Nairobi Notebook

Early Stampede

I have it on good authority that the smart money is on an early wildebeest migration this year down in the Masai Mara. Light rains during the current wet season mean the savannah grasses will dry earlier...and that means the wildrbeest may chance their luck across the Mara River a few weeks earlier than normal. The crocs are already licking their chops.

The migration cannot come soon enough for the Mara Conservancy. They have been facing a financial shortfall to the tune of $50,000 a month since Kenya imploded in January. At the begining of this month their bank balance read zero for the first time. To cut costs night ambushes are suspended and daytime anti-poaching patrols are shorter than usual. There is a nervous sense among the rangers that they are leaving the backdoor open to poachers who are becoming increasingly brazen as the conservancy becomes stretched beyond its limits. I joined the rangers on patrol this week. The frustration was written across their faces as they discovered traces of a poachers camp. The charred remains of a warthog and blackened embers suggested the rangers were a just a few days too late.

Helping keep the conservancy afloat is Joseph Kimojino, the ranger usually in charge of keeping safari vehicles a respectable distance away from the animals. But with so few tourists to monitor he is turning his attentions to fundraising through a blog. Three months ago Kimojino could not even turn on a computer. Now he regularly scores 500 hits a day (cue my face turning green with envy!) and has raked in $47,000 in donations.

You can find Kimojino's blog at http://www.maratriangle.wildlifedirect.org

Mara Politics

The Masai Mara remains empty of tourists. The Mara Serena happens to be booked out, not by foreign visitors but by a large NGO. I’m not sure what is wrong with a hotel in Nairobi. Perhaps the good people who are supposed to be “alleviating poverty” are trying to resuscitate the reserve, give the jobless staff at the Serena something to do, but I suspect this is another example of frivolous NGO spending. But that’s another story for another time.

Rangers with the Mara Conservancy say the last time the Mara’s savannah plains were as deserted as they are now was in 1998 – the year Al Qaeda struck the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salam. Those were dark days in the park’s history. The Mara’s ecosystem was, as it is now, worth big bucks and “corruption was bringing the reserve close to total collapse” recalls ranger Joseph Kimojino. Poachers were allowed to decimate the wildlife populations as local big-men vied for control of the tourist dollars.

So when the Mara Conservancy took over the management of the Mara Triangle –roughly one third of the reserve – few fancied the chances of its CEO Brian Heath turning things around. I am told that Dr Richard Leakey, himself a former head of the Kenya Wildlife Service – only gave Heath a couple of months. The politics behind the Mara were just too dirty. Heath could not survive.

But he did and the Mara Conservancy has flourished – until, that is, the post-election crisis once again put off foreign tourists – and Heath has won over both his staff and surrounding Masai communities. Tourist dollars are going where they are supposed to – back into the conservation of the Masai Mara.

But there remain dark forces at play. One lodge apparently considers itself beyond paying the conservancy the usual park entry fees. I am told the owner has had the High Court (one can only imagine a large sum of money exchanged hands) slap an injunction on the conservancy to prevent them collecting the gate fee. Just how short-sighted are these money-grabbers? Are your political careers and personal savings accounts really worth more than Kenya’s best known asset?

Troubled Times in Virunga

These are troubled times in the Virunga National Park that straddles the Congolese/Rwandan border. In the last two weeks militias fighting in the war-scarred east of the Democratic Republic of Congo have slaughtered 14 elephants for their tusks. Conservationists say there is a global increase in the demand for ivory. The evidence points to China as the key culprit. According to Newsweek in March this year, ivory is the most commonly trafficked contraband. The US State Department puts the market value of ivory at $400 a pound…a lucrative source of cash for the militia.

But the rebel groups are not just trading in the tusks for cash. These details come the same week that the BBC said it had further evidence that UN peacekeepers in eastern DRC traded ammunition with local militias in return for ivory and gold. The BBC first made similar allegations a year ago. At the time a UN investigation found some evidence of smuggling but refuted the allegations of exchanges involving arms.

The BBC’s report carried details of a rendez-vous between a Rwandan rebel group whose senior commanders were leading architects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and Indian blue-helmets. The peacekeepers the Beeb says flew an UN-marked helicopter deep into Virunga where the ivory exchange allegedly took place.

The BBC’s evidence of a UN cover-up heaps shame on the peacekeepers and threatens to overshadow the small measure of stability the 17,000-strong force has brought to this volatile region. More tragic perhaps is the apparent arrogance among the powers-that-be within the UN that the institution’s name and reputation too precious to risk an honest investigation…let alone help protect Virunga’s threatened animal populations.

Arguably it is the mountain gorilla population that is most vulnerable. Wildlife Direct says that in the last 12 months eleven of these rare great apes have been butchered. Virunga National Park and the surrounding mountainous rainforest are home to half of the 700 remaining mountain gorillas worldwide. But they live a perilous existence, caught in the crossfire.