Reports have emerged that Tanzania’s stockpile of blood ivory now stands at 34.000 tusks, representing at least 17.000 elephants killed for their tusks.The initial report a few weeks ago in the Mail on Sunday shook the Tanzanian establishment to the core and the follow on article just published will probably do no less, considering the stark figures now available and the cloud over how real some of the announcements made at the London Conservation Conference truly are.
It also puts into perspective the sacking of the highly respected former Natural Resources and Tourism Minister Amb. Khamis Kagesheki, who by common consensus was put to the proverbial sword like a sacrificial lamb for being about to make public the names of those behind the ivory trade in Tanzania, before he was hastily dismissed (and very likely told to shut up or else).
This is a must share article for all conservation minded people.
Haul of shame: This shocking photo shows for the first time the biggest stockpile of illegal ivory on earth
- Mail on Sunday’s Martin Fletcher goes inside the warehouse in Tanzania
- Dar es Salaam holds 34,000 tusks ripped from 17,000 elephants
- The tusks would be worth some £150million on China’s black market
- Biggest is nearly 7ft long, weighs 191lb and takes three people to lift
- Last month, MoS asked how Prince of Wales and Cameron could shake the hand of the Tazanian PM who has presided over slaughter
- Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism invited MoS to Tanzania
- ‘We have nothing to hide,’ Lazaro Nyalandu said
PUBLISHED: 22:04 GMT, 22 March 2014 | UPDATED: 00:08 GMT, 23 March 2014
It takes your eyes, and your brain, a moment to adjust as you move from the dazzling Tanzanian sun into the dusty, dimly lit warehouse.
Workers stand by a pile of elephant tusks, systematically weighing each one on a large red Avery scale.
Behind them, rows of tall metal shelves recede into the gloom. They are stacked solid with tusks, each pair the sole remnant of a once-magnificent elephant.
Cruel trade: Martin Fletcher visits the world’s largest ivory stockpile in Tanzania, containing more than 34,000 tusks which would be worth about £150million on China’s black market
More tusks lie in sacks on the concrete floor. It is an appalling, sickening sight.
This is the world’s largest ivory stockpile. More than 34,000 tusks weighing roughly 125 tons are stored in the warehouse behind the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism in Dar es Salaam. They would be worth about £150?million on China’s black market.
Some were taken from elephants that died naturally or turned rogue. Many thousands were seized from poachers or their middlemen and cannot be sold because international trade in ivory is banned.
They are black, brown and dirty white. A few bear the marks of the machetes used to hack them from the elephants. Others were sawn off.
The biggest is nearly 7ft long, weighs 191?lb and takes three people to lift. The shortest measure scarcely a foot and were ripped from babies – testimony to the indiscriminate slaughter of the poachers who kill 30 Tanzanian elephants a day and have destroyed half the country’s 110,000 elephants since 2009.
Elephant graveyard: Emilian Mhelela, a game scout at the Selous game reserve where the number of elephants have been reduced from 70,000 elephants in 2006 to 13,000
The stockpile is a shrine to human greed. Its only redeeming feature is that the tusks were intercepted before they were smuggled to Asia, but the amount of ivory that passes undetected though Tanzania’s ports is far greater.
The country is easily the world’s biggest exporter of this illicit ‘white gold’.
The Mail on Sunday was given exclusive access to the warehouse after publishing an article, just before last month’s London summit on the illegal wildlife trade, that asked how the Prince of Wales and Prime Minister could shake the hand of Jakaya Kikwete, the Tanzanian leader who has presided over such a slaughter.
We reported that many politicians, officials and well-connected businessmen were active accomplices in the illegal ivory trade, and that there was corruption from top to bottom.
The article caused uproar in Tanzania. A well-placed source said President Kikwete was ‘hopping mad’.
His office denounced the article as ‘malicious, preposterous and contemptible’. His government consulted British public relations advisers.
But the article had a dramatic effect. Before leaving for the London summit, Mr Kikwete summoned senior wildlife officials, tearing up his prepared notes as he angrily demanded that they do better.
Then, at the summit, he astounded the conservation world by announcing that Tanzania would put its vast stockpile ‘beyond economic use’ and support a continued ban on international trade in ivory. That was an astonishing U-turn.
Three times in eight years Tanzania had unsuccessfully sought approval from the 180-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to sell its stockpile – despite overwhelming evidence that one-off sales merely fuel China’s appetite for ivory.
‘The article shamed the president in front of the world,’ said one source.
‘He really had to come and say something concrete at the summit,’ said another.
There was one more surprise. Lazaro Nyalandu, the Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism, invited The Mail on Sunday to Tanzania. ‘We have nothing to hide,’ he said.
My visit included a trip to the Selous game reserve, a spectacularly beautiful wilderness and Unesco World Heritage Site double the size of Wales, where the shocking scale of Tanzania’s poaching frenzy became clear.
Selous had 70,000 elephants in 2006. Barely 13,000 survive. At the peak of the onslaught rotting carcasses defiled the reserve’s woodlands, savannahs and swamps, and tourists could hear shooting from their lodges.
For the better part of two days, Benson Kibonde, the reserve’s chief warden, and I jolted along in a Toyota Land Cruiser, scattering giraffes and impalas, zebras and warthogs, baboons and waterbuck. Countless hippos wallowed in the swollen brown waters of the Rufiji river.
My visit coincided with the rainy season, so the elephants had wandered far from their usual watering holes, but during those two days we saw just one, a bull who retreated into the bush. Only from the air did we spot more – three here, six there – sad remnants of once abundant herds.
Even carcasses are becoming rarer as poachers seek richer pickings elsewhere in Tanzania.
The only one we saw was a month old – a scattering of hefty white bones picked clean by hyenas and jackals. That is what Selous has become: an elephant graveyard.
‘It’s a tragedy,’ Mr Kibonde said. Mr Nyalandu is young, engaging, smartly dressed and US-educated. He visits the University of Buckingham one weekend a month to pursue a Master’s degree in international relations. He is also a good talker.
He acknowledged that corruption was ‘huge’ and that The Mail on Sunday article ‘really got a lot of people thinking’.
He said poaching was the country’s ‘number one national security problem’ and insisted the president was determined to defeat it.
Questioning power: The original Mail on Sunday article that left Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete ‘hopping mad’, published last month
Not so long ago the Tanzanian government denied there was even a problem. Mr Nyalandu declared that Operation Tokomeza, a very effective military-led crackdown on poachers which was suspended after a month last autumn because of human rights abuses, would soon be relaunched with strict safeguards.
He added that his ministry’s wildlife division would be relaunched this year as an autonomous wildlife authority with greater powers.
He promised more game scouts with better equipment, tougher penalties for poaching and a crackdown on corrupt port officials, customs officers and police. ‘We are serious about doing everything, and I mean everything, to save the elephants,’ he said.
Well, almost everything. What Mr Nyalandu failed to address was the crucial issue of high-level complicity in Tanzania’s illegal ivory trade.
Nobody seriously contends that 11,000 elephants a year can be killed in a one-party state with a strong security apparatus, or that their tusks can be spirited across the country and out of its ports, without the help of powerful patrons.
Mr Nyalandu himself told the BBC last month that he ‘had the names of politicians, senior people’.
The Mail on Sunday has been told that Mr Kikwete received a dossier from his intelligence services last year listing the names and roles of nearly 50 senior politicians, officials and businessmen involved in the ivory trade, most with links to his Chama Cha Mapinduzi party. None has been arrested and convicted.
Under threat: Poachers kill 30 Tanzanian elephants a day and have destroyed half the country’s 110,000 elephants since 2009
Nobody accuses Mr Kikwete of involvement in smuggling, but one authoritative source said: ‘He finds it very difficult to go after anybody related to him or his friends.’
Mr Nyalandu also revealed that the destruction of Tanzania’s stockpile was far from certain, despite Mr Kikwete’s London pledge.
He said the president was willing to burn it, but in return Tanzania wanted roughly £30?million from the international community for an elephant conservation fund. Potential Western donors scoff at that unrealistically high figure.
The warehouse, I discover, is hardly Fort Knox. It has two sliding steel doors with five heavy padlocks whose keys are divided between two chief storemen, but the doors were wide open when I arrived.
Each tusk is marked and catalogued, and the warehouse has internal security cameras, but I saw no armed guards outside.
Ivory has allegedly been stolen from the stockpile in the past and in 2009 the inventory was destroyed in a mysterious fire.
In Selous, at least, there is now a glimmer of hope for the elephants thanks to Mr Kibonde, an ebullient character whose energy and drive belie his 62 years. He is short of weapons, vehicles and manpower, but has started moulding his scouts into a force capable of fighting the poaching gangs. He has imported 220 hand-picked volunteers to boost the 250 existing scouts and has formed 75 six-man patrols.
As a result, Mr Kibonde believes the poaching frenzy in Selous is finally starting to abate. ‘Our children will curse us if we don’t do what were supposed to do,’ he says.
Now Tanzania desperately needs at national level what Mr Kibonde brings to Selous: strong leadership willing to tackle a corrupt elite. But nobody is holding their breath.
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2 Responses
Great news – sometimes a shock newspaper headline stirs action. Lets hope President Kikwete gets stuck in with his promise of action!
our president is never serious on this cz he also involve in this as he doesnt want to arrest people who are known to do poaching in his cabinet