial questions, for they focus attention on the need for some hard decisions.

A conservation biologist will maintain that while the actual number of wildebeest at any particular time is irrelevant, what is important is to ensure adequate space and habitat so the population can vary as it must in response to environmental vicissitudes.

In contrast, a free market environmentalist would approach this problem secure in the knowledge that there is indeed a market for nwildebeest which will deliver a socially and economically efficient number of animals.

Naturally, neither of these views is wrong— which is not the same as saying that either is right.

Consider as an example the Serengeti migratory wildebeest population which, despite 40 years of scientific monitoring and research, has effortlessly grown from around 250,000 individuals in the 1950s to some 1.5

the conservation biologist and the free market environmentalist, for what is the optimal number of wildebeest given that tourists probably only need to see some 300,000 to experience the raw majesty of the migration? Kenya will balance the benefits to be gained from developing agriculture on what was previously pastoral land against any possible tourism losses, while Tanzania may still wish to have as many wildebeest as possible to enhance the international reputation of the Serengeti National Park.

Difficult choices indeed.

Thunder in the plains: The Great Migration in full flight and, below, overview of the Serengeti.

million today, going up a bit in good (rainy) years and down a bit in drier years. That this extraordinary phenomenon still exists is due to the vast 30,000 km² area over which they are able to migrate, from the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania during the wet season up to the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya during the dry season.

Population While this would seem to support the view of the conservation biologist, it has now become clear that rapid changes around the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya are impacting the migration and will inevitably affect population size.

These changes are from a mainly pastoral land use under communal tenure, in which wildlife can co-exist in the interstices, to an agro-pastoral or agricultural land use under private tenure, where wildlife find it more difficult to co-exist. If carried through to their full potential, one might expect a 20%– 30% reduction in wildebeest numbers.

Here now is a problem to exercise both

Bad news from the rangelands 1977 was an important year for conservation in Kenya for it was then that sport hunting and all other consumptive uses of wildlife and attendant value added activities were banned. It was also the year when the Kenya Rangeland Ecological Monitoring Unit (KREMU) began to monitor the numbers and distribution of livestock and wildlife throughout the 500,000 km² of Kenya’s arid and semi-arid rangelands.

So, perhaps uniquely, a major change in conservation policy—a ban on all consumptive utilisation of wildlife— coincided with a new capacity to monitor its effect and impact.

The monitoring results have been deeply disturbing, and by the mid-1990s a number of warnings were issued about a major decline in wildlife right across Kenya’s rangelands, even in the most heavily used tourist areas. The only good news was that

loss rates seemed significantly less inside the Protected Areas than outside where some 70% of all Kenya’s wildlife are to be found.

More recent analyses eliminate even this ray of hope—rates of wildlife loss continue unchecked, and are now the same both inside and outside the Protected Areas.

Since 1977, Kenya has lost 60%–70% of all its large wildlife.

While losses of such magnitude indicate a major institutional failure to protect wildlife, the pernicious spread of agriculture throughout the rangelands, even around important conservation and tourism areas like the Mara area of Narok and the Amboseli area in Kajiado, give clear signals of a policy failure. Indeed, the entire economic system of rangeland production in Kenya has undergone a radical transformation since the mid-1970s.

From the perspective of the individual pastoral landowner, at the macro-economic scale domestic and international markets are expanding and there are real gains in producer prices. At the micro-economic scale, the pastoral landowner sees improved market and transport networks, improved market information networks (mobile telephone coverage is expanding across the rangelands), improved access to financial services, ever-increasing opportunities for off-farm jobs and investment, and a wider availability and choice of goods and services.

Over the rangelands as a whole, recent studies demonstrate that livestock now represents at most only one half of income at the household level, and it is rare for pastoral landowners to rely on livestock as their sole source of wealth and savings.

Where this is still found, it is indicative of a local deficiency in economic alternatives.

At the household scale, however, the major economic driving forces are the differential returns from agricultural, livestock and wildlife production.

In contrast, net returns to pastoral landowners from the wildlife on their land are meagre and average $5 ha–1y–1. The best returns are for “concession fees”, where pastoral landowners rent a concession area and/or allow sole access to such an area to an individual tour company. Here, the net returns average $10 ha–1y–1, with the highest rents of $50 ha–1y–1 being found very occasionally in the Mara area. These average returns to wildlife of $10 ha–1y–1 are competitive with agriculture only in very dry areas of below 300mm of annual rainfall, and with livestock below 600mm annual rainfall. In other words, net returns from livestock could be some 66% higher were wildlife to be eliminated.

Yet another important change, evident Turn to P10

July 2012

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Special Feature Part III |

From P9

everywhere throughout the rangelands, is the rapid evolution of property rights from large parcels of land under group or communal ownership to small parcels of land under private ownership. This process of land sub-division is fuelled by three incentives. Security of tenure is paramount, from in-migration, and from land alienation by political elites, the government or even conservation NGOs wishing to extend the area of conservation estate. Second is the clear dilution of the value of communal resources in the face of rapid population growth. Finally, sub-division allows the economic benefits of agricultural, livestock and wildlife production to be captured directly at the household level rather than through communal institutions or other agencies.

This process of land sub-division has farreaching impacts. The smaller the physical size of the landholding the lower the density and diversity of wildlife; with sub-division comes an increased density of settlements which in turn displaces wildlife; and subdivision also imposes on the landowner a change from extensive to more intensive methods of production—again at the expense of wildlife. Finally, land values rise with sub-division, making it both easier to raise capital for land development and making the land more attractive to outside investors.

These differentials between the net returns to pastoral landowners from agricultural, livestock and wildlife production offer the clearest explanation we have to date for the spread of cultivation throughout the rangelands, for the rapid evolution of property rights and for the concomitant widespread and comprehensive loss of wildlife throughout Kenya. The uncompetitive returns from wildlife compared with other production systems encapsulate the entire dynamics of change observed on the rangelands. They focus our attention on the fact that, under current conditions, wildlife simply cannot compete economically with livestock or agricultural production, and as a result pastoral landowners are disinvesting in their wildlife resource.

10 |

The Maasai & The Mara

Why are returns to wildlife so low?

In Kenya, wildlife returns to pastoral landowners are low and uncompetitive through a combination of policy failures, institutional failures and market failures.

The most important of the policy failures is the continuing ban on all consumptive utilisation of large wildlife,5 which not only restricts the opportunities for pastoral landowners to generate revenues from their wildlife resources, but also largely disenfranchises 95% of the pastoral rangelands from any income-generating opportunities (tourist wildlife viewing is restricted to a mere 23,000 square kilometres (5%) of the rangelands where wildlife are found). Second is the continuing investment of wildlife ownership and user rights almost solely in the State, and the denial of compensation to landowners for the costs (destruction and damage to life and property) of raising wildlife.

Of the institutional failures, the most critical is that of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), which acts solely as a regulatory and enforcement service rather than an enabling institution. KWS also lacks any technical expertise. There persists a romantic notion that pastoralists co-exist with wildlife in a harmonious relationship. Perhaps in the past, when population densities were lower and economic opportunities more restricted, pastoralists could indeed afford to ignore wildlife. But today, burgeoning human populations and ever increasing financial imperatives, economic expectations and opportunities for investment create the absolute necessity to raise productivity per unit area of land. Given the uncompetitive returns from wildlife, pastoralist landowners simply can no longer afford the extra costs of production associated with their presence.

The inconsistency in all this is simply astonishing. Some consumptive utilisation of wildlife is still permitted, but with quite restricted benefit streams. The companies ranching crocodiles (one), ostrich (one) and butterflies (two or three) create local benefits primarily through employment opportunities. In contrast, bird shooting (either pest control on rice schemes, or game birds on ranchland) creates significant revenues, between $10,000 and $20,000-a-year for some group ranches.

Returns from bird shooting could be significantly higher if the landowners were

Second is the clear dilution of the value of communal resources in the face of rapid population growth”

more skilled in negotiating contracts with the shooting operators. Also, in a single example where culling of locally abundant populations has been permitted, the entire carcasses had to be fed to crocodiles—they could not be used in any other way! Furthermore, the state accepts wildlife from the private sector to restock Protected Areas—but without making any payment—and provides wildlife (typically rhinoceros) to the private sector—again without accepting any payment—even though it is fully recognised that the Private Sector makes profits from this same wildlife through tourism activities.

The conservation NGOs are also deeply at fault for they are too focused, obsessed even, on topical single issues which rarely concern the economics of producing wildlife. They seem largely unaware of the importance of market forces in determining land use and production decisions by pastoral landowners, and they are often too reticent in challenging the government over policy issues. This leads to inappropriate investment on the part of the NGO community into trendy “conservation initiatives” of one kind or another instead of supporting the development of free and unencumbered markets for wildlife goods and services.

Finally, many communal institutions pander to locally powerful elites and fail to keep the interests of their ordinary members in mind when entering into development or tourism contracts, and when disbursing revenues from such contracts. This in turn fuels demands for sub-division so that economic benefits can be captured directly at the household level.

Equally glaring are the market failures for the provision of wildlife goods and services, which can be laid squarely at the door of the tourism cartels.

These cartels divert the major portion of all wildlife generated revenues away from the producers of wildlife—the pastoral landowners—to the service side of the industry (agents, and the providers of transport and accommodation). In general terms, landowners (which here includes private landowners, the KWS and county councils) see perhaps 5% at most of the total revenues generated by wildlife. The cartels also maintain strict barriers that prevent landowners becoming more directly involved in the tourism

business (e.g. by offering transport and accommodation) and thus capturing more of the potential revenues; and, to add insult to injury, they pass onto the landowners a disproportionate and unfair amount of the business risk involved in tourism.

A useful definition of an “initiative” is to do something quite unnecessary with someone else’s money.

With the exception of guiding (to which there are now severe barriers in the form of “standards”), landowners find it difficult to engage in other incomegenerating opportunities. Few have yet the capital or management capacity to enter the transport or accommodation sectors (unless heavily subsidised).

An operator will typically pay a relatively small amount as a concession or access fee, but will load up the bed night fee. When business is slack, both the landowner’s and operator’s revenue falls—but the landowner, unlike the operator, cannot reduce his costs.

Such arrangements should be replaced with a fixed lease—as with agricultural leases.

After all, in one case an operator is renting land to grow wheat, and in the other he is renting land to grow wildebeest—so why should the terms of business be any different?

Faced with such conditions it is indeed a wonder there is any wildlife left at all.

A call for new policies Clearly, at least three bundles of new policy instruments are called for with the overall policy objective of transforming wildlife from a liability for pastoral landowners into an asset that is worth investing in. The first is an economic bundle to improve the revenues that landowners receive from wildlife; next is a property rights bundle to settle issues of ownership and user rights to wildlife; and finally an institutional bundle to create the necessary enabling environment for what is, strictly speaking, private sector conservation.

The economic bundle Consider the goat—and suppose you were not allowed to use it in any way at all (no marketing, no slaughter, no use of milk, meat or skin), and that if you were discovered to be using it you would at worst be shot dead, or at best

imprisoned—indeed image that all you could do with your goat was hope a minibus of tourists would drive by and photograph it, from which you might obtain a meagre reward. How many goats do you imagine would remain in Kenya? This is the nub of the continued survival of wildlife on the rangelands of Kenya.

The objective of the economic bundle is to make the net returns from wildlife production economically competitive with other production systems (agriculture and livestock), especially in the 95% of the rangelands where tourist do not go, so that it becomes in the economic interest of landowners to invest in wildlife rather than get rid of it.

All sources of wildlife revenues, from both public and private sectors, must be re-examined and re-assessed, such as wider and more equitable sharing of protected area revenues with the neighbouring pastoral landowners who support the wildlife on their land; enhanced payments for ecosystem services (PES), perhaps through donor and NGO programmes; the implementation of fair and transparent compensation schemes for loss of life and property to wildlife; and the expansion of wildlife tourism into new areas but without harming the areas where they currently go.

Pastoral landowners must also acquire new skills in negotiating contracts so they capture a larger share of the total wildlife revenues and improve their capacity to establish and manage tourism ventures as individual firms.

However, the most important item in the economic bundle is to relax the current restrictions on income-generating opportunities from wildlife and open up once again the full range of utilisation and value added activities to landowners.

These include live sales of wildlife between landowners, and between landowners and the public sector; wildlife ranching for local or overseas trade, either in live sales or in wildlife products; culling locally abundant populations; value added activities of tanning and making trophies and curios; and, of course, sport hunting.

The reintroduction of consumptive utilisation to Kenya is a highly contentious issue, and much ill-informed debate has ensued, particularly as to whether Kenya would lose its “ethical” tourist base.

Such fears seem unfounded, as there is

The objective of the economic bundle is to make the net returns from wildlife production economically competitive”

no evidence from the 23 other African countries with hunting industries of any tourism boycott. Its neighbour Tanzania offers a striking example. Tanzania competes strongly and very successfully against Kenya in the market for wildlife viewing tourism—despite having a well-established hunting industry over many years. Indeed, the hunting industry in Tanzania is seen as an essential partner in conservation, especially in areas where tourists cannot and/or do not venture.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Kenya receives a tourism benefit from “ethical” tourists; neither does Kenya use the ban on hunting and other consumptive use to market its wildlife tourism. The current hunting ban seems to offer little comparative advantage to Kenya’s tourism.

Indeed, experience from elsewhere indicates that hunting, like any other form of consumptive utilisation, is not an alternative to eco-tourism, but is complementary.

We can again turn to Tanzania for factual evidence of this. In Tanzania, the vast hunting areas in the Miombo woodlands in the west and south of the country are far removed from the tourist circuits and produce essential revenues for the Government and communities alike to support conservation and wildlife management. To be fair, a few tourism operators have finally seen the light and are paying fair rents for concession areas which largely match the agricultural potential of the land. Furthermore, they are starting to contract out the provision of services such as security, water, fuelwood and other supplies.

The property rights bundle While there are currently no property rights of any kind to wildlife in Kenya there are legally enforceable property rights to the land on which the wildlife are to be found. Through the proper enforcement of these property rights all landowners, which includes the Government and its agents (the KWS and the county councils), can control access to wildlife and the nature of development on that land.

The Government does, however, regulate the use to which wildlife can be put, both inside and outside the Protected Areas.

Currently, the Government allows only non-consumptive use of wildlife through “game viewing”, although it does license Turn to P12

July 2012

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Special Feature Part III |

From P11

some consumptive use. It is the weak and conflicting nature of the property rights to wildlife that lie at the heart of the general loss of wildlife from rangelands.

Livestock are owned and have value, and their owners accordingly invest in and profit from their upkeep, maintenance and use. As a result, the agricultural areas and rangelands of Kenya are stuffed full of livestock. In contrast, wildlife are not owned by anyone, and accordingly have little or no value to those on whose land they are found. Any damage caused by wildlife is thus seen as a loss—unlike with livestock, where benefits in general outweigh costs. And since wildlife have no value they are being eradicated wholesale throughout the country.

Indeed, the quite devastating scale of the bush meat trade in Kenya is a stark reminder of what happens to resources that are neither owned nor have value to the owners of the land where they are found.

Wildlife are being treated as a nonrenewable resource and are being mined rather than used on a sustainable and renewable basis.

Extraordinary as it may seem, not a single tourism company in Kenya invests in wildlife or habitat management even though their very economic future depends upon the resource; and neither do most landowners.

Both decisions stem from the lack of clear-cut property rights to wildlife: not only are the returns from wildlife meagre, but why invest in something that is not yours? The only areas where wildlife rents (the profits from wildlife) are reinvested in wildlife and habitat management are on the few, large, privately owned conservancies where fencing effectively gives ownership of wildlife to landowners. Furthermore, here the landowners are actively involved in most aspects of the tourism industry and accordingly capture a larger slice of the wildlife rents, making habitat and wildlife investment even more profitable. These are the only areas in Kenya where wildlife numbers and diversity are stable, or even increasing.

It is often claimed that ownership to wildlife is impossible in Kenya because it moves around between properties, but experience suggests this need not be the case. In Europe, for example, landowners invest in raising game birds for the shoot even though they move freely between properties. Losses are minimized by habitat management to keep the birds within defined boundaries and by neighbouring landowners pooling their access and hunting rights.

This is exactly what is now taking place on sub-divided land around the Maasai 12 |

Mara National Reserve, where neighbouring landowners have pooled their access and user rights to wildlife by forming Wildlife Conservancies or Wildlife Associations to negotiate directly with individual tourism operators.

Livestock are owned and have value, and their owners accordingly invest in and profit from their upkeep, maintenance and use”

The institutional bundle While it is clear that conservation “policy” now creates perverse incentives for landowners to get rid of wildlife, it is nonetheless too simple to say that it is just a matter of land use economics: there is undoubtedly more to it than that. We need a new mindset, one which reflects the realities of pastoral life today.

It is instructive here to compare the policies and approach of the agricultural and the conservation sectors in Kenya. The agricultural sector owns neither crops nor livestock, but harnesses market forces to create incentives for producers to produce.

It promotes production through training and extension; by research and development of new germplasms and technologies; by subsidies and infrastructure support; by providing capital and loans; and by creating and supporting both markets and producer prices.

In contrast, the conservation sector claims ownership to all wildlife and natural biodiversity, yet imposes a range of policy

instruments which create disincentives to invest in conservation and make it economically sensible to eradicate wildlife.

It supports no research or development into wildlife utilisation techniques; provides no subsidies, capital or loans or support to infrastructure; neither creates nor supports markets; and passively condones the diversion of revenues away from the producers and custodians of the wildlife resource to the central government, to county councils and to tourism cartels.

It is a curious fact that among the last of the state monopolies to survive in Africa are the state conservation monopolies. And it is the sad fact that the precarious condition of biodiversity and wildlife conservation in much of Africa is the direct consequence of hopelessly inefficient and bloated state conservation monopolies aided and abetted by international conservation organisations which, with their seemingly limitless resources, lack of accountability and hidden agendas, wield such power and influence over conservation policy. Together, they have created an unholy alliance that perpetuates on the one hand inefficiency and misuse of conservation resources, and on the other a perverse policy environment that creates disincentives for conservation.

All state monopolies are inefficient, effortlessly consuming resources while

delivering few benefits, and state conservation monopolies are no different in this respect. Kenya affords a prime example for since 1977 the Kenya state conservation monopoly in its various guises (first the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, and now the Kenya Wildlife Service) has received literally hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, revenues, grants and gifts. In the same period, it has lost over 60% of the wildlife which it was charged to conserve and protect. Very recently, the sheer impotence of the KWS to manage wildlife has been demonstrated by the spearing to death of most, if not all, of the remaining lions in the Nairobi National Park, literally within sight of its headquarters, where some 500 bureaucrats sat paralysed at their desks. And even more recently its sheer incompetence was demonstrated by the death of eight rhinoceros translocated (for free) at the wrong time of year from the Nairobi National Park to a private ranch.

Need for new paradigms Governments long ago realised the futility of coercing farmers into growing crops and instead adopted market forces, yet they still persist in attempting to coerce farmers into growing “conservation”. Outside the Protected Areas, conservation clearly

Nonetheless, barriers remain, including perverse economic incentives (subsidies to agriculture); lack of appropriate legal frameworks”

can succeed only by offsetting one set of market forces and incentives against another.

Indeed, the only effective instruments of conservation policy can be economic ones, and the only effective agents of conservation can be the landowners themselves. And if market forces can be harnessed to meet national agricultural production targets then they can be harnessed to meet national conservation goals.

And if pastoral landowners will use or rent land to grow wheat then they will use or rent land to grow wildebeest—provided the returns are right.

It is the hundreds of thousands of landowners and land users in Kenya who are the real custodians of the wildlife resource, and they must be empowered to manage and benefit from these resources. And if it is accepted that Kenyan landowners can successfully herd tens of millions of livestock and can successfully cultivate hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops, then it is inconceivable to deny to them either their ability or their right to herd a few thousand head of wildlife.

Kenya needs a radical rethink of conservation policy and a completely new set of paradigms to match current economic realities. This means embracing private sector conservation (PSC)—for this is what we are talking about here. All conservation outside the Protected Areas can only be through the private sector—carried out by private individuals who own their land and who decide for themselves and in their own best interests what to do on it and what to do with it.

Worldwide, PSC is one of the fastestgrowing sectors in conservation, and already in southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe) data suggest that privately owned and managed conservation areas are roughly one-fifth (60,000 km²) of the size of state managed areas (some 300,000 km²). There are over 9,000 private game ranches, 1,100 privately managed nature reserves and over 400 conservancies.

They provide a comprehensive range of services, including wildlife viewing, sport hunting, live game sales, and bush meat production, the mix of services on offer reflecting regional and local preferences.

Many march with public sector reserves and are managed collaboratively, with the public sector reserves providing the wildlife resources utilised in the private areas.

And they do seem effective in conserving the wildlife resource: in Namibia, for example, wildlife numbers on private game ranches have increased by some 70%, diversity by 40%, and >80% of all large wildlife live on them. Typically, private sector conservation areas are highly profitable (60%–80% over operational costs) and are

direct contributors to community wealth.

So it can be done given the right conditions—namely, an enabling policy environment; well defined property rights over land and wildlife resources; rights to use wildlife and trade in live game and wildlife products; and a strong international demand for wildlife viewing and sport hunting.

Nonetheless, barriers remain, including perverse economic incentives (subsidies to agriculture); lack of appropriate legal frameworks (in some countries, a “game ranch” lacks a legal definition); lack of genuine government support (land for wildlife is still viewed as unused); lack of comprehensive land policies recognising wildlife as simply another facet of production; overlaps in institutional responsibilities (e.g. between Ministries of Agriculture and Ministries of Tourism & Wildlife); compliance costs—especially with respect to wildlife use; international restrictions on trade in wildlife products (e.g. the CITES ban on the ivory trade which prevents the full capture of the economic benefits of elephants); and still insecure property rights (e.g. Zimbabwe).

In Kenya, despite the lack of incentives and Government support, the private sector is gradually becoming more involved in conservation. Perhaps the most important development has been the formation of Wildlife Forums throughout Kenya, which bring together private and group landowners to manage their natural resources and wildlife cooperatively, the start of local empowerment for resource management.

Another significant event has been the establishment of the Mara Conservancy, where a private company is managing a conservation area on behalf of a local district council. No one will pretend there have not been teething problems, but undoubtedly the benefit flows to local communities, and the investment in infrastructure, are far superior to what they were before.

In Botswana, wildlife is state-owned but private landowners have been given custodial rights to use it (Fauna Conservation Act 1982); in Zimbabwe, the Wildlife Act of 1975 gave private farmers the right to utilise and derive the full benefit of their wildlife resources; and in Namibia, the Nature Conservation Ordinance from 1967 privatised the ownership of wildlife on privately owned land.

Elsewhere in Kenya, private concessions and reserves are springing up everywhere, offering a whole range of services from access for game viewing, bird shooting or camel trekking to camp sites and boutique lodges. These are being set up either as Turn to P14

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Special Feature Part III |

From P13

collaborative ventures between landowners and operators, or by landowners establishing their own conservation and tourism operations.

The private sector has also proved spectacularly successful in collaborating with communities to achieve conservation goals, wealth creation and poverty reduction.

Collaboration implies a measure of equality and a free market approach: you’ve got something, I’ve got something; let’s get together and party—and we’ll all benefit.

This is in stark contrast to most state- and NGO-sponsored community conservation projects which, being topdown, invariably fizzle out in a morass of committees, sub-committees, stakeholder meetings and unread reports.

There is even a growing role for the private sector within state-owned Protected Areas—through what are known as PublicPrivate Partnerships (PPPs). The basis of a PPP is that a state conservation organisation enters into a long-term agreement to contract out the management, but not the ownership, of a protected area, under any one of a number of innovative licensing and leasing schemes, but while still retaining a firm regulatory and oversight role at board level. In Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland and Zambia, PPPs are providing efficient protected area management and increased inward investment and diversified revenue flows.

Implementing new policy It was never the policy of the Government of Kenya to lose more than 50% of its wildlife in 30 years. No one actually set out to achieve this remarkable result, but in spite of all the effort, money and initiatives from the Government, conservation NGOs and donors it has happened.

Clearly there has been a massive failure on a truly massive scale by all concerned, and in the face of such failure one might expect policies to be submitted to microscopic examination, institutions to be overhauled and heads to roll. But not in Kenya: indeed, rather like a person who has been diagnosed with cancer, both the Government and the conservation movement remain in total denial that anything has gone seriously wrong.

Nonetheless, the first attempt to improve matters in the face of such a manifestly catastrophic failure in conservation policy came on the initiative of a group of Kenyan MPs mainly from the pastoral areas. In December 2004, the Kenyan Parliament passed an important amendment to the Wildlife Act which sought to make the KWS answerable 14 |

to its Board of Trustees rather than to the Government, to provide for greater participation on the Board by the landowners who actually produce wildlife, and to address the issue of compensation for the loss of life and damage to property by wildlife. This amendment came from the floor of the House, it went through all the required procedures, debates and public consultations, including with the Attorney General’s Office, and was properly voted on by the parliamentarians.

Yet, following some deliberately misleading lobbying of the President by two anti-hunting American NGOs, the Humane Society and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), the President of Kenya refused to sign the amended Wildlife Act into law. Clearly, these two hugely wealthy overseas NGOs have more influence on the President and on policy than do Kenya’s own parliamentarians.

More recently, and after much prodding and badgering, the Government at last instituted in September 2006 a national consultative review of wildlife policy which was to lead to a new Wildlife Act. A National Steering Committee was established, a policy drafting team was appointed, universities held workshops, and views were sought from one and all throughout the country in a series of two national and 22 regional seminars. But, once again foreign NGOs were able to hijack the entire consultative process.

Action Aid (which supports extreme minority land rights issues and is vehemently anti-private landowners) literally shipped in paid, rent-a-mob crowds who reduced everything to an endlessly sterile shouting match about the reintroduction of

The private sector has also proved spectacularly successful in collaborating with communities to achieve conservation goals, wealth creation and poverty reduction”

sport hunting, while IFAW launched a massively well funded publicity campaign in newspapers and on TV, with posters in Nairobi city and the international airport.

But throughout the policy review process there was no serious engagement from the tourism sector, the very wellbeing of which so largely depends on the wildlife living on private land outside the Protected Areas. The Wildlife (Conservation and Management) (Amendment) Bill, 2004 was published in the Kenya Gazette Supplement #38 (Bills #15) of 18th June, 2004.

The President was deliberately misled by these NGOs, who claimed, incorrectly, that the amendment would allow hunting in Kenya’s National Parks “within months”.

The amendment in fact made no mention whatsoever of the reintroduction of sport hunting.

Conservation NGOs including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) and the World Conservation Union (IUCN), all of which have regional offices in Kenya, clearly were frightened off by the IFAW publicity campaign, and by the threat of being labeled in favour of “killing animals for fun”. Only the East African Wildlife Society (EAWLS) become seriously involved.

So it was left largely to the Wildlife Forums to battle it out with the well-funded animal welfare and rights lobby. Most forums (there are 17 in Kenya) are solely made up of local people who live with wildlife and who struggled to articulate their concerns: if they must live with wildlife then it must benefit them. Sadly, the Nairobibased animal welfare lobbyists had a louder voice and lots of hard cash to hand out.

Kenya shares with India the dubious

distinction that all (well, most) wildlife hunting of any kind is banned. All IFAW and its ilk care about is that hunting and other consumptive utilisation of wildlife is not reintroduced to Kenya, and whether this leads to further losses of wildlife and to the perpetuation of rural poverty is completely irrelevant to them, because their underlying purpose is not to help Kenya but to be able to raise more money in North America and Europe on the basis of their “Kenya success”.

IFAW simply ignores the stark economic realities behind the tragic loss of wildlife, and in turn offers no alternative suggestions of any kind as to how wildlife can be made more profitable to landowners so that it becomes in their best interest to conserve and invest in it.

No one has any objection to IFAW holding its opinions, but one can and must object to the lengths it is prepared to go to achieve its objectives. It is bad enough that the international conservation NGOs and their donors sat back supinely for years without ever challenging the Government’s conservation policies, but IFAW and its

ilk are taking things to altogether new and dangerous levels. As Deepak Lal so elegantly puts it: Foreign NGOs claim to speak on behalf of the world’s poor but in fact speak the language of the world’s rich and invariably seek their own agendas and purpose rather than those who they purport to help. Through their financial strength and access to political elites, especially in poor countries, they are able to subvert the representative democratic process and insinuate foreign minority views into what are supposedly parliamentary majority voting systems.

The exercise of such power without accountability, transparency or responsibility is a dangerous and heady mix. IFAW and Action Aid represent at the most a million members, mainly in North America and Europe. Why should they determine Kenyan wildlife policy, rather than Kenya’s own elected parliamentarians?

Surprisingly, and despite all these distractions, the consultative process resulted in a Draft Wildlife Policy (dated April 17th, 2007) that went some of the way towards promoting wildlife conservation as a form of land use in Kenya, tackling the serious wildlife governance issues that currently persist and creating some genuine incentives for pastoral landowners to conserve and invest in wildlife, including a more relaxed policy towards consumptive utilisation.

But, in a final irony, the National Steering Committee sidelined its own drafting team and instead turned to a single IFAW consultant to produce the final version of the draft “Wildlife (Conservation and Management) Bill, 2007” (dated 10th May, 2007), a consultant who had not been involved in the consultative process, and who had little experience in either wildlife conservation or wildlife management.

This latest Draft Wildlife Bill, which the Minister should present to Cabinet for approval to send to Parliament, completely

IFAW simply ignores the stark economic realities behind the tragic loss of wildlife, and in turn offers no alternative suggestions of any kind”

undermines the earlier Draft Wildlife Policy, and imposes a top-down, autocratic approach to wildlife conservation and management which does nothing to address the catastrophic decline of wildlife in Kenya and which effectively disenfranchises communities and landowners from wildlife management decisions.

It even brings “wildlife tourism” and “recreation” under “wildlife user rights” which communities and landowners must now apply for through the Ministry and three levels of local and regional wildlife committees, along with management plans, monitoring schemes and financial plans, before they may be implemented; while at the same time offering no real incentives to pastoral landowners to conserve and invest in wildlife, and creating barriers that will prevent most community groups in the country from creating economically viable wildlife conservation areas.

Furthermore, the Bill places such tight restrictions on any consumptive utilisation (game ranching and cropping) that it will never be permitted, while banning outright sport hunting, bird shooting and game fishing. In a final irony, the Bill creates the un-constitutional power to annex private land for conservation in that conservation easements can be imposed on land against a landowner’s wishes.

None of these draconian measures has anything remotely to do with conservation, or in enabling pastoral communities and landowners in marginal areas to benefit from their wildlife: instead, they pander solely to the vociferous and well funded animal welfare lobby. Game, set and match to IFAW and their ilk? Who can tell.

Postscript So, as we were saying, how many wildebeest do you need? Well, the market should decide, but I somehow doubt if it will be given a chance to do so.

After completing his doctoral studies in zoology at the University of Oxford in 1968, Mike Norton-Griffiths spent five years as the Senior Ecologist at the Serengeti Research Institute, Tanzania.

Moving to Kenya he set up an environmental consulting company, EcoSystems Ltd., which carried out landuse, livestock and wildlife surveys throughout Africa, the Middle East and South America. In 1988 he managed the IUCN Eastern Sahel Programme before moving to UNEP to run the GEMS/UNITAR Africa Programme, which set up national environmental information networks in a number of western, eastern and southern African countries.

After spending a year as a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) Mike moved for three years as a Visiting Research Fellow at CSERGE (Centre for Social and Economic Research into the Global Environment) in the Department of Economics, University College, London.

More recently Mike has held visiting research fellowships at the Property and Environment Research Centre (PERC), Bozeman, Montana, at the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), in London, and at the International Policy Network (IPN), also in London and has carried out aerial census of wildlife in Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

Back in Kenya since 1996, Mike has worked as an independent consultant in conservation and landuse economics and is currently a Senior Research Scientist with the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF).

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Special Report

Staff morale was at its lowest ebb; the revenue base weakened drastically; uncertainty grew astronomically; poaching and insecurity increased in the parks; human-wildlife conflict climbed to alarming proportions; the future of tourism was bleak. And then . . . Enter the Strategist. The saga of how DR. JULIUS KIPNG’ETICH, a young management science specialist, appointed to head KWS by the President in December 2004 turned around the Service in less than a decade to the point where it is now By JOE OMBUOR

The New KWS in Action

T

he remarkable achievements the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has made in the last eight years have laid a firm foundation for wildlife conservation in the 21st Century and beyond.

The critical contribution the wildlife conservation industry makes to national development often goes unappreciated. Yet KWS plays multiple roles in various cross-

16 |

cutting sectors in the economy, including the environment, security, water, electricity, health, fisheries, tourism, culture, religion, transport and international conventions.

The tourism industry, which relies on wildlife, is the backbone of the economic pillar in the Vision 2030 development blueprint.

A total of 25% of the country’s GDP comes from the industry, of which 15% is

from wildlife, 5% from water and another 5% from electricity, both hydro and geothermal.

In fact, the conservation industry runs neck-and-neck with agriculture when it comes to contribution to the GDP. To fully harness such a critical resource, KWS continues with the implementation of wide-ranging reforms through various strategic management tools and initiatives to drive conservation and tourism efforts.

Desperate attempt The steady recovery of Kenya’s wildlife from the poaching threat in the late 1980s has been long and torturous. The population of large wildlife species was decimated drastically. For instance, the population of elephants declined by 70% while that of rhinos declined by 90% by 1989.

In a desperate attempt to reverse this trend, the Government appointed a total of 13 different directors to head the KWS from 1989 to 2004. This turned out to be one of

the most traumatic periods in the history of KWS. During this period, the staff morale plummeted to its lowest ebb; the revenue base weakened drastically and uncertainty grew astronomically; poaching and insecurity significantly increased in the parks; cases of human-wildlife conflict climbed to alarming proportions; and the future of tourism was bleak.

Lack of modern management practices involving developing and documenting a roadmap in the form of a strategic plan likened the organisation to a “ship sailing with no radar”, as it operated without clearly defined focus, strategic objectives and targets.

However, all these are now history, thanks to three phases of reforms spearheaded by Dr. Julius Kipng’etich, a young management science specialist, who was appointed to head KWS by the President in December 2004.

In June 2005, Julius introduced the concept of strategic planning for KWS. The three pillars he identified were people, technology and KWS’s image. Based on the log frame approach, the Strategic Plan for 2005-2010 focused on science for wildlife management, information for institutional development and marketing for financial sustainability.

How was that achieved? Kipng’etich says devolution and what he calls ‘satisfiers’, or motivational factors, played a big role.

“We made sure that the organisation’s hardware, such as proper housing, good salaries and so on, were in place, but installed software such as team spirit, recognition for excellence and work incentives to enhance their motivation”.

Implementing the plan was not smooth sailing. Kipng’etich observes: “It takes a long while to change organisation culture, especially in an environment which had become hostile like KWS”.

He explains that the process requires passion, motivation, professionalism, teamwork and, above all, capacity enhancement of the entire workforce.

New focus The Plan concentrated on institutional strengthening, especially creating order and discipline among a motivated workforce and designing structures, systems, processes and procedures to produce a more accountable and agile organisation.

The results from the 2005-2010 plans started taking effect in early 2006. KWS staff

ensured that the organisation’s conservation efforts were guided by the results of continuous scientific research. Information technology was applied to ensure that information was available in a decentralised manner for decision-making and taking appropriate action.

In addition, aggressive marketing through mass media, partnerships, and exhibitions started drawing more domestic tourists. Branding of some 22 national parks and reserves which gave each park distinct identity generated renewed interest from the public and the tourism industry.

Significant achievements in the period include strengthened institutional capacity; improved public image and stakeholder relationship; and the establishment of an endowment fund to augment the organisation’s already diversified revenue base. In developing the 2008-2012 Strategic Plan, which marked the second phase of reforms, KWS realised that the log frame approach was limited to activity level and could not relate vision and mission to performance.

A decision was made to change to the balanced score card (BSC) approach, which provided tools that could improve efficiency and productivity.

The focus for the new Plan was also changed to reflect four pillars: People as the most valued resource; new opportunities emanating from emerging technologies; strengthening the KWS image and brand; and aligning KWS operations to the Vision 2030 national development blueprint.

The shift in focus resulted in formulation of new strategic objectives in line with the new pillars. In the new Plan, enhancing wildlife conservation still remained a primary objective while attaining financial stability; enhancing partnerships with customers and stakeholders; enhancing quality service delivery; and modernising institutional capacity became new objectives for the 2008-2012 Strategic Plan.

Award winning For an independent judgment of the turnaround strategies that the organisation had put in place and opportunities to benchmark in 2007, KWS joined the Company of the Year Awards (COYA).

The culture of continuous improvement started manifesting in KWS in 2007, which made the organisation scoop two additional COYA awards in 2008. In that year, the performance of the organisation was visibly better than before as it recorded significant improvement in revenue collection.

These COYA awards were in addition to the INTERPOL Eco-message Award in Turn to P18

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From P17

recognition of the organisation’s exemplary sharing of information leading to arrest of international wildlife products smugglers.

KWS has also been rated among the top five in a survey of the most respected companies in East Africa conducted by the Nation Media Group in 2007.

The institutional and organisational capacity enhancements which KWS undertook since 2005 not only improved its performance but also increased the capability of its staff significantly.

Fruits of reforms The reforms KWS has been implementing for the last eight years have borne fruit. For five years running, KWS has had clean bills of health from the Auditor General’s office. The organisation has not only won various COYA awards, been ISO-certified but has also been granted Superbrand status.

From a revenue of Sh800 million a year in 2004, the initial restructuring saw the revenue jump by Sh300 million in just six months. The KWS budget has increased seven-fold from Sh1.16 billion to Sh7 billion in eight years.

This has enabled KWS to increase the number of vehicles for conservation operations from 90 in 2004 to the present 712, the majority of the fleet distributed in the 26 national parks, while 16 planes patrol the national parks and other wildlife-inhabited areas. More than 90% of the vehicles are less than five years old to ensure efficiency.

Currently, KWS is raking in a yearly revenue of Sh4.6 billion from sources such as streamlined conservation fees from national parks, 22 of which have been branded through renovation and rehabilitation of infrastructure system, restocking of wildlife and community outreach.

The branding of national parks and reserves has been a morale booster to staff, while adding value to visitor experience.

This has won the admiration of the tourism industry, which supports a pricing strategy that reflects the value of the Service and the unique Kenyan tourism product.

Increasing human population, adverse effects of climate change and sophistication in crime as the greatest challenge to conservation but Kenya’s wildlife is safe for posterity. In the last eight years, Kenya’s elephant population has grown from 28,000 to the current 38,000, an increase of an average of 10,000 new elephants every year.

It’s a similar success story for rhinos, which have grown from 700 in the year 2004 to the current 1,006.

Whereas main competitor South Africa’s loss of its rhino population is moving towards 250 since January, Kenya so far has lost only

18 |

five rhinos, three of them from private ranches. Kenya lost a total of 23 rhinos last year, compared to South Africa’s 448. KWS support to the communities that coexist with wildlife has risen phenomenally from Sh20 million in 2004 to the present Sh250 million a year. More communities have been brought to the conservation agenda, with a million hectares for wildlife won without the government spending money.

KWS aims to pass 10% of its income to the communities in the form of schools, health centres, water points and other communal benefits. Besides, a new department for Community Enterprise has been set up to streamline relations between investors and communities. This aims at enabling more communities to increase revenue streams beyond livestock.

However, law and policy reforms so vital for the way forward have yet to be passed. Some of the key highlights of the proposed law and policy are on institutional arrangements, compensation and benefits

sharing as well as law enforcement and punishment.

According to Kipng’etich: “We need deterrent laws in place that will treat environmental destruction of plants and animals as economic crimes, because the environment is an important pillar in our economy. It is a pity that existing laws categorize environmental destruction as a misdemeanor.

The new policy will also be instrumental in re-organising the industry into policy, operations and regulation roles.

For financial stability to cushion the organisation from uneven income, Kipng’etich says KWS has set up an endowment fund with a target of U$100 million as the principal. Interest accrued is expected to cushion conservation during lean times.

Kenya also needs to adapt and mitigate adverse effects of climate change while reaping the benefits of carbon credits from global markets. Asked about the significance of the stellar results KWS has been posting, Kipng’etich asked rhetorically: “What we are reaping today is yesterday’s crop. What will tomorrow’s crop be?”

Joe Ombuor is an experienced award-winning journalist with a flair for Science and Education writing.

A specialist feature writer, Joe has published articles in the Standard, the Nation and several local journals.

His science writing has been recognized with a CNN/Multichoice African Journalism Award in the Environment Category that he won in 2006. He is the only Kenyan winner of the Akintola Fatoyinbo African Education Journalism Award.

Cover Story |

Special Report

We needed to make sure that we were able to achieve our primary mandate of conserving Kenya’s wildlife and to do this our cash inflows needed to be reliable and sufficient – Dr. Julius K. Kipng’etich, Director. By JOE OMBUOR

KWS Lays Firm Foundation for Financial Stability

T

he Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has turned a corner in its efforts to raise resources to support conservation in the 21st Century and beyond.

The organisation has undergone several drastic changes in its top leadership between 1994 and 2004. These changes affected the organization’s financial position and its ability to generate sufficient revenue to meet Kenya’s conservation agenda.

The pre-2004 period was characterized by ineffective financial management procedures leading to gross mismanagement and loss of revenue.

The manual systems hindered the capacity to deal with the financial requirements of the organisation.

Evidence from the financial reports depicts this gloomy picture. The most telling situation was that of net income, which indicated that, in the seven-year period from 1997 to 2004, KWS oscillated around a consistent deficit position of KSh550 million at its lowest in 1998 and KSh50 million at its highest in 1999.

KWS traces the roots of its financial recovery to the appointment of a new Director in December 2004, Mr. Julius Kipng’etich, and renewed Government

The private sector has also proved spectacularly successful in collaborating with communities to achieve conservation goals, wealth creation and poverty reduction”

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support. The first step to addressing the organization’s situation was the development of the 2005-2010 Strategic Plan to strengthen institutional capacity, among other key objectives.

Conservation Under this initiative, emphasis was put on financial performance systems and improving revenue generation to support conservation. At the end of 2005, the gains had already started being felt and the internally-generated revenue doubled from KSh800 million to KSh1.6 billion.

Internally-generated revenue has increased

from KSh800 million in the year 2004 to the current KSh4.6 billion and Government subvention increased from KSh400 million to the current KSh2.2 billion.

The first step in building the institutional capacity was to address the Smart Card revenue collection system.

Later, a new system – Safari card – was installed to manage revenue collection.

Safari card brought the advantage of having more controls, including audit trails.

This was also the beginning of devolving the financial management function to the conservation areas in line with the overall organization’s decentralized structure.

The ultimate aim was to ensure that fully qualified accountants managed each of the eight regions.

Dr. Kipng’etich observes: “We needed to make sure that we were able to achieve our primary mandate of conserving Kenya’s wildlife and to do this our cash inflows needed to be reliable and sufficient.”

As the revenue collection and management improved, the set targets in the Strategic Plan of 2005-2010 were being achieved. Indeed, during the mid-term review of its 2005-2010 Strategic Plan in 2008, it emerged that 80% of the targets had been achieved ahead of schedule.

This informed the development of the Second Strategic Plan whose objectives were now geared towards growing the milestones.

Almost halfway to the end of the Strategic Plan 2005-2012, realized that we had accomplished over 80% of the targets set. The new plan is premised on an additional three drivers: People, Technology and Image, which are aligned to the country’s Vision 2030 development blueprint.

Perspectives The Strategic Plan 2008-2012, which used the Balance Score Card Performance Management Tool had one of its four perspectives being “Attaining financial sustainability”. The new objective now focused on enhancing resource mobilization, diversification of revenue streams and growth as well as effective and efficient management of resources and strengthening the devolution of financial management to parks and regional offices.

Some of the key financial achievements under the new plan include the creation of the Kenya Wildlife Service Fund (the Endowment Fund).

The Fund is designed to provide reliable, consistent funding, despite the fluctuating tourism income, unpredictable national political environments, or the vagaries of international economics. Therefore, the Fund is expected to support wildlife and community conservation efforts over future generations.

The Fund’s goal is to raise KSh8 billion (US$100 million) over a decade. Therefore, at an assumed interest rate of 10% a year, KSh750 million (about US$10 million) will then be available per year for conservation activities.

“That sum is but a fraction of the cost of countrywide conservation today — but will still be invaluable, particularly when tourism earnings dip and ensure sustainability,” said Mr. Edwin Wanyonyi, Head of Resource Mobilisation.

“Kisumu Impala Boat Race” and “Kenya Wildlife Service Animal Adoption”.

Last year, these events were able to raise a total of US$200,000. The sponsorship for the events came from corporates like Standard Chartered Bank, Safaricom, Kenya Electricity Generating Company (Kengen), Kenya Commercial Bank, Resolution Health, Coca Cola, Kenya Airways, among others.

The Kenya Wildlife Service Animal Adoption Programme gives an opportunity to individuals or corporates to sponsor an animal at the Nairobi Animal Orphanage.

The orphanage is famed for its efforts in caring for abducted, abandoned, and injured wild animals. The adoption programme is based on the fact that every animal at the Orphanage has specific needs.

The other new approach includes the commercialization of the Air Wing based at Wilson Airport, Nairobi, to hire out KWS aircraft to third parties and undertake repairs and maintenance of third-party aircraft. This would ensure that when the aircraft are not in use for park patrols, they could also generate revenue.

In order that visitors to national parks appreciate the role their park entry fees plays, it was renamed “Conservation fees”.

The change of the name was to reflect the purpose for charging the fee and endear customers to wildlife conservation as a world heritage. This was also followed by differentiated pricing approach in the parks facilities. Leases of bandas in national parks were also reviewed and rationalised.

Another resource mobilization strategy was the creation of innovative conservation fun-filled fundraising events.

They include “To Hells Gate on a Wheelbarrow”, “Cycle with the Rhino”,

The Fund is designed to provide reliable, consistent funding, despite the fluctuating tourism income”

Sponsorship The support goes directly into the upkeep of the animals by providing food, medicine, toys, translocations, cage construction, maintenance repairs, and supplies. From every sponsorship received, 50% goes directly to the Kenya Wildlife Service Fund, whose objective is to provide a sustainable source of funding for wildlife conservation and its habitats.

Other financial sustainability initiatives include commercialization of the KWS Law Enforcement Academy in Manyani to admit outsiders from the region and beyond in various courses. KWS scientists will also have a structured way of developing proposals and conducting wildlife-based research as additional revenue streams.

KWS is now focused on the third Strategic Plan, which now aims at further strengthening the financial sustainability strategies.

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Special Report

Reaching out to communities: Ms. Munira K. Bashir

Communities Invest in Naturebased Businesses ‘In essence, what we are doing is tantamount to teaching the communities how to fish instead of giving them fish’, says Ms. Munira Bashir, head of KWS’s Community Enterprise Development Department By JOE OMBUOR

W

hile wildlife occupies the core of its business, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has demonstrated that human beings who share their land and other natural resources with wildlife are very much within its radar in matters of planning.

That is why, two years ago, KWS came up with the aptly-named Community Enterprise Development Department to 22 |

streamline investments in nature-based businesses by communities.

This critical docket is headed by Ms. Munira K. Bashir and has adopted a sustainable participatory approach to win the people’s appreciation of wildlife as an asset that must be preserved for the present and future generations while supporting livelihoods.

Says Ms. Bashir: “Our mandated responsibility is to make people who share their land with wildlife to look at this heritage as an alternative land-use option to crops because the two are not compatible.

Water “We considered this approach most viable in a situation where boundaries between designated wildlife areas and human settlements remain porous and a land-use policy was passed only recently.

“We have gone out of our way to support communities hosting wildlife through public education (conservation activities and community study tours to learn from others), health and support for medical camps, provision of clean water by way of shallow wells, hand pumps, water tanks and boreholes as well as emergency and other assistance. Provision of wholesome water in particular has helped shorten the distance to water areas and

drastically reduced human contact with wildlife”.

Ms. Bashir says corporate social responsibility (CRS) has helped strengthen community-based wildlife conservation and eco-tourism for wealth generation and poverty alleviation.

“As an extra step towards their general welfare, we are encouraging communities with land frequently encroached by wildlife to set it aside for wildlife conservation upon which KWS comes in with capacity building initiatives such as the training of community rangers to guarantee standard operating procedures that give tourists the feel of Kenya, regardless of where they access the animals.

It is a win-win arrangement that has benefited both the communities and

wildlife conservation through eco-tourism”.

KWS has trained about 100 community rangers at the Manyani Law Enforcement Academy in Tsavo West National Park. The rangers are equipped with requisite skills in habitat monitoring, security for wildlife and the security of tourists.

Approach “In essence, what we are doing is tantamount to teaching the communities how to fish instead of giving them fish,” says Ms Bashir.

“The participatory approach is on the right path, with many communities coming forward to be assisted to set up conservancies. All that remains is legislation to have these conservancies registered to give a legitimate and better platform for

wildlife management governance.

“Before that legislation is passed, there exists a clause that allows the minister to use his powers to encompass emergent issues in the spirit of Vision 2030 that recognizes tourism as a key pillar of development. We can have a subsidiary legislation in the meantime”.

She describes archaic wildlife laws still in use as unfavourable to humans and wildlife conservation. “What is the rationale behind compensation by the State for death and injury caused to humans by wildlife, yet no compensation is given when citizen’s livelihoods such as livestock and crops are destroyed? These laws are creating a negative feeling against wildlife, hence the urgent need for new legislation,” she says.

Investors Ms. Bashir regrets that enactment of the new legislation has dragged on since 2006, when the process of revising the current Wildlife Act started, adding that it is high time Kenya went the path of Namibia where non-governmental organisations (NGOs) overseeing community conservation) have been a success story.

“Whereas investors are welcome to put up infrastructure such as hotels and ecolodges in community conservancies, KWS wants to scrutinize agreements reached to forestall exploitation as has been the case in the past”.

Benefits ought to be shared equitably, says Ms. Bashir, giving the example of the Mwaluganje Elephant Sanctuary in Kwale County, where investors and the community have enjoyed mutual coexistence.

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Special Report

Adopt-a-Wild Animal or a National Park Offers Endear Kenya Brand to the World From entire governments to corporates and world-beating athletics superstars, Kenya’s animals and national parks are raising funds in creative and endearing adoption programs whereby both individual wild animals and sanctuary areas are adopted. This is one of the Service’s most innovative and iconic endeavours, reports EA Flyer Special Correspondent JOE OMBUOR 24 |

T

he Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) Head of Resource Mobilization, Mr. Edwin Wanyonyi, says the organization is headed towards financial sustainability in its operations. “We have moved on from the days when our lifeline was hinged on donor funding in an atmosphere of compromised efficiency,” he says.

“With only a KSh2.2 billion government subvention, we have resorted to innovative methods to meet our annual budget requirement of Sh7 billion to finance our core operations of security for visitors and wildlife, research, management, endangered species, ecological restoration and infrastructural maintenance,” he says. Wanyonyi credits the accomplishment to the efficiency and good governance that have raised the organization’s internally

generated revenue from Sh800 million in 2004 to Sh4.6 billion currently.

He says KWS’s growth to a new status of near-financial independence has been partly due to active engagement with partners, aggressive campaigns to encourage domestic tourism in programs, engaging the tourism sector and coming up with products that justify an increase in park fees without inviting complaints from tourists and making the best use of low and high tourism seasons.

“KWS has, by way of engagement with other sectors in and outside government, undertaken infrastructural development such as the construction of roads within the parks as agent for the Kenya Roads Board. The roads are among the sources of revenue.

Funds “Through our proposed Sh100 million Wildlife Endowment Fund, we expect to raise funds from accruing interest for wildlife conservation all the time without worrying about low or distress periods such us what happened after the 2007/2008 post-election implosion. At an average interest of 10 per cent, we shall be making an average US$10 million to support conservation every year”.

Asked how the Endowment Fund will be realized, Wanyonyi says KWS has embarked on novel fund-raising activities that incorporate participation by communities.

He gives examples such as the Hell’s Gate Wheel Barrow Race that raised Sh7 million last year and is expected to raise Sh15 million this year, the Cycle with a Rhino in the Park fund-raising event, the Kisumu International Boat Race that is expected to start in the lakeside city’s Impala Park and grow into a regional affair, among others.

“By participating in these events, communities living with wildlife contribute directly to their conservation, hence appreciating this vital natural resource,” says Wanyonyi.

“We encourage prominent individuals with the wherewithal to adopt and support orphaned or injured animals in the Orphanage as happened when the world’s fastest man – Usain Bolt – visited Kenya and adopted a baby cheetah. Others who have publicly adopted animals include Prime Minister Raila Odinga, a lion, and his daughter Rosemary, a lioness.

Outgoing Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Louis Moreno- Ocampo promised to return to Kenya and adopt a baboon.

“Institutions too have adopted animals

Corporates have expressed an interest in adopting entire parks that will have their colours and signage prominently displayed.

Nations too have identified themselves with Kenya’s national parks, as seen from China’s love for Nakuru National Park since the President of Chinese Communist Party visited the park and addressed his people back home from there a few years ago.

“The Chinese have since had a lot of fascination with Lake Nakuru National Park, a facility they visit in big numbers, contributing to its infrastructural development in the process.

in the orphanage, among them Resolution Health, a cheetah, Microsoft East Africa, a giraffe, Kenya Methodist University, a cheetah, and the Kenya Tourist Board, a lion. They are supposed to care for these animals, the way parents care for their children. Some of their donations go to the Endowment Fund to help prop up conservation.

Athletes Wanyonyi says a program to adopt animals in the wild has been rolled out, attracting athletes who have expressed interest to spend some of their money on conservation.

Boosting Kenya: Above: The justretired Moreno Ocampo wants to adopt a baboon. Centre: Usain Bolt, world’s fastest man, adopted a cheetah, the fastest animal.

Next, baboons.

Infrastructure “The French on their part have a peculiar liking for Meru National Park, where they have put a lot of money for infrastructure, while the British have historical links with the Aberdares National Park, courtesy of historical connections with the British monarchy. Though minimal, support from the British Army has benefited the park.

Wanyonyi urges corporates that draw their identities from wildlife to come on board and assist in conservation.

“I have in mind Kenya Breweries, that has operated under the Tusker (elephant) banner since the company was founded in the 1920s, Nakumatt Supermarkets that uses the elephant as trademark, Tuskys Supermarkets, the Kenya Commercial Bank with the lion as their symbol, Simba Cement, Rhino Cement, Twiga Chemicals and others”.

The call of the wild in the cause of conservation has rarely been clearer.

July 2012

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Special Report

The world’s only wildlife sanctuary area next to a metropolis is increasingly threatened by a massive infrastructure project, reports EA Flyer Correspondent BETH NDUTA

The Southern Bypass

– a Necessary Evil?

N

airobi is the home of the Nairobi National Park, which covers 117 square kilometers and has a large number of wildlife animals. It is also the only wildlife sanctuary area in the world close to a capital city that is highly protected.

Located 7km from the city, the park is a grass plain, a highland dry forest as well as a riverine forest.

It is also one of the most successful rhino sanctuaries in Kenya, making it one of the places where a visitor is assured of seeing the black rhino in its natural habitat.

Other attractions in the park include birdlife, the Ivory Burning Site Monument, the Nairobi Safari Walk, the walking trails at the hippo pools as well as the Animal Orphanage.

As one of the fastest growing cities in Africa, Nairobi is a transport hub

connecting different parts of East Africa. Being a central hub and growing economically, the city has serious traffic problems. The presence of a highway cutting through the central business district (CBD) has made things much worse and it is on this same highway that endless truckloads of goods being transported to other parts of the country as well as the East African countries pass.

Congestion This situation has brought about a lot of congestion within the city and to reduce it, President Mwai Kibaki launched the Nairobi Southern Bypass on March 16th 2012.

The initiative arose from the need to offer an alternative route for transit traffic and to ensure that all vehicles going to the western or coastal parts of Kenya will not have to pass through the already-congested

The presence of a highway cutting through the central business district (CBD) has made things much worse”

26 |

Nairobi CBD. The road will connect Mombasa Road from Ole Sereni Hotel to Lang’ata Road, move through Kibera and Karen before joining the Nakuru Highway at Rironi near Limuru.

During his launch speech, the President highlighted the fact that the Government was concerned about the congestion on most of the roads in the city. The traffic situation has been moving from bad to worse, and a lot of time is wasted in traffic jams when it could have been used for more productive things than forming a line of cars on the road. Businesses suffer and, by extension, the country suffers. Even the man on the evening bus worries about his security. What will happen to him, if he gets to his neighbourhood at 10pm because of traffic jams? Who will be waiting for him on the path to his house?

The 30km dual carriageway project that is meant to solve these problems will take 4km from the Nairobi National Park.

According to Africa Network Animal Welfare, the Kenya National Highway Authority proposed that the Southern Bypass encroach on the park to create a transport corridor approximately 4km long.

According to the Friends of Nairobi National Park, the negative impacts of constructing the bypass are more than

the positive impacts. The National Park is a popular spot for visitors, both domestic and international, thus generating a lot of income in terms of park fees. Aside from that the Nairobi Safari Walk is one of the most important educational facilities in Kenya. The bypass will affect these activities and the tourism industry with them.

However, on the positive, devil’sadvocate side of it, the easing of traffic congestion in the city will make it easier for the tourists to get into the park and to other attraction sites. As the city grows, the number of visitors to the city and to the National Park has also increased and the faster we get them to the park, the better.

But then again, what will they be going to see? The bypass creates a situation that will disrupt wildlife migration patterns, meaning that the population of animals will fall, making tourist visits pointless and futile.

Affected The wildebeest, Coke hartebeest, as well as the lions and the cheetah will be affected. Such a threat to these animals is even bigger than the one posed by the Serengeti Highway to the Serengeti National Park. The Kenyan Government was successful in petitioning the diversion of the Serengeti Highway to the South and The Friends of the Nairobi National Park and African Network Animal Welfare are proposing a similar re-routing for the Nairobi Southern Bypass.

African Network for Animal Welfare offered a win-win solution, which proposes keeping the bypass on its original path, situated outside the park. It also includes the construction of a tunnel, 200 meters long, at the end of Wilson Airport, just like the one at the Pangani-Forest Road.

The construction of the Southern Bypass at the presently proposed location, aside from attacking nature’s course, will amount to condoning grabbing of public land. A legal expert, commissioned by Africa Network for Animal Welfare opined that the Nairobi National Park is public land as defined by the Constitution of Kenya.

Managing Further, the National Land Commission is the body responsible for administrating and managing all public land, therefore, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has no business or right to give any part of the park away for any purpose.

In a letter to the Kenya National Highway Authority, the East African Wild Life Society (EAWLS) claimed that the Southern Bypass route is illegal. The construction of the bypass does not follow the procedures that have been laid out in the Environment

Management Coordination Act, Laws of Kenya. Other concerns raised by EAWLS include the fact that there appear to be contradictions and compromise in regard to safety needs and the Kenya National Highway Authority did not carrying out a proper cost-benefit analysis.

In making its demands, EAWLS insisted that the Government needs to respect the integrity of the National Park and avoid undermining Kenya’s Vision 2030.

Public consultation that complies with the Constitution is very important as far as this is concerned. In terms of the environment, the construction of the Southern Bypass will cancel out all efforts made to conserve the ecosystem. Many organizations have contributed to the conservation of the Park, including EU, USAID, UNEP, the local community and some government departments.

In its defence, the Kenyan Urban Roads Authority (KURA) stated that in its construction of the Southern Bypass through the Nairobi National Park, it has no choice but to comply with the regulations of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). One of the regulations states that the bypass has to be 570 meters away from the runway, thereby placing it inside the park; which more or less puts the KURA between a rock and a hard place.

Pastoralists will also be affected by the construction of the Southern Bypass. Most of them move with their animals from pasture to pasture in search of water and food. With the construction of the road, the land on which they will graze their

The easing of traffic congestion in the city will make it easier for the tourists to get into the park”

animals will be affected. Since the Nairobi National Park is home to lions, the presence of the road will also expose livestock and humans to the danger of being mauled as it will place human traffic on the lion’s migration route. The lions will also get a fair share of ill luck because the pastoralists will want to get rid of them before they kill their livestock.

There is a possibility that the bypass will be constructed with both an overpass and underpass for the movement of wildlife, similar to that of the Banff National Park of Canada. The Canadian Government constructed a road through the park and kept wildlife away by placing high fences along it. Special tunnels and bridges to allow for wildlife migration were also built.

Evidently, looking at both the pros and cons of having the Southern Bypass constructed through the Nairobi National Park will provide a better guideline on how to move on without interfering with existing laws of nature and human laws. The Ministry of Transport and other relevant agencies must work with all relevant stakeholders in ensuring that a workable solution is found.

Beth Nduta is Learning & Mentorship Consultant at Lesleigh Inc and a creative writer with a Bachelor’s Degree in Education (English and Literature). She contributes to Princess Project Kenya (an online magazine) and is the author of Bee Illustrated (blog)

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Special Report

Why are Africans Killing all their Animals?

Poachers claim economic reasons, there are no jobs, they have families to feed and relatives to take care of. They need the animals dead because they fetch a good price that will take care of their economic needs. Governments consider poaching an illegal criminal activity. Illegal things entice people. There is a mystery and excitement that comes with forbidden fruit that encourages or draws people to it By LINDA MUSITA 28 |

O

n the first floor of the Kenya National Archives located on Nairobi’s Moi Avenue, there is a picture of what its caption describes as ‘natives’ spearing an elephant. A contrast to the wonderful collection of stamps on the wall opposite it, the picture makes you wonder where and when poaching began and who thought it a brilliant idea to kill animals for their body parts.

Maybe those natives were spearing the elephant to protect themselves, but the white man standing on the side cheering them on or spitting orders (you can never tell with a picture) makes one wonder why a crowd of men would spear an elephant walking the wild with her calf. One can only imagine, the

thoughts that Mama Elephant must have had running through her mind and the level of her anger at being cornered, not able to protect herself, or her offspring, from the spears, and later, her descendants, from the guns and poisons of human beings. If she had the will and the power to fight back, what would she have done?

Deliberate The ‘natives’ without their knowledge were contributing to the deliberate move to wipe the world clean of African elephants. In 1930, the number of elephants in Africa was estimated at 5 to 10 million: 59 years later, the number had reduced to an approximated 600,000.

Working with an average number of 7 million elephants and 59 years, the consequence is since 1930 to 1989, 118,644 elephants were killed every year by natives, colonialists and later the very independent African, now no longer a native but a sophisticated poacher.

In May 2012, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) confirmed that three containers of ivory, shipped from the port of Mombasa, were seized on May 15th at Colombo Port in Sri Lanka.

The three containers had their destinations set for India, the United Arab Emirates and Guatemala and were declared

to be carrying plastic scrap, plastic punnets and teak logs.

However, after investigations with the help of the Kenya Police, KWS reported on 6th June that only one container contained ivory, the rest had the items that had been declared.

KWS has a Security Division that works with the Kenya Police to fight wildlife crime, but they can only do so much because a big number of the wildlife population lives outside protected areas.

The elephants will still be hunted down and the ivory will find its way out of the country. Some will be salvaged; the rest will go into the market and make one or two Asians or Arabs very rich.

Giraffes, gorillas, rhinos and elephants are hunted down for wild meat, for medicine, horns and tusks. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, about 5,000 elephants have been killed since 2006. That being the number of elephants killed in the area around Noubale Ndoki National Park. The park is home to an estimated 7,000 forest elephants that are well- protected and have a better chance at survival than the elephants that are not within the park.

The rhino story is more heart-breaking.

The International Rhino Foundation’s numbers show that only five of the dozens

If she had the will and the power to fight back, what would she have done?”

of rhino species that existed in Africa remain and there are only 2,707 rhinos alive on the plains of Africa.

In South Africa and Zimbabwe, rhinos barely have a chance against the poachers’ guns, crossbows and veterinary drugs.

According to a report by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network and International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s Rhino Specialist Groups, Zimbabwe, and South Africa have the highest number of poaching incidences in Africa. The rest of Africa combined takes 5% of the cake, while Zimbabwe and South Africa take the bigger share, 95%.

Beauties The news is always about elephants and rhinos. As far as poaching is concerned in Africa, elephant tusks and rhino horns are the beauties of the beasts and they are sought after with much fervour. Well, gorillas and giraffes are also endangered.

Not for their medicinal value or their teeth, but for their meat. One dead gorilla is worth $100 in the bush-meat market, a lot of money for a poacher who can shoot two gorillas in a day without looking too hard.

In Cameroon there are organised poaching gangs that hunt and kill gorillas Turn to P30

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Special Report

for the poachers because they also get a cut from the sales of the meat.

The interesting thing about poaching in Africa is that most of the goods of the trade have a market in Asia or an Asian is involved in the trade within Africa.

Vietnam and China are good markets for rhino horns, which are used for medicinal purposes.

But China is playing nice. On June 7th, this year, wildlife experts and conservationists from China, the United States of America, the United Kingdom and South Africa, met in Beijing to more or less tell China to kill the bad habit of encouraging the poaching of rhinos.

The idea is to show China how their need for medicine is affecting another life that is equally precious. The fact that China agreed to host the experts and conservationists may be a good sign and step towards protecting the rhino.

From P29

and when they need help in the forest they enlist the help of the forest pygmies who do not require much in terms of payment.

A bottle of whiskey is good enough for a hunting party of pygmies, who will guide the poachers around the forests. The gangs use guns as their weapons of choice, the most accessible gun being an AK 47. They shoot everything that stands in their way, including forest rangers and park wardens.

Cultural village The mountain gorilla poachers in Rwanda excuse their illegal activity to lack of employment and the obligations they have towards their families. Children have to be fed and taken to school and parents have to be taken care of as well. There are no jobs and one gorilla can be sold as bush meat and the head and the feet can be exchanged for a collector’s money.

In 2006, the Iby’Iwacu Cultural Village was established. It is an eco tourism project that offers employment to former poachers. The cultural village’s main aims are to curb poaching by alleviating poverty, which is considered the main cause of poaching in Rwanda.

As good an initiative as it is, seeing as it has led to a 60% decrease in gorilla poaching, not all poachers want to become good uniformed boys. The thrill and the fast cash are a better bet for them than formal employment. They are the reason

30 |

that the number of mountain gorillas will keep reducing from the estimated 700 that are still alive despite the noble efforts of the government and eco-tourism-based cultural villages.

It turns out that giraffe meat is fit for human consumption. Somehow, someone discovered that giraffes taste real good and decided to kill them and sell the meat. Every month, 20 giraffes are killed in Tanzania. According to Tanzania National Parks (Tanapa), poaching has become rampant in protected areas and Tanapa is trying its best to cut it at its root, despite the limited resources they have, vehicles being of great importance as far as the fight against poachers is concerned.

Once a poacher has killed a giraffe, the meat is sold to restaurants and hotels in Tanzania and Kenya. The game rangers, who are not paid much of a salary, their monthly earning being $250, make it easier

Rampant poaching However, despite the good intentions of foreign governments, there is that one question: Why is poaching so rampant in Africa? Poachers claim economic reasons, there are no jobs they have families to feed and relatives to take care of. They need the animals dead because they fetch a good price that will take care of their economic needs.

Governments consider poaching an illegal criminal activity. Illegal things entice people. There is a mystery and excitement that comes with forbidden fruit that encourages or draws people to it. So much that all efforts geared towards conservation and protection of the animals are futile.

Michael Norton-Griffiths in his article, “The Kiss of Death, or Does Conversation Work?” on Page 13 of the May 2012 issue of the EA Flyer, suggested that the only way to get rid of poachers is to legalise the trade. I understood his logic to mean that in the same way we keep cows for milk and cows for beef, we can keep wild animals for tourist viewing and breed wild animals for game meat and trade.

The important things to bear in mind would be the various gestation periods and how to breed the animals commercially.

Veterinary science would play a major role in this. Create jobs and save some animals and human lives in the process? Which is the greater evil, legalising poaching or criminalising it?

Linda Musita is an Editor at Lesleigh Inc and an Advocate of the High Court. She has edited The Princess Project (K) ( http:// princessprojectkenya.com/) and is the author of Akhatenje (http://akhatenje.blogspot.com).

Travellers Tales |

Into Ituri, DRC

Into Ituri, DRC Given the historically unpredictable pattern of events and continued conflict in most parts of the eastern Congo, despite its beauty, it may take many years before it appears on the itineraries of anyone but the most adventurous of travelers, JONATHAN KALAN reports

I

awoke shortly after dawn to a natural orchestra of sounds drifting through the Congolese rainforest.

Ten short, hardened, dark oliveskinned pygmies with razor-sharp bows and arrows were milling about outside my window.

“Habari”, I greeted them in Swahili, a language that was native to neither of us, but the only common ground we could find. “Of course we’ll buy your weapons and necklaces!”

Smiles lit up their weathered faces.

We had come upon Kahopi, Wendu, and the rest of a small tribe of Mbuti pygmies a day earlier. They were huddled around a small fire, engaged in a prehunting ritual on the edge of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, a stunning 13,700km² UNESCO World Heritage Site tucked deep in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Home to the endemic Okapia johnstoni, more commonly known 32 |

as the Okapi, a rare and exotic forest animal most closely related to the giraffe, the reserve is also where thousands of Mbuti pygmies have lived, hunted and roamed for generations.

As much of the world was opening presents on that warm Christmas morning, rivulets of sweat were pouring from every inch of my skin as we – two South Africans, a fellow American and Faustine, a Congolese refugee living in Kampala – stumbled behind the nimble-footed Mbuti through the misty green womb of the Ituri Rainforest.

An intense and surreal series of howls and yodels, the Mbuti’s hunting tactic meant to drive Duikers into a series of nets strung from the foliage, slowly advanced towards us.

To most Westerners, the Eastern DRC is seen as a vast and formidable no-man’s land of endless bloody conflict, rape and abuse – our only contact with the region

Hunter: Sisko, a Mbuti tribe pygmy, waits for a Duiker (small antelope) to be chased into the hunting nets in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve of the Ituri Rainforest.

found in the diamonds on our fingers, the minerals powering our iPads, and the devastating news exported from the region.

In truth, some parts really are that bad. Once ravaged by civil war, and now by warlords and militia, many parts of the region are highly unstable. But then again, some parts aren’t. And it’s those parts we hoped to discover – the off-beat traveler’s gems in a sea of bloody minerals.

Caution Family, friends and an overprotective US Department of State all offered us words of caution – just weeks earlier the country held its second democratic elections in history, and the disputed outcome was bound to cause unrest. Yet the eastern region, disconnected by thousands of kilometers of impenetrable land and politics from the capital of Kinshasa, remained relatively unaffected.

Our journey to the Reserve traced the path of cheap Chinese flip-flops, petrol, and an endless list of imported goods. Like them, we snaked our way into the Congo through fractured arteries of transport – bus, boat, motorcycle and truck – and vastly un-toured lands.

Photography | JONATHAN KALAN

We entered the DRC through a backchannel port of Lake Albert, along the western Ugandan border, in late December. Yet our journey really began two days earlier, as we went from Nairobi, to Kampala, to Fort Portal, transitioning through congested cities dipping into open countryside, dirt roads careening through lush green hillsides, and, eventually, out into the calm savannah of Toro Game Reserve.

As we arrived in Ntoroko, a decrepit port town on the southeast corner of Lake Albert, a Ugandan immigration official informed us that we were in luck – the lake now had a ‘speedboat’, and for $15 we would get to Kasenyi, our entry point to the Congo, in about an hour-and-a-half. We were optimistic.

Of course, traveling off the beaten path – in places where they fill your boat’s fuel tank through a laborious manual process of siphoning petrol straight from a barrel into 20-liter jerry cans – one must expect the unexpected. The boat could make it in less than two hours, but that’s only when it’s filled with people. For that, it turned out, we’d have to wait another several hours in the oppressive midday heat and humidity.

Bantering back and forth in broken Swahili with day laborers loading flip-flops and mattresses onto a wooden cargo boat bound for the Congo, time slipped by with complicity. We swapped stories, cigarettes, and photographs while Congolese music blared from cell phones. For us, the sense of this formidable ‘Congo’ looming ahead perhaps made us savor these slow moments of anticipation.

Hours later, we skimmed across the

placid waters of Lake Albert, arriving at the concrete dock of Kasenyi, our gateway to the DRC. We had been advised to expect the worst at immigration. Travelers to the DRC may experience “temporary detention, passport confiscation, and demands by immigration and security personnel for unofficial ‘fees’,” the US State Department warned.

Yet our experience was quite the opposite, and quickly we found ourselves traveling hard against the grain of the typical eastern Congo narrative. Less than 20 minutes later, Julius, the Chief of Immigration, offered us a sincere “welcome to Ituri” and Jacque, another immigration officer, became our jovial town guide – securing us a meal and a night at a guesthouse.

Easy riders: On the road to Bunia, DR Congo.

The easiest, cheapest, and often only form of transportation between the two is motorcycle taxis. Hill country: Stunning landscapes of Ituri, Eastern DR Congo. Taken on the road between Kasenyi and Bunia, on a hill overlooking Kasenyi towards Lake Albert.

In 2003, Ituri, the eastern most region of Oriental Province, one of the DRC’s 10 fractured attempts at subdividing a nearly non-functional central government into even less manageable states, was dubbed the ‘Bloodiest Corner of the Congo’ by Human Rights Watch. As the country emerged from a violent civil war in 2003, Ituri continued to struggle with a vicious ethnic conflict, primarily between the Hema and Lendu communities, and Bunia, the capital, was its epicenter.

Direction The region is now nimbly straddling the line between ‘emergency relief” and ‘early recovery’, said Cyprien Gangon, the head of the United Nations Development Programme in the area, with little teetering in either direction. While major conflicts ceased around 2004, and much of Ituri has been relatively stable since, the peace is still fragile.

“Lock vehicle doors and keep windows closed when driving”, another DRC travel advisory, was faintly drifting through our minds as we loaded up our two-wheeled caravan of motorcycle taxis, and began to carve our way through the striking terrain and crippled roads of Ituri towards Bunia.

We flew past makeshift FRDC military checkpoints entirely unchecked with wave, smile or salute. When one group of men with AK47s attempted to halt our progress for bribes, our five boda drivers simply overwhelmed them and drove on.

We assumed this was normal, though it probably wasn’t.

We passed through Bogoro and Vilo villages, where in 2003 the two communities took part in a brutal one-day Turn to P34

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Into Ituri, DRC

From P33

massacre that left over 200 people dead.

“It was terrible during the conflict,” Lokpa Rogert, an elder of Vilo Village, told us when we visited later on. “If you were not here, and survived it, you could not understand. It was just killings,” he reflected, his voice deep with emotion.

Yet we witnessed a different side of Ituri – young men, left crippled by the war, training to be carpenters and welders; communal soccer fields being built; disabled women disrupting village stereotypes by starting small tailoring businesses. Despite what the headlines had told us, we saw life in Ituri resuming – and, in some cases, even booming.

We pulled into Bunia late in the afternoon, caked with dirt from being stuck behind a slow-moving UN convoy, and warmly welcomed by a 40-foot Primus Beer advertisement, the most colorful thing in sight. The drab and dusty town serves as the regional headquarters for MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission that has operated in the eastern Congo since 2001, formerly under the name MONUC. Its mission was to monitor the peace process of the Second Congo War, however it has spent considerable funding and efforts in dealing with the Ituri conflict and the militias in the Kivus.

Although MONUSCO is seen as the glue holding the entire fabric of Ituri together, at the micro level it is the work of community-based organizations, grassroots nonprofits, and the community members who are bringing a sense of normality to people’s lives.

This is a story that Kalongo Rwabikanga, an inspiring Congolese man we were introduced to, knows all to well. His organization, Synergie Simama, has brought together the work of ten grassroots 34 |

organizations around Ituri which empower disabled and vulnerable women and youth, offering them vocational training, physiotherapy, and countless other services to help them and their communities.

As we explored the small town, we stumbled into the Café De La Paix (Café of Peace, in French) a beautiful colonial restaurant built in 1958, and a cheery old light-skinned woman chain-smoking Sportsman cigarettes behind the counter.

Roads It turned out that Miss Mohammed, or Mapoli Kibonge as she’s known by her Congolese name, was born in Ituri in 1938.

Her grandfather arrived in Bunia from Iran as a tourist in 1905, and ended up staying to build the roads from Bunia to Nyoka.

When Mapoli’s Father came to visit in 1935, he fell in love with a local Chief’s daughter, and in two years Mapoli was born, a woman of extremely unique heritage.

She has seen the best and worst of times in Bunia, once working under Mobutu’s regime as head of a woman’s economic association for the region.

Despite fleeing the violence no less than

Let’s prey: Kahopi, an elder of a Mbuti pygmy tribe in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve of the Ituri Rainforest, leads a hunting expedition with a series of nets draped from the trees.

four times, and with 32 grandchildren spread out all across the globe, she chooses to remain in Bunia. “It’s home”, she told us.

And now, she added hopefully, “Bunia is improving”.

We left Mapoli’s gracious hospitality, to board the bus to our final destination – Epulu, the small town on the edge of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve.

Now, I’d heard rumors of the Congolese buses, but nothing could prepare me for the steel beast that would bring us hours into the jungle. Our ‘Nile Coach’ looked, felt, and smelled as if its soul had been torn from the engine, and crushed by its own weight.

The amount of pieces missing seemed to outnumber those that remained; yet it dawned on me that this particular specimen must have been the most

Photography | JONATHAN KALAN

successful outcome of the Mr. Potato’s bus experiment. Like the joke about the Swahili language, the DRC appears to be where buses come to die. Four bus skeletons, boasting a rainbows collage of colors, makes, models, and pieces, littered the station.

For eight hours we sat stuffed like a human jigsaw puzzle in this poor bus, conjoined to the people around us by their sweat, smell and heat. Cheap Chinese flipflops stacked the entire aisle two feet high, and we descended into the jungle one squirming mass of humanity, HP-Printers, and rubber.

We had secured a comfortable renovated Belgian colonial cottage perched on the banks of the Epulu River, the perfect place for a relaxing holiday, it seemed. After checking in, we relaxed on the terrace,

Above: An Okapi johnstoni, or Okapi, DR Congo’s national symbol, and the logo of the Congolese Wildlife Authority, displays its long, purple tongue.

The endangered animal is most closely related to the giraffe, and is often referred to as the ‘forest giraffe’.

An estimated 30,000 survive in the wild, all presumed to be located in the Ituri Rainforest.

The Okapi Reserve Capture and Breeding Station, a project of Gilman International Conservation, studies, tags, and breeds the exotic animals.

Left: Sisko, a Mbuti tribe pygmy, with his wife, in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve of the Ituri Rainforest.

The reserve is inhabited by close to 20,000 people, mostly Bantu origin agriculturalists, yet is also the home to thousands of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer Mbuti and Efe pygmy tribes.

watching kids cast fishing nets as they gracefully waded upstream, lines dangling the day’s catch knotted to their waists. The distant roar of the river provided a constant companion to the cacophony of bird and insect calls permeating from the jungle.

“There is no local equivalent to the ‘911’ emergency line in the Congo”, was one of the last lines in the DRC travel advisory. Yet even if we had reception, we wouldn’t have called. Despite a rough history, the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, which occupies about one-fifth of the Ituri Forest, felt pristine, untouched, and safe.

Turmoil Run by the ICCN (the Congolese wildlife authority), the Reserve suffered a great deal of turmoil between 1996 and 2002 – as battles were fought, resources extracted, and populations harassed inside the reserve.

Yet the quelling of conflict, the reopening of the main road through the reserve in 2007, as well as continued international support of local programs, has all shown signs of positive development.

New development, expansion of agriculture, mining exploration, and most notably poaching, however, remain the most pressing threats.

The main attraction in the Reserve, the Okapis themselves, currently number around 20,000, yet are nearly impossible to see in the wild, and a Capture and Breeding station, a project of Gilman International Conservation, hosts the endangered creatures up-close.

Shy yet curious like horses, wild and exotic with zebra stripes on their hindquarters and moose-like ears perched on their elegant heads, the Okapis appear more like a Darwinian hodgepodge, a mistake, than a creature of beauty. But to witness – and even touch one – first-hand was an unforgettable experience.

For a week after our ‘holiday’, we snaked our way back through the Congo to Nairobi, yet this time in half-empty buses and following the path of nothing in particular. While nearly everything is imported, the region’s exports are mainly limited to minerals, lumber, coffee, and tragic news.

Perhaps we were lucky. There are a million ways to imagine how our DRC vacation could have gone wrong.

“Everything is absolutely fine until it’s not”, were the wise words given to us just hours before our departure from one photojournalist friend in Kampala. Yet, for us, the trouble we may have expected never came.

When we finally said goodbye to our Mbuti friends, their bows, arrows and necklaces in tow, we vowed to make it back again, and promised to share with the world one of the DRC’s most naturally beautiful hidden gems. We were fortunate, or perhaps bold, enough to venture behind the constant narrative of war, conflict, corruption and poverty, to be rewarded with warm smiles, generous Congolese hospitality, and an opportunity Turn to P36

July 2012

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Travellers Tales |

Into Ituri, DRC

From P35

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Photography | JONATHAN KALAN

to experience an incredible, unseen, and untold side of the country.

We had come upon them minutes earlier in a clearing on the edge of the thick jungle. Ten short, blockish, dark olive-skinned men and children holding a pre-hunting ritual – smoking pot and communicating with ancestors through a small brush fire.

They were Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, but in this sacred moment repeated for generations, everything else was cast aside – traditional beliefs still hold strong for the Mbuti community.

Decorated like most rural and possessionless Congolese – sporting ratty and worn relics of foreign sports teams – the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest were at least a foot shorter, stunted heads planted on frail yet rigid bodies.

Hunting for bush meat with one of the oldest indigenous populations of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and paying a visit to the elusive, endemic, and endangered Okapi (once alluded to as the ‘African Unicorn’), on the eastern edge of the country just weeks after disputed elections, was perhaps not the typical traveler’s dream of a relaxing Christmas holiday. But it was exactly what our off-beat itinerary held.

We traveled by local transport through vastly un-toured and unstable lands – by bus, motorcycle, boat, and car – to arrive

at a small river of peace and tranquility. We came as visitors, but left with an endless list of friends – from immigration officers and restaurant owners to senior UN officials and volunteers. I departed from Nairobi, Kenya’s Akamba bus terminal, late one Friday night, bound for Kampala, Uganda,

our real departure point. In perhaps the least promising start to a two-week journey, our bus broke down barely past Nairobi’s traffic. Three hours of fellow passengers complaining how Akamba, once East Africa’s largest transporter in the 1950s was ‘fading fast into the sunset,’ something I can certainly attest to with experience, and we were finally back on the road.

Untold We emerged from the eastern DRC several days later with an untold story.

Perhaps we were lucky, or perhaps we were foolish. Yet we were fortunate enough to venture behind the constant narrative of war, conflict, corruption and poverty, we were welcomed with warm smiles, generous hospitality and treated to a beautiful, unseen side of the country.

Given the historically unpredictable pattern of events and continued conflict in most parts of the eastern Congo, despite its beauty, it may take many years before it appears on the itineraries of anyone but the most adventurous of travelers.

Jonathan Kalan is an internationally published photojournalist, journalist and blogger specializing in the intersections of business, innovation and social development in emerging markets. In just 24 years he has traveled to over 35 countries, worked in South Asia and Africa, and collaborated with NGO’s, social enterprises, technology start ups, and media companies.

His work has appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Boston Globe, GlobalPost, The Huffington Post, The Star (Kenya), Stanford Social Innovation Review, Destination Magazine EA, How We Made It In Africa, The Christian Science Monitor, On The Ground (New York Times blog), and many others. He was a Finalist for the 2011 Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards.

Jonathan is currently based in Nairobi, Kenya, freelancing and documenting stories of social enterprises, entrepreneurs, and innovations for The (BoP) Project.

Foreigners |

Cheese-maker Extraordinary

Photography | ROOPA GOGINENI

Marrying into Cheese An American cheese-monger settles in Limuru, Kenya and produces some of Africa’s finest cheese

By ROOPA GOGINENI

T

wo years ago, Andrew and Delia Stirling lived in Phoenix, Arizona. He sold electronics while she sold commercial real estate. The commute to work was long, leaving the couple little time to spend with their young sons, Alec and Kincaid.

As many do, the Stirlings grew tired of this lifestyle but, unlike most, the couple had a compelling alternative.

They left the United States for Kenya to take over Delia’s parents’ cheese business.

Now the family of four lives on a 6-acre farm in Limuru, just north of Nairobi. “We work more here, but the kids are always around”, says Andrew.

Delia’s parents, Kenyans of British descent, established the business in 1979.

It all began with a craving. Forty years ago,

Above: Delia Stirling leads a cheese factory tour every Saturday for visiting guests.

David Brown asked his wife Sue to make some brie cheese. He was bored with KCC cheddar, the only cheese available in Kenya at the time.

Imported cheese had been banned in an attempt to encourage the local industry. Sue’s brie was a hit – she made more to give as Christmas gifts and soon people were asking to buy her cheese.

From this the business was born. In time, the production facility expanded from a small room in the basement to a large production facility adjacent to the family’s home.

Now under Andrew and Delia’s management, the product line has grown from a sole brie to 15 different cheeses, the largest variety produced at a single factory anywhere in the world. Colleagues abroad have told the Stirlings that they produce fourteen cheeses too many. “Normally

artisan cheesemakers will focus all of their efforts on a single cheese,” Delia explains.

Specialization If she could, Delia would produce just one variety, but the market in Kenya is not large enough for specialization. Today Brown’s customer base comprises just half a per cent of Kenya’s population, a majority are expatriates and Kenyan Asians.

The absence of cheese in traditional Kenyan diets limits the mass-market appeal of Brown’s products. “Several of our Kenyan staff really dislike cheese,” Andrew noted. He suspects a culture of preserving foods never developed in Kenya or much of sub-Saharan Africa because of the climate. In Europe, long winters necessitated food preservation.

“The most delicious foods are preserved!”

Turn to P38

July 2012

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Foreigners |

Cheese-maker Extraordinary

From P37

Andrew exclaims, “cheese, meat, and wine”.

He protests the reputation of cheese as a highbrow food, historically people made cheese to extend the life of milk.

Curd The invention of cheese likely occurred by accident, several thousand years ago, when Arab travelers used animal stomachs to carry milk. Rennet, an enzyme found in stomach lining, separated milk into curd and whey and a soft cheese was produced from the compressed curds.

The practice of making cheese has been refined over centuries and across continents, today nearly 500 internationally recognized varieties exist. Artisan cheeses such as Brown’s, made in small batches and produced by hand, are gaining in popularity. “Making cheese is a science, but it also an art,” Delia states, “It is difficult to make the same cheese twice.”

All 15 varieties of Brown’s cheese begin with either cow’s milk or goat’s milk. They keep a small herd of Friesian cattle on site

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Above: Milk is separated into curds and whey at the Brown’s cheese factory. Right: A cheese tasting concludes every factory tour. Tasters start with the mildest cheese, a provolone, and end with a strong blue cheese. Inset: Curds remain after rennet is added to fresh milk and the whey is drained. Below: A Friesian cow from Brown’s small herd is milked.

in Limuru and supplement their stock by purchasing milk from three hundred farmers in the surrounding community.

Limuru’s proximity to Nairobi – it is just a 30-minute drive – inflates costs.

The market price for milk is highest in Nairobi and Brown’s must compete with buyers in the city. Goat’s milk is especially difficult to procure; goat farmers are generally poorer and are unable to afford the transportation infrastructure needed to deliver their milk in a timely manner.

After the milk is delivered to the factory, it is mixed with rennet in a large steel basin. The rennet used in Brown’s cheese is vegetable-based, making the product vegetarian-friendly. In Kenya this is especially important for attracting Asian customers. After the rennet is added, one part curd is produced from every 10-parts milk.

The whey, the liquid remaining after the milk is curdled and strained, is fed to pigs on the Brown’s farm and other farms in the area. The curds are then pressed into a mold and allowed to age. The fat content of the milk, the amount of pressure applied to the curds, the size and shape of mold, and the length of time a cheese is aged all affect the texture and taste.

Upon meeting Andrew it is difficult to imagine that there was a point in his life when cheese was peripheral, just something he liked to eat. Andrew, a Michigan native, attended Cornell

University in Ithaca, New York, where Delia was also a student. With degrees in mechanical engineering and business, Andrew worked in management and sales for several years.

His foray into fromage began seven years ago while on holiday visiting Delia’s family in Kenya. Sue Brown taught Andrew to make his first cheese. After deciding to take over the business, he studied for one year at the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese, a center at the University of Vermont. The formal training equipped him with technical skills, though, Andrew claims, “making cheese is more valuable than learning about making cheese”. Most of his cheese savvy comes from hands-on experience.

Craving As it did 40 years ago with Sue’s brie, product design at Brown’s often starts with a craving. Four months ago, Delia’s frustration at having to buy imported cured meats led her to hang a ham in a cool, well-ventilated room. In five months she will have prosciutto.

Though the company does not yet sell meat, the results of such experiments with cheese often end up on the shelves of Nakumatt, served in the front of Kenya Airways flights, and in hotels and lodges around the country. Chefs around Kenya also approach the Stirlings to identify gaps in their cheese lineup.

Though the breadth of artisanal cheeses produced at Brown’s is unusual, the quality remains uncompromised. Brown’s aged gouda and plain soft cheese took the coveted qualité prize awarded at the 2010 South African Dairy Championships.

Brown’s Cheeses also dominated four consecutive East African Cheese Festivals hosted in Nairobi. These awards are buttressed by sales figures. In the two years since Andrew and Delia took over, Brown’s has experienced a 40% growth in sales and production.

separate, he leads visitors on a tour of the factory, into aging rooms that are climate controlled to simulate caves from the cheese-making of old.

Thousands of rounds of cheese mature, waiting in perfectly spaced lines. Following the tour, a cheese tasting commences with a mild provolone and ends with Brown’s strongest cheese, the blue stone cheese. Lunch is then served. When asked if everything is sourced from the farm, Andrew concedes, “Well, we don’t make our own flour”.

They are now looking to expand internationally and have represented Africa at the Fancy Food Show in New York City.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act, passed in 2000, encourages US-African trade by promoting free markets.

The initiative would allow Brown’s to export their cheese to the US duty-free.

Before Andrew is able to sell his cheese back home, he must work through the logistics and costs of maintaining a cold transport chain from Nairobi, through Europe, and into the US. In Limuru, the Stirlings host cheese tastings and lunches at the farm to get to know their customers. Guests are greeted with glasses of wine and fresh halloumi grilled in rosemary and mint. Andrew begins by demonstrating how cheese is made, pouring rennet into milk and setting it aside. While the curds and whey

Lunch After lunch, guests spend an afternoon in the gardens, with fruit and vegetable plants running wildly into one another.

Visiting children can milk the cows and watch the piglets but from a distance, their parents have serious teeth. One hog is named “Bacon”, Andrew explains, “to remind ourselves not to get attached”.

The farm is made sustainable by a worm compost behind the house, which processes all of the organic waste.

On a sunny Saturday in May during a farm tour, Alec, now four years old, showed around visiting kids. Rainy season had turned much of the property into a giant mud pit. A couple boys followed him to the fenced-in herd of cows, struggling to keep up as their wellies got stuck with every step.

“I want to play with that cow!” The boy made motions to open the gate.

Alec intervened, “it will kick.”

“Well,” the other boy reasoned, “let’s wait for another.”

In a wisdom intrinsic to barefooted boys on farms, Alec responded, “they all kick”.

Above: The table is set for lunch, prepared with food fresh from the Brown’s farm.

Left: Rounds of cheese age in climate controlled rooms. Below: Andrew Stirling with his wife Delia and their two-year-old son, Kincaid.

Inset: Kids watch colobus monkeys overhead while on a tour of the Brown’s farm.

For Andrew and his family, the move to Kenya is permanent. They left behind the suburban traffic for a sustainable and delicious life in the highlands of Limuru. Of course, there are challenges. The market for artisanal cheese is vulnerable in moments of unrest.

Andrew noted that sales plummeted following the post-election violence in 2008. Power supplies are unreliable, when your entire store depends on a temperature-controlled room, a power outage or broken generator is perilous.

The expensive European equipment in the factory breaks often and the replacement parts are oceans away, but Andrew makes do by driving to the Industrial Area and finding mechanics who specialize in improvisation. Most everything can be fixed within hours.

“Yes, we are here for good,” Andrew said, as he watched his ridgeback chase after a guinea fowl in the backyard.

Photography | ROOPA GOGINENI

Roopa Gogineni is an American journalist and photographer based in Nairobi. She received a BA in History and African Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MSc in African Studies from St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. She has produced radio, video, photographic and written reports for various outlets, covering news in North and East Africa.

Roopa is a regular contributor to Voice of America and Radio France International

July 2012

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Big Ideas Forum |

Innovations for a Changing World

Four-Legged Liberators Rodents trained to detect TNT, the explosive agent found in most landmines, are seriously redefining the old adage about ‘smelling a rat’ — by sniffing out danger JESSICA SILBER reports

T

he village of Niza lies deep in the Pfukwe Corridor, a rarelyvisited region in the Gaza Province of Mozambique.

It sits amid scrubby brush in the rural landscape, alongside a railroad track that runs from Maputo to Zimbabwe.

On the other side of the track lay the mines.

At 25 kilometers in length, the Pfukwe Corridor minefield is one of Mozambique’s longest. The mines here were laid during Mozambique’s 10-year civil war to protect

42 |

the railway – a crucial supply artery – from attack.

As is so often the case with landmines, the weapons remained in the ground long after the war’s end in 1992. Out of fear, Niza’s inhabitants avoided the opposite side of the railroad track. But months became years, years became decades, and avoidance grew increasingly difficult.

Firewood dwindled on the side where the village lay, while lush forests beckoned from across the railroad. Livestock, having exhausted the available grass on the one

side of the track, ventured across the railway and encountered landmines; dying, according to the accounts of some villagers, at a rate of one animal a day.

And Niza, like so many other mineaffected villages, stood stagnant.

Dulce Mazuze, one of Niza’s two resident schoolteachers, sighs when asked about the devastating effect the landmines have had on the village’s development. Gesturing to the one-room schoolhouse where she and fellow teacher Eliarda João work, she says, “They affect even the school because they affect the development of the community. For example, people can’t collect wood for fires because they are afraid of mines. And we need firewood for the school. There’s no investment in the community; so there’s no investment in the school”.

“We work in these conditions,” adds Eliarda. “We must make our own effort.”

Life in Niza continued this way for nearly two decades – until an unlikely liberator arrived in the Pfukwe Corridor.

“In 2009,” Dulce recalls, “I heard there were rats that were being kept and trained to find landmines. I thought, oh, my!” she says with a laugh, demonstrating her amazement. “I admired that they could do this.”

The news of these incredible rats spread throughout the region. People living in the area surrounding Niza confirmed that a demining organisation had set up camp in the neighboring village of Pelane, where these uncommonly enormous rodents were being trained to detect landmines.

Of course, the creatures had not materialised in the Pfukwe Corridor to begin clearing fields on their own. They’d come with APOPO, a Belgian NGO whose humanitarian Mine Action programme had arrived in the Gaza Province three years prior. But APOPO’s journey through Mozambique to the Pfukwe Corridor had begun even earlier, in Belgium: a country as far removed from the deadly threat of landmines as can be imagined.

An Unusual Approach It was when he was conducting an analysis of the global landmine problem at the University of Antwerp that Bart Weetjens, a product engineer, had his a-ha moment.

A rodent enthusiast as a child, Weetjens was no stranger to the animals’ intelligence, trainability, and olfactory capabilities. When this knowledge was coupled with a passion for the African continent that had been instilled in him through travel, he arrived at an idea for a new approach to demining; an approach that was sustainable, cost-effective,

rapid, and placed local people and local resources at the wheel.

Following initial research and financial support from the Belgian Directorate for International Co-operation, APOPO – an acronym for the Dutch AntiPersoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling, or Anti-Personnel Landmine Detection Product Development – registered under Belgian law as a noncommercial agency in 1998.

Two years later, Weetjens and the nascent APOPO moved camp from Belgium to Morogoro, Tanzania, where a partnership was established with the Sokoine University of Agriculture – and where African giant pouched rats,

Above and below left: APOPO’s team of men and their trained rats work each day in one of Mozambique’s largest minefields.

Right: Mine Detection Rat Supervisor Zacharias feeds one of the team’s star rats after a morning of reinforcement training in the Pfukwe Corridor, Mozambique.

the detection species of choice, were abundant.

With a lifespan of up to eight years, an African giant pouched rat can expect a long and successful career in Mine Action.

And weighing in at about 1kg, the rats are much too light to detonate a landmine. To earn the official title of Mine Detection Rat (MDR), they train for about nine months, at a cost of approximately €6,000 – much less than the average accepted cost of Turn to P44

July 2012

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Big Ideas Forum |

Innovations for a Changing World

From P43

training a Mine Detection Dog. In peaceful Tanzania, a country unburdened by mines, rats are trained according to the principles of operant and Pavlovian conditioning to work in some of the world’s most dangerous areas.

Rats trained for landmine detection will learn to recognize the scent of TNT, the explosive agent found in most landmines.

Their incentive for distinguishing a sample of TNT from other, neutral samples is a reinforcing click noise made by their trainer, followed by an immediate offering of a food reward: typically banana or peanut.

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Above: Rats are loaded onto a vehicle to begin their morning of landmine detection.

Below: Rat detective being fed.

Once a rat has proven that he or she can reliably locate a sample of TNT, his or her trainer must guide them through a series of training stages in near-toreal conditions at APOPO’s landmine detection training field.

Beneath the field’s 24 hectares are buried over 1,500 deactivated landmines.

Each morning, a pair of trainers will attach the trainees to a harness and place them in a designated training box, containing anywhere between zero to four mines.

When a rat smells the target scent of TNT, he or she must alert their trainer to the presence of a mine by scratching at the ground for a sustained length of time. A correct signal is again reinforced by the sound of the click and the subsequent offering of a food reward.

If a Mine Detection Rat-in-training passes three tests at the most advanced stage, he or she is declared fully internally accredited, and has earned his or her flight ticket to Mozambique. Here, one more test awaits: an exam is administered externally by Mozambique’s National Institute of Demining. Passing the test means a trainee will officially be declared a Mine Detection Rat. The first group of 11 MDRs were licensed according to International Mine Action Standards in 2004, and APOPO’s Mozambique Mine Action Programme took flight. In 2008 – one year before the rats arrived in the Pfukwe Corridor – APOPO was tasked by the National Institute of Demining as the sole demining operator for the entire Province of Gaza.

Rats and Results In the Pfukwe Corridor, the day begins at 5am for APOPO’s Mine Action Team. At this early hour, mechanical team members, manual deminers, and MDR handlers don their protective gear and return to the opposite side of the railway for another day of mine clearance.

While schoolteacher Dulce Mazuze’s amazed reaction to learning about APOPO’s detection rats is characteristic of the rats’ unique magnetism, the Mine Detection Rats are far from APOPO’s only asset in the field.

As a humanitarian demining organization, APOPO’s achievements are a result of a combined approach to their Mine Action work. Before a trained Mine Detection Rat can set even one paw in the

deadly minefields of the Gaza Province, the ground must be mechanically prepared by APOPO’s mechanical team, men who control the impressive machine power of APOPO’s demining operations.

Once ground has been prepared for clearance, APOPO’s manual demining team moves onto the land, creating safe lanes for deminers to walk within and demarcating the 10x 20 square metre boxes where APOPO’s Mine Detection Rats will perform their duties.

Metre by metre, the team progresses through the Pfukwe Corridor. It’s in this painstaking manner that APOPO has cleared more than 2 million square metres of land in the Gaza Province, with an additional 2.2 million square metres of land cancelled from clearance and returned to

Above: APOPO’s Mine Detection Rat Team clears a demarcated box with one of their trained African giant pouched rats, while a supervisor observes. Right: Teachers Dulce Mazuze and Eliarda João stand with their students outside of the village schoolhouse.

When APOPO has completed landmine removal in the area, the villagers have plans to use previously unavailable resources to build a new school for their children Left: APOPO’s Mine Detection Rats and their handlers live in this permanent campsite in the Pfukwe Corridor, beside the railroad tracks.

the population, thanks to technical and non-technical survey techniques. Since the beginning of operations in the Province, APOPO’s mechanical, manual, and MDR teams have located and destroyed 1,866 landmines, 783 explosive remnants of war, and more than 12,000 small arms and ammunition.

The incredible progress in Mozambique set the precedent for the establishment of APOPO Mine Action programmes in other parts of the world.

In 2010, the organisation initiated a Mine Action operation in Thailand, where survey teams (made up of humans, not rats) are currently at work detailing land along the mine-infested border with Cambodia.

Plans are also underway for APOPO to replicate its Mine Action successes in a new program based in Angola, one of the world’s most heavily mined countries. Governments, foundations, and stakeholders are watching as APOPO’s Mine Action programmes ensure that mines are no longer an obstacle to development and growth.

But the most important stakeholders are not foreign governments or agencies.

They are alongside APOPO in the field, and they are watching, too. And waiting.

Schoolteacher Dulce Mazuze and the villagers of Niza wait patiently for the day when APOPO declares the Pfukwe Corridor mine-free at last, and inhabitants know they can once again cross the railroad, collect firewood, and let their cattle graze without fear.

Already, there are plans for growth in Niza.

“When APOPO finishes, we will be using this land right away,” Dulce declares with a smile. “We are very excited. There are plans to build a new school here in Niza. A local church will use the resources

to build the school.”

“Now, we are feeling so happy,” Eliarda agrees. “We know that mines are being removed, making life easier for us. I think it is brilliant work.”

Jessica Silber is a nonprofit communications professional with an editorial background, whose work has appeared in Connecticut magazine, Westport magazine, and Folio magazine. She is originally from the northeast United States and now resides in Tanzania, where she is the Communications Coordinator for APOPO.

July 2012

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Events |

Italian National Day

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Italy Marks National Day in Style Italians and their well-wishers in Kenya celebrated the Festa Della Repubblica, or Italian National Day, on June 2 with a reception at the official residence of the Italian Ambassador to Kenya, Ms. Paola Imperiale, in Muthaiga, Nairobi. Kenya was represented at the celebrations by Justice Minister Eugene Wamalwa and Sports Minister Paul Otuoma. Among the dignitaries who toasted the Italian Republic were members of the Diplomatic Corps, captains of industry and media personalities. American Ambassador Jonathan Scott Gration was in attendance. Italy became a Republic on June 2, 1946, following World War II and the abolition of the monarchy. EA Flyer photographer SALATON NJAU was at the reception to capture the most memorable aspects of the event and brings you this Photo Essay.

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4 1: Italian Ambassador to Kenya Paola Imperiale is joined by Sport Minister Paul Otuoma, Justice Minister Eugene Wamalwa and Northern Development Minister Mohamed Elmi during playing of the national anthems on Italy’s National Day on June 4, 2012 at her Residence in Muthaiga. 2: From left South Africa High Commissioner Ndumiso Ntshinga, Uchumi Supermarkets CEO Jonathan Ciano and Chief of Mission, Consulate of Gabon, Samira Furrer. 3: US Ambassador Jonathan Scott Gration with Justice Minister Wamalwa. 4: Ambassador Imperiale with Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore. 5: Guests sample Italian delicacies during the occasion. 6: Attentive guests during the reception.

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July 2012

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Events |

Italian National Day

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7-8: Guests at the National Day fete.

9: Ambassador Imperiale joins Qatari Ambassador Al Abdullah and Algeria Ambassador Saad Maandi. 10: Kuwait Ambassador Yusuf Al-Sanad and Saudi Arabia Ghorm Said Malhan. 11: New York Times East Africa Bureau Chief Jeffrey Gettleman and Matilde Carrona, Chief of Consular Section Italian Embassy. 12: From right Naomi Scott, Mari Warne Smith both of the UN and Helana White of US Embassy.

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13: Ambassador Imperiale and the Chairman of the Alfa Romeo Club, Bob Dewar. 14: From left Tanzanian High Commissioner Batilda Buriani, Slovakia Ambassador Michal Mlynar, Ugandan High Commissioner Angelina Wapakhabullo and Zambian High Commissioner M. Zambeyi. 15: The Italian Military Attache chats with Tomoko Koseko of the Japanese Embassy. 16: Marina Rini, Communication Officer, Italian Embassy and the Ambassador of Chile.

July 2012

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Books |

Serialization

‘Dust Clouds Gather’ David Lovatt Smith was a warden at Amboseli in the years between 1952 and 1960, after which he served in other National Parks and finally in the Head Office. He later returned to Amboseli at the invitation of the local Maasai people, and was instrumental in the formation of their community wildlife tourism areas, including those at Kimana, Eselengei and Elerai. His film promoting the preservation of wildlife, Wildlife Means Prosperity, with commentary in Maa, was shown annually to all the 40 or so primary schools around Amboseli for many years from 1998. ­— Excerpt 2

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A herd coming to water at one of the springs at the Ologinya swamp.

I

n the 1950s the Kisongo Maasai had watched the growing number of visitors to Amboseli with a mixture of interest and apprehension. Many were inquisitive to see the outlandish strangers just arrived from Europe or America with their pale faces, blonde hair and peculiar clothes. They were fascinated by some of the women who painted their lips with a kind of red-ochre which the warriors also used to adorn themselves.

The Maasai women, always very conscious of their own looks, giggled amongst themselves at the European women’s clothes, their curious hairstyles and

their extraordinary hats.

While the women and those without tribal responsibilities were amused to see these strangers in their midst, some of the elders and headmen were worried that if Amboseli became too popular with visitors, the Government might try to edge them out of their lands to make way for more tourists.

Fears As wardens, we did our utmost to allay any fears they might harbour and we welcomed the older members of the local population in the camp to sit and chat whenever time permitted. The wazee (old men) made sure they returned the

compliment to us and we were always welcomed into any boma (village) while out on our daily patrols. Whenever possible, we stopped and gave lifts to those who were walking in the same direction as we were heading. In this way we kept abreast of their fears and anxieties and tried to set their minds at rest.

The Maasai knew that visitors were charged an entrance fee to come into the Reserve and that they paid to stay in the Lodge. They could see that the National Parks were benefiting from the tourists who came to see and photograph the wild animals, which they now began to look upon as their own. After all, past generations of Maasai did not harm the wildlife that inhabited their land, and the herds were left virtually undisturbed – something few other races have done.

They were beginning to see that Amboseli was becoming very popular with tourists, and that the Parks’ organisation was exploiting that popularity by encouraging an ever increasing number of visitors to come to see the wildlife, and pay for that privilege.

Surely, the Maasai argued, it was they that had enabled the wildlife to remain intact, therefore as owners of the land on which the wildlife roamed, part of that money should go to them. For us, the difficulty lay in explaining to the elders that the amount we charged visitors was nowhere near enough to pay for its administration let alone to apportion some of it to the Maasai as well.

Nevertheless, Tabs believed it was right and proper that the Maasai should benefit in some way, even if it was just a token to show our good faith. In this way the elders could feel they were getting some material advantage from what they felt was the exploitation of their animals on their lands.

In 1954 our Director, Mervyn Cowie, and Tabs, had a meeting with the elders to discuss ways and means of achieving this.

After some negotiations they reached an amicable agreement whereby a proportion

of the entrance fee money would be paid over to the Maasai.

This was duly arranged, and from then on, until 1961 when the responsibility for the Reserve was handed over to the local District Council, a proportion of the entrance fees was passed on to the local headman, Ole Kiparia ,for the families that lived in the Ol Tukai area where the visitors were based. Although the money was not much by today’s standards, it was a positive sign of our goodwill towards the local people, which they appreciated.

Treatment We were also able to give them help in other ways. The nearest dispensary for medical treatment was 50 miles away at Namanga, and the nearest hospital another 50 miles further at Kajiado.

So the sick and injured would often come to us for treatment, and, while none of us had any medical training, where possible we were happy to help.

Occasionally we would be asked to take hospital cases to Kajiado, and when it was serious enough we never hesitated.

For about four months of the year the

A proportion of the entrance fees was passed on to the local headman”

Maasai were out of the Ol Tukai area in their wet weather grazing lands and we seldom saw them. It was in the dry season that competition for the water in the swamps became acute. The Ol Tukai swamps provided the only permanent water available to the Kisongo people, and this meant that they had to graze their cattle within striking distance of the swamps for the water they provided.

The same water was also needed by the wildlife for the same reason, and the drier the season the more competition there was for this water. Inevitably, confrontations took place, occasionally ending in tragedy either for the Maasai or for the animals, and sometimes for both.

In the driest period of 1953 some irresponsible warriors set fire to part of the Ologinya swamp, which spread close to the Ol Tukai Camp and Lodge.

The warriors who started the fire were soon identified and punished very severely by their elders. However, the episode served to highlight the underlying problem of trying to preserve wildlife in a comparatively Turn to P52

Cattle watering in the Simek: When the new water started appearing from the Ngong Narok Swamp, The Maasai would bring their cattle in to water there. When the troughs were built, they preferred to use them as they were sited closer to their grazing grounds.

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Books |

Serialization

Study in brown: This was one of Amboseli’s finest male lions.

Unfortunately he was speared by a group of worriors during the period before the new water appeared when relations between the National Parks and the Maasai were at their lowest.

From P51

small area when human activities must take preference over the interests of the wildlife.

It was difficult to find a solution beneficial to both wildlife and Maasai. On the one hand, more wild animals were being encouraged to come into the area where they were protected, and, on the other, the Maasai herds were continually growing

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because of the increase in population and the advance in veterinary care.

The conflict could only worsen and it became clear that as there was no question of the Kisongo being turned off their own land, something fundamental would have to be done to overcome the conflict of interests if the area was to continue as a

wildlife sanctuary and tourist attraction.

The problem was all too easy to see. The area belonged to the Maasai and provided them with their only means of livelihood.

They had lived there for generations. It was just unfortunate that Nature had placed the swamps in such a wonderful setting where they acted as a magnet to all the wildlife for miles around.

The swamps were not sufficiently extensive to allow such large numbers of domestic stock to drink, as well as the wild animals, and there was certainly not enough grazing for both.

The Maasai were not averse to using water from boreholes if they could be paid for it, and three boreholes were drilled by the Government in 1957, but that was the extent of the help Amboseli was getting.

The Government was adamant that no more money could be found for more boreholes. Nothing short of a miracle could save Amboseli now.

Desperate

By August 1957 the situation was becoming desperate. More cattle than ever were in the area and the dry season was only just beginning. The Maasai were already losing cattle daily through lack of grazing. They began to realise that the available grass could not sustain the enormous numbers of cattle in Ol Tukai, but they kept them there in order to reinforce their claim, fearing that the Government might change their minds and declare it a National Park.

For the first time, relations between us, the Amboseli staff, and the Maasai began to deteriorate. The conflict of interests was

just too great. Lions were being speared by warriors and only token punishments meted out by the elders.

Rhinos were also being speared, trumped-up excuses being that they were attacking women out collecting firewood. It seemed as though Amboseli would have to be lost as a wildlife sanctuary.

Nature But Mother Nature knew better. She was not going to allow this to happen.

In September 1957, we noticed something amazing. The water in the swamps was beginning to rise. This was

extraordinary: it was the very driest part of the year and there had been no rain on the mountain.

We watched with growing astonishment as the swamps continued to rise throughout the next few months. The rise in water level of one swamp, called Ngong Narok, soon enabled us to build a canal to take off some of the water to a trough for the cattle well away from the areas where the wildlife drank.

Over the next 12 months, while the water continued to rise, we carried on with the canal and built more troughs culminating in a large watering place on

Amboseli’s famous longhorned rhinos: ‘Gertie’ and calf on the plain below Observation Hill.

the dry lakebed some 6kms away from the original boundary of the Ngong Narok swamp.

Here, the cattle were able to water well away from the main wildlife areas and enjoy better gazing at the same time. By building the canal and troughs, we had been able to help the Maasai and the wildlife, but it was Nature herself that had saved Amboseli.

Amboseli – A Miracle Too Far, is published by Mawenzi Books, 2009, Sh1,600. Available from from all good bookshops.

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Dispatches |

Letter from Kampala

Letter from

Kampala

By ANGELA KINTU

Customer service a la Uganda The relatively new kids on the block are the mobile telecom companies. Given that almost all the players have international roots, it is unbelievable how much for granted they take the Ugandan customer 54 |

C

ustomer service is a relatively new concept to Ugandans, seeing as we have only just started owning businesses of our own.

In October, we will be 50 years independent.

For years before that we were growing cash crops to send to our British colonial bosses; for a decade or so after that, only Asians knew what to do with a business. After that, Idi Amin did the bad thing he did and a breed of businessman who had not earned the business took over. It was another 10 years before we started to

but overdoes it with the adverts. You get 5 text notifications every time you load airtime and at least 5 others during the day informing you of one competition or another. It is highly annoying.

The other mobile network regularly drops calls and charges you exorbitantly for the nuisance.

The customer help lines for these mobile phone companies tend to be manned by people who mumble and cannot solve your problems, but hopefully one day we will get there. At least they pick up the phone, unlike quite a number of government offices.

own anything more advanced than a little duka – service-based things like restaurants and mobile phone outlets. Before the dawn of customer service, things were so bad it was almost hilarious.

In the little downtown shops that sold materials, clothes, shoes, groceries and the like, there were a few unspoken rules Ugandan shoppers had to be aware of.

The first rule was to remember that the shopkeeper was doing you, the shopper, a favour. They opened their shop out of the goodness of their heart and you were well advised not to waste their time by browsing, asking questions, bargaining or showing indecision.

Sacred Furthermore, their lunch break was sacred. If you entered a shop and they were eating (or on the phone for that matter) you were likely to get shooed out of the shop to let them eat in peace. The final rule was that the shop owner reserved the right to guess if your wallet was loaded.

If they thought you did not look like a big spender, they would treat you with outright disdain. There were even stories of shopkeepers who told the customer outright not to ask after a certain grade of items because they did not look like they could afford it.

Fast forward to today and the shops have become more numerous and the customers a little less frightened and a little more aware that their earnings have value. However, there are still places where you will not be served first even if you were there first. A more aggressive and illmannered person can come and slap their money down on the counter even as you

In the little downtown shops that sold materials, clothes, shoes, groceries and the like, there were a few unspoken rules”

make your polite enquiries and patiently wait your turn.

The relatively new kids on the block are the mobile telecom companies. Given that almost all the players have international roots, it is unbelievable how much for granted they take the Ugandan customer.

The first player on the scene charged exorbitantly and tried to turn mobile phone ownership into an exclusive club.

Five or so changes of management and several years later and the public have still not forgiven them.

The next players refuse to invest in infrastructure and now employ hacks who have no idea how to fix a smartphone.

(Forgive me, I am still smarting from a personal experience with one such hack who destroyed the rubber housing of my phone with his long and highly disgusting fingernail. And what’s up with that anyway?

Why do some guys keep one horribly long fingernail?).

The third player on the mobile phone market has tried to appeal to all Ugandans,

Official But then again, since when has it become easy to see a government official in Uganda? For a lot of officials, bureaucracy is a perk of the job; the more difficult it is to see a person, the more important they feel or are perceived to be. Therefore, to expect someone to pick up the office phone and arrange you an appointment without hassle is, frankly, ridiculous. Forget I even mentioned the government offices.

In the hotel industry, where the service is supposed to be excellent, Uganda is lukewarm. There are places we go where we are the only black people in the restaurant.

In these places, the staff has seen enough colour to know that all customers are equal.

In return, we Africans are learning to tip.

In other (slightly more downscale) places, you still have to ask for the menu. And then you find out that seeing the menu is pointless, because the waiter will say the majority of things are unavailable and then reel off what is available verbally.

Overall, the art of keeping your customer happy has yet to be honed over here. And it will take a while because the customers do not yet know that things can be done their way. It seems our appreciation of customer service is tied very closely to the way we vote – without asking questions, without demanding accountability and without a sense of our own power.

Angela Kintu is a freelance writer and columnist for The Sunday Vision. She has worked as a radio producer and been a writer, editor and copy editor for an array of publications in Uganda, including The New Vision, Sunday Magazine and Flair magazine. She is a regular contributor to African Woman magazine and a media consultant at the African Centre for Media Excellence.

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Dispatches |

Letter from New York

Letter from

New York By lARS DABNEY

The Fine Etiquette of Road Tripping

H

enry’s driving terrified me.

I don’t scare easily. But there is something about a battered red semi-trailer barreling down on you at an aggregate speed of a couple hundred kilometers per hour while a madman cackles behind the wheel of your own vehicle that really tightens the bowels. I felt my fingers curl inwards, despite my best efforts to appear nonchalantly cool.

My left arm braced for impact against the door frame entirely of its own accord. My pulse crescendoed.

Roundly cursing the cowardice of his passengers, Henry swung back into the

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southbound lane. We were still an hour- anda-half outside of Nairobi. Two-and-a-half if Henry were driving like someone with a reasonable fear of fiery vehicular death. He turned around in his seat, one arm cocked on the headrest, eyeballed me and said, “You’re not afraid, are you? This girl, she is ridiculous.

She acts like I don’t know how to drive.”

Eyeballing I raised an eyebrow. “Ah.” The girl in the passenger seat was now eyeballing me as well. Her facial expression told me she knew exactly how I felt about this, and she was just waiting to see if I had the guts to

say something about it. I decided to go King Solomon, and split things down the middle. “Perhaps a little slower for her sake, hey? It’s not like we need to be back by any particular time.”

Henry rolled his eyes and turned back to the road. The girl shook her head and turned back to berating Henry. I exhaled.

Henry decelerated one, maybe two kilometers per hour. That lasted about 15 seconds.

There are times when you don’t get to fly. Depending where you are, every location has a certain radius around it (around 2-5 hours near New York City, where I live) in which you will get to your destination faster if you take a long drive on the chin than by going through the elaborate rigmarole of flying. At longer distances it’s just plain cheaper, as long as the car is full. From these two incentives, the road trip was born.

Road tripping is more complex than simply piling a bunch of folks into a car and dropping a brick on the accelerator until you get where you’re going. There are techniques; there are different styles and rules. There is etiquette.

The most pressing question is seating.

Not as in leather versus rattan versus chintz, but as in driver, shotgun/passenger, and (if you’re at capacity) the much-despised middle back seat, often referred to by a certain derogatory canine-associated word.

Let’s call it the dogseat.

Dogseat is less problematic than you’d think, generally. Either somebody is so small and obviously appropriate for the unwanted duty (think the only girl in a car full of rowers, which happened to a friend of mine once) that they’re stuck there, or you rotate because civilized behavior isn’t entirely a thing of the past.

Driving, though—which really should be the most straightforward—can get downright nasty. That’s because driving is equivalent to an instant promotion to alpha status, and the driver gets to turn the car into their own little dictatorial banana republic if they feel like it. On a recent road trip with my cousin and her boyfriend, driving nine hours from Charleston, South Carolina, up to Washington DC, I found myself the victim of a pincer assault by what I had assumed would be my passengers, whom I was generously driving.

Sick The boyfriend insisted he would get violently car sick if he did not drive. My cousin informed me that I was hung-over and exhausted (I was not) and should get some sleep in the back (I’d already had two cups of coffee, waiting for them). I grudgingly relented on driving for the first leg, but insisted on riding shotgun—it was, after all, my family’s car (I was driving it back to my parents’ house as a favor). This transformed my cousin into a furious ball of sulking backseat resentment, and I quickly realized that persisting in this struggle would only lead to nine hours of misery as we crawled north. I surrendered the front seat over breakfast, on the condition of a rotating driving schedule on which I got second shift.

As we pulled out of Charleston I realized that the three of us had possessed very different images of just how this morning would go down. To me, I was looking forward to being the generous skipper to my young cousin and her slightly-lessyoung boyfriend, ferrying them north to their new life together, possibly dispensing humorously wise anecdotes along the way. Picture the first scene of The King & I. Something like that.

They, on the other hand, had mentally co-opted the car entirely: they would be embarking together on a new adventure, the open road, the post-college future, sunshine streaming through the windows

Driving, though — which really should be the most straight forward— can get downright nasty”

while they listened to all their favorite couples’ songs and their hung-over older cousin snored on in the backseat (who was only along because he had to be, in order to return the car at the end). They would be doing me the favor.

All this could have been avoided, had we discussed who’d be driving prior to the moment when all three of us simultaneously tried to cram ourselves through the driver-side door.

There are plenty of other details that, if not handled appropriately, can send an entire road trip careening off the rails and render it an explosive catastrophe. I do not refer only to Henry’s driving.

Music—of what kind, and at what hour?

Generally, the driver decides, but a degree of consensus makes everyone happier. I have a habit of playing punk rock extremely loud and screaming the lyrics at the top of my lungs on very long road trips—when I’m driving alone. I would never subject another human being to this (my dog, though, has had to put up with it many times).

The art of road trip conversation is a fine one, and a very different one from normal conversation. Even a very good yarn over an evening of beers at the pub rarely lasts more than three or four hours. Road trips can last 10 or more, and happen at very strange hours. On one college road trip, many years ago, our convoy found itself departing at seven in the evening, with a 12-hour drive ahead of us. Through some strange logic I ended up in a car with only one other person, Yago, a close friend of mine. We were about to become much, much closer.

The situation was helped by the fact that both Yago and I are conversation sources; that is, much like a water source, we are capable of producing conversation at a moderate rate of flow for more or less indefinite periods of time. Neither of us slept until after we arrived at 6 the next morning (also in Charleston, though this was years before the cousin/boyfriend incident). We traded driving a few times, but the conversation roared on throughout, and had at least three of those weird moments where the talk has run really late and somebody inadvertently starts talking about their thoughts on mortality/divinity/ the supernatural/mink fetishes.

At least one of those was a thing we didn’t actually talk about.

Good conversation always starts with a good rapport, which Yago and I luckily already had. It is helped by having one or two chatterboxes present. But what really helped is that, despite being burbling word-fountains, Yago and I were both also fascinated by our driving fellow—we’d both led unusual lives to that point, and

both liked hearing stories. Much of the conversation was one of us taking turns interrogating the other. Listening, in other words—just like your mother told you.

Not that I have not been party to some egregious violations of road tripping etiquette in my time. On another collegeera road trip, to visit Duke, the three bored passengers (including myself) decided to risk their driver’s license, future, and sanity, and start drinking before arriving at our destination. We were pulled over with a dozen crushed beer cans stuffed under the front seats and a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels in the glove compartment.

Astonishingly, we got away with it.

Though the policeman did offer a very pointed warning to the tune of, “I know exactly what’s going on here, and I’m going to let it slide for now, but don’t try it again or it’s Piggy McNasty time”. Although not those precise words.

Backseat On the way down to Charleston (yet again, this time actually in advance of the boyfriend/cousin return) I found myself in the backseat of my cousin’s car (different cousin—older sister of the other one—I have a lot of them, grandparents were Irish Catholics, what can I say). Despite having a full complement of three passengers, the conversation fell off around midnight.

My cousin insisted on remaining behind the wheel, but to maintain wakefulness spent the entire hour-and-a-half lull texting furiously on her phone.

At first this worried me, causing an appreciable fraction of Henry-level fear, but my cousin seemed entirely competent at what should be an impossible task (texting demands our brains sacrifice peripheral vision in order to focus on, and read, the letters on the screen—making it very hard to drive straight). I kept a weather eye on the road lanes for the first half hour, but with no incidents, and with the glowing rectangle of her phone screen a more-orless permanent fixture on the top of the steering wheel, I decided to let it slide. I even managed to get some sleep.

I think next time I’ll just fly.

Lawrence Dabney is a war correspondent and humanitarian lawyer based out of Washington, DC. He grew up in Perth, Western Australia, and has since lived in over half-a-dozen countries around the world. He is a politics editor for The Faster Times, and the founder and lead correspondent of AK Diplomacy. His writing has appeared in Kenya’s The Star, Eclectica Esoterica magazine, and The Blue & White, among others.

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