Botswana Government

21 hrs ·
PARLIAMENT ADOPTS MOTION TO LIFT ELEPHANT HUNTING BAN

Parliament has adopted a motion tabled by Maun East MP Mr Kostantinos Markus requesting government to consider lifting the ban on the hunting of elephants in areas that are not designated as game reserves and national parks.

Debating the motion, the Vice President and Boteti West MP, Mr Slumber Tsogwane said the human/wildlife conflict had over the years been on a rife, primarily due to an overlap between human population and wildlife.

He said such conflicts occurred when either the need or behaviour of wildlife impacts negatively on human livelihoods or when the humans pursue goals that impact negatively on the needs of wildlife.

The human/wildlife conflicts, he said, had been prevalent in the Boteti constituency, where large numbers of elephants roamed freely in marginal range lands. The increase in human population had also resulted in the encroachment into more marginal lands inhabited by wildlife.

The Vice President said conflicts between people and wildlife currently ranked among the main threats to conservation countrywide, adding that with much of the wildlife living outside protected areas, one of the real challenges to conservation is how to enhance and sustain coexistence between people and wild animals.

He said the increase of elephant population had also affected the land conservation plans as they turn to over graze and destroy the natural landscape.

“Given the economic and social importance of both wildlife-related activities and agriculture, balancing the relationship between wildlife species and agricultural production is critical if the needs of all of the respective interest groups involved with these commodities are to be met,” he said.

He emphasised that the motion should not be regarded as a leeway to promoting poaching of elephants as government would implement stringent measures to protect elephants and other wildlife spies.

Mr Tsogwane said an understanding of how people and conservation agents dealt with the problem of wild animals was critical in evolving and establishing sustainable conservation systems.

He said that government would consult with all the relevant stakeholders to facilitate human/wildlife coexistence.

Tati East MP, Mr Samson Guma argued that it was undoubtedly evident that the expansion of the human society had forced people to infringe into wildlife habitats and convert land to other uses incompatible with wildlife.

Mr Guma said smallholder farmers living along the Botswana/Zimbabwe border fence had struggled for years with elephants that regularly invaded their land and destroyed their crops.

The majority of those farmers, he said, settled along the border line to benefit from rivers that do not only act as demarcation boundaries between the two countries, but also have water in abundance all year round.

Mr Guma said that the story of elephants farm invasion in his constituency was heartbreaking as a week hardly passed without elephants raiding on farms and ploughing fields alike.

“Elephants inhabiting the nearby parks easily stray outside its perimeters in search of forage, water and a place to breed, thereby destroying everything on their path,” he said.

He said both elephants and human population density in the area had become high and as a result the competition for resources between the two had intensified, hence efforts of many subsistence farmers in the area to become commercial were more like a lottery than a livelihood.

Mr Guma therefore said government should swiftly act on how best to resolve the human/wildlife conflict and the lift on the hunting ban and shooting of elephants in areas that were not designated as game reserves could be remedial to the crisis. (BOPA)

Khama was one of Africa's better leaders, but he had a serious against for hunters. There may have been a backstory to that.

The late Don Heath told me on his last visit to Zimbabwe that a foreign hunting party had come across something, somewhere, that the government (or Khama) didn't want known. What, when, where, why and how is anyone's guess.

That is all I have. I tried to get more of the story for African Hunter, but I don't think Don really knew much more. So, really all it is is a rumour.

It doesn't come as that much or a surprise that Botswana would re-address the ban after Khama left office. There is minimal human-wildlife conflict and hunting will generate lots of revenue.