Tough Call for Gonarezhou Rangers
Wonai Masvingise And Kudzai Bare
30 July 2010


Harare — AS the four-seater Cessna flew low over the carcasses of two huge jumbos slain by poachers a week before, an eerie nauseating atmosphere filled the stuffy interior of the small aircraft. A short distance ahead, vultures were feasting on yet another dead elephant, a dinner that could last days for the scavengers if not disturbed.

Death is the price that the world's biggest land mammals are paying for their tusks, which have a lucrative international market.

The question that was on everyone's mind aboard the aircraft was:

Is Zimbabwe's parks authority sufficiently equipped to effectively curb poaching activities, especially given the fact that poachers are coming into the country with far more sophisticated weapons than the rangers' archaic looking Russian-made AK47 rifles?

Gonarezhou National Park, which is situated in the south eastern part of the country, is part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park which incorporates Gaza National Park of Mozambique and Kruger National Park of South Africa.

Covering 5 053 square kilometers, this makes it a mammoth task for the few rangers deployed in the park to eradicate poaching activities, which are on the increase worldwide.

Due to the growth experienced in the ivory export business in the 1970s and 1980s, the total elephant population of Africa decreased by half. Up to one million elephants were killed for their tusks to the point where the endangered animal appeared to be on the verge of extinction.

Despite the resource constraints, the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZPWMA), has made commendable strides in protecting the country's elephant herd and managed to reduce poaching activities by 32 percent last year.

Vitalis Chadenga, the director-general of the ZPWMA, said the authority would never eradicate poaching completely as it is part of wildlife management but it was critical that it is kept within acceptable levels.

"We are dealing with a well resourced powerful syndicate operating in the region but we are, however, on top of the game as we have noted a decrease in poaching nationwide. We are working with security agents in the country, the Attorney General's Office, the police and the courts to address this issue," Chadenga said.

"Poaching is not new in Africa but we have deployed trained men to the park. Our major challenge is that the rangers cannot cover the whole park, which is big," he added.

Similar killings over the years have led to the decimation of the black rhino from Gonarezhou and the country is planning to reintroduce the endangered species to the park, senior ZPWMA conservationist, Edson Gandiwa, said.

In 1989 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wildlife Fauna and Flora banned trade in ivory hoping to protect elephants from poachers. Some Western nations have also provided assistance to African countries in order to help crack down on poachers.

Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia have in the past decades accumulated huge stockpiles of ivory through culling, which is meant to keep the elephant herd within manageable levels.

Although the country is bound by a moratorium on ivory trade for nine years it is continuously arguing that if allowed to sell its ivory stockpiles the issue of poaching could be managed better.

Zimbabwe, which is sitting on a 34 tonne stockpile of ivory worth US$5,1billion, can only reapply for permission to trade in its ivory in 2017.

A December 2009 report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature showed that since 2006, 95 percent of poaching in Africa has occurred in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

The report also showed that the conviction rate for rhino crimes in Zimbabwe is only three percent.

Last November, the country was among 18 countries investigated in an Interpol operation to contain a racket involving the illegal trade in traditional medicines containing protected wildlife products.

Most rhino horns leaving southern Africa are destined for medicinal markets in south east and east Asia, especially Vietnam, where demand has escalated in recent years.

The demand for rhino horn is driven by an insatiable appetite in China and Vietnam where superstitions attribute medicinal properties to rhino horn.

According to Yahoo Answers ivory is used in the manufacture of electrical appliances including specialised electrical equipment for aeroplanes and radar.

"In China and Japan ivory has been used for inlay and small objects, especially for statues and carvings of small size and great precision and beauty of detail. In the last few centuries in Europe and North America, ivory has been employed to decorate furniture, for small statues, and occasionally as a surface for miniature painting," writes Yahoo Answers.

ZPWMA senior wildlife officer, Daniel Sithole, said the duty of controlling illegal activities remains a challenge as there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed.

He however, noted that the activities were declining on an annual basis.

"There is limited manpower levels . . . Rangers are shared among other station duties, which include tourism, roads and fireguards among other duties, which will leave the operation with a very limited number patrolling rangers out of the total," he said.

"The other constraint is poor roads, which become impossible to access during the wet season hence patrols will be restricted to such areas where accessibility is easy. There is also lack of connectivity between the northern and southern part of our policing area due to the broken bridge. When the Runde river is full, deployment to the south is difficult," Sithole said adding "Resettled people in Guluji are a threat as it is difficult to single out a poacher from a cattle herder."

Meanwhile, the conflict between the Chitsa people, who have encroached into the Gonarezhou National Park, and the national parks authority continues because the government is yet to allocate them land for resettlement.

"The problem we are facing has to do with the people of Chitsa. That is an area of concern to ourselves. There is serious conflict as far as the implementation of the wildlife based land reform policy is concerned.


"People settling in the park are doing so in a haphazard manner and this is posing a threat to the security of animals," Chadenga told journalists during a tour of Gonarezhou last weekend.

"The Chitsa people should not be in the park. They should be out of the park and that is our position. We have the hope that they would be relocated," he added.

A tour around the area being infiltrated by the Chitsa people showed that animals were being scared further into the park as the settlers set traps for smaller game for the pot.

In the last three years the ZPWMA has removed 2 051 snares and 1 532 cattle were impounded from Gonarezhou.

Furthermore, the Chitsa people continue to infuriate the parks rangers by herding their cattle into the park in search for water and good pastures despite the lurking danger of lions.

Meanwhile back in gud olUS, Ele's cant be imported from Zam or Moz, Polar Bears are endangered as are Black Faced Impala and Cheetah from Nam.....

Man vs jumbo in Gonarezhou

From George Maponga in MASVINGO

August 7, 2010

THE light aircraft owned by the Frankfurt Zoological Society hovers in the cloudless azure skies after taking off from a small private airstrip at Chipinda Pools.

It affords those aboard a gripping spectacle of the vast Gonarezhou National Park, Zimbabwe’s perfect theatre of the jungle, on the southern tip of Chiredzi.

At about 1 500 metres above the ground in the small aircraft, a bird’s eye-view of the entire northern part of the vast park easily becomes visible not least the plumes of smoke that occasionally cloud parts of the extreme northern end of the elephant-rich game reserve.

Besides the billowing smoke, vast tracts of cleared land are also evident from the sky so are small rondavels dotted in linear fashion adjacent to the cleared patches of land, ostensibly for agricultural purposes.

A few kilometres deep into the heart of Gonarezhou, a multiplicity of tracks that regularly cut across parts of the park and thereby slowly eroding its veneer of wildness give the biggest hint of something terribly going wrong in one of Zimbabwe’s most renowned wildlife habitats.

Indeed the occupation of part of Gonarezhou National Park by nearly 1 000 families of the Chitsa clan nearly eight years ago, has created a big blemish on the wildlife-rich game reserve.

The park is slowly but surely losing its lustre due to a myriad of human activities that are inimical to the self-sustainability of wildlife habitats.

Over the past decade, wildlife in Gonarezhou has now been forced to compete for food with tens of thousands of livestock from the Chitsa community that occasionally make forays deep into the park in search of grazing and water.

Coupled with that has been the unabated high incidences of veldfires believed to originate from the area occupied by the Chitsa clan members who will be clearing virgin land for farming purposes while cases of poaching have also been rife since the families moved into the park.

Livestock belonging to the Chitsa families have also created numerous tracks in the park out of routes which they use on their way deep into the park in search of water and fresh green grass on the banks of Save and Runde Rivers whose confluence is also in Gonarezhou National Park.

Dr Hugo Van Der Westhuizen who is the Project leader of the Gonarezhou Conservation Project, which is working with the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority to rehabilitate parts of Gonarezhou, contends that the presence of Chitsa families in the vast wildlife sanctuary was cause for concern.

"It is really disturbing to note that Gonarezhou National Park is now full of cattle tracks made by cattle owned by the Chitsa families.

"These cattle occasionally move deeper into the park in search of good grazing pastures and water but if the truth can be told it is a known fact that cattle cannot co-exist with wildlife," he said.

Dr Van Der Westhuizen added that efforts by his organisation to render conservation support to Gonarezhou National Park were being thwarted by the continued existence of the Chitsa families who were gradually encroaching deeper into the park on an annual basis.

Besides increasing incidences of veldfires in Gonarezhou ever since the parks’ occupation by the Chitsa families, cases of poaching have been rapidly increasing while efforts to combat the vice have been equally proving unmanageable.

Chipinda Pools Area manager under the Parks and Wlidlife Management Authority, Dr Norman Monks also weighed in saying the presence of Chitsa families in Gonarezhou National Park made it difficult to differentiate between members of the clan and poachers

Dr Monks said every year they recover thousands of snares throughout the park most of which are likely to have been set up by Chitsa clan members who regulary make incursions deep into Gonarezhou National Park in search of game meat.

He added that even efforts by his organisation to impound some of the cattle that stray deep into park have not been deterring the Chitsa family members from letting their livestock deep inside Gonarezhou’s boundary.

"We have been impounding hundreds of cattle which would have strayed deep into this park but these moves have not been proving too much of a deterrent because at the end of the day we cannot do anything with the cattle save to give them back to their owners," said Dr Monks.

Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, Director General Mr Vitalis Chadenga said the Chitsa families should be urgently removed from Gonarezhou to save the park from further decimation and deformation.

Mr Chadenga said Gonarezhou National Park was under virtual siege from the Chitsa families who were threatening its very wildness and self-sustainability as a wildlife habitat hence the urgent need for the families’ immediate relocation.

The parks boss however, conceded the the occupation of Gonarezhou National Park by the Chitsa families and their subsequent relocation was a very complicated issue.

"The truth of the matter is that the Chitsa families should be removed from Gonarezhou National Park and they should be moved urgently before more damage is done that eventually compromises the self-sustainability of this wonderful park.

"We have been working to secure the relocation of the families and we continue to work towards that goal but the issue is very complicated since the solution is not technical, the solution lies everywhere," said Mr Chadenga without elaborating.

A few years ago there were plans by the Masvingo provincial leadership to relocate the families to Chizvirizvi farming area in Chiredzi but the move failed to materialise after the families vowed to resist any efforts to relocate them.

The Chitsa families have been adamant that they would not accept relocation from Gonarezhou National Park on the grounds that it was their ancestral land from which they were hoodwinked into leaving by the white supremacist and racist Rhodesian regime led by Ian Smith.

In their own defence, the families claim that the area under Gonarezhou which they are occupying was never part of the mammoth game reserve.

It was incorporated into the park in 1978, they say, after the Rhodesian regime had removed them from the area under the pretext of wanting to clear it of tsetse first.

They further allege that after the area was cleared of tsetse they were never allowed to return after being told that it was now part of the enlarged Gonarezhou National Park.

Masvingo Governor Titus Maluleke recently added uncertainty in the proposed relocation of the Chitsa families from Gonarezhou National Park after he charged that the families were not going anywhere.

"Why should the families be moved from the area yet the place is what they call home, they have valid offers letters to stay where they are so why should they be moved?" asked the Masvingo Governor.

However, it is clear that with the passage of time the whole northern part of Gonarezhou National Park that straddles over 2 000 hectares might be unsuitable as a wildlife habitat if Chitsa families are not removed from the park.

Population increase and the subsequent demand for farming land would even precipitate more destuction of the wildlife habitat in through incessant cutting of firewood, burning of grass among other un-eco-friendly human activities.

Already the roll-out of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park that will amalgamate into one, Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park with Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park and South Africa’s Kruger National Park, to create arguably the world’s largest wildlife corridor is under threat from the Chitsa families.

The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park initiative will not be successful as the self-sustainability of Gonarezhou National Park is compromised by occupation of part of the park by humans, who cannot co-exist in the same environment with wildlife.

Failure to create the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park will also negate the unavoidable strides that have been made in regional integration in political and economic fronts as the Southern Africa region responds to the tremors of globalisation.

Survival of Gonarezhou National Park, which is about 5 000 square metres in size and home to over 9 000 elephants among other wild animals is of paramount importance to the country not only because of its vast tourism potential but also for the benefit of progeny.

The relocation of Chitsa familes from the park will be a milestone development that will eventually guarantee the survival of Gonarezhou National Park, which is one of Zimbabwe’s reputable wildlife habitats.