Tanzania – Saleh says killing of Wayne Lotter shows corruption at all levels

Saleh says killing of Lotter shows corruption at all levels that drives illegal ivory trade.

I will probably sound angry or disappointed as I pen down this article. But I believe most of my readers will agree with me on the concern I wish to raise and address today.

It is of great national interest to which we all have seen and heard several government leaders issuing utterances in support or in condemnation of the attacks on a very important animal – the elephant.

The animals now face extinction, to prevent this from happening several efforts have been made. Campaigns are on going.

The alarm has never stopped ringing and the call has received support from near and afar knowing that the elephants, like all endangered animals, are a human heritage, and when they are finished it is a calamity to the world and not only to the countries losing them.

Of course we all know the elephant is hunted, killed because of their tusks which attract high prices in the Far East for many traditional reasons and of which several organizations including CITES have aroused the world interest on its banning.

Sales of ivory have been banned but in reality the business continues in the black market involving criminals and gangs as it is certainly a billion dollar business.

We would be wrong to deny that Tanzania has been the hub of the business. The country has not only lost a number of elephants but has also been a battle ground and even a significant route for the trade.

One of the high profile proponent or supporter of war against killing of elephants for their tusks has been Wayne Lotter of PAMS.

His organisation helped saving thousands of elephants in Tanzania and has been the source of several arrests of suspected traffickers in this business.

Lotter, 51, who had the zeal and drive to fight against poachers and dismantling their networks, was shot dead in Dar es Salaam by two gun totting assailants in a day certainly one of the darkest in Tanzania’s fight against ivory trade and corruption in general.

Such death has certainly put a drawback to President Magufuli’s efforts to fight high level corruption against a person who was constantly blocked by its ugly face as for sure corruption is the driving force in ivory trade as it touching all sources from the parks, storage, police stations, courts
and jails.

I believe it is a very expensive exercise to arrest poachers but more so for the international ivory dealers. Lotter had distinguished himself and put his life in danger all the time. I believe he knew he made more enemies each day and he knew, as much he was after them, they were also after him.

However, it saddens me that we have heard very little from high government levels on this death of a person whose contribution can be matched with no one along the whole line of our security organs.

I said at the beginning I might sound angry or disappointed and I really do. Such death should have received full attention of the government and probably a statement from Prime Minister and above, and above meaning the President.

Lotter put his life for our natural resources in the name of the most famed animal-the elephant.

Now it is not proper to question as to how much was he protected, knowing he was always being pursued by ivory dealers, many of whom he has caused pain in business and in jail confinements.

We only hope Lotter will be honoured for his contribution and that his death will not pass just as one of them because it is not. He dies a hero for Tanzania and he deserves recognition.

Mr Saleh is a lawyer, journalist, author, political commentator, media consultant and poet. He is also the Member of Parliament for Malindi in Zanzibar.



Source: https://africasustainableconservati...55614103631419&fb_action_types=news.publishes

Yes indeed. If someone gets assassinated, they made someone in a powerful position angry.

It would take a lot of will power to do anything significant about the corruption and truly be effective at reducing elephant slaughter. I doubt they have the stomach to do it. Too many bribes.... Bruce

It is my understanding that Lotter and PAMS were the driving force behind the drop in ivory poaching in Tanzania and a number of the high profile arrests made in the last 2-4 years. Hopefully PAMS can continue the good work without Lotter.

Elephants and rhino in Tanzania have just lost one of their greatest champions.

Too bad there are not more like Mr. Lotter. RIP

https://www.economist.com/news/obit...-obituary-wayne-lotter-was-killed-august-16th

Obituary: Wayne Lotter was killed on August 16th

NO LANDSCAPE was dearer to Wayne Lotter than the savannah of southern Africa, and in particular one corner of it, the Selous-Niassa Wildlife Corridor round the Ruvuma river in Tanzania. He cherished it from the air, circling in a microlight over the dry rolling plains, the miombo woodlands, the white river bed and the bright-green hippo marshes; he surveyed it from lurching Land Rovers and on foot, brushing his way through the tall elephant grass. Sometimes he was the only human, and even he was in his khaki ranger’s camouflage. Almost invisible, he would listen to the voices of the elephants and lions that really ruled this place.

Too often on his sorties, though, his stomach would start to knot. An elephant would scream out, alerting the herd. Or, on a breeze, he would catch that smell. It was a stench that hit you from 100 metres away: rotting elephant. And there, soon enough, would be the carcass, swollen in the sun, too much meat even for the scavengers to keep up with. The face would be hacked off with an axe or machete and the tusks, of course, would be gone.

Over his time in Tanzania he found hundreds of such carcasses, sometimes 14 in a day. He never got used to it. But he had landed in the world’s hotspot for ivory poaching: between 2009 and 2014, Tanzania lost 60% of its elephants. Astounded by the slaughter, he and two colleagues, Krissie Clark and Ally Namangaya, founded the Protected Area Management Solutions (PAMS) Foundation in 2009 to do what they could to slow it down.

He had spent long enough in conservation—25 years, much of it in Kruger National Park, his first love from childhood, and in Kwa-Zulu Natal—to know that simply throwing money at policing was woefully ineffective. It was stupid to address just the symptom, the poaching, rather than the causes. He was fighting networks that stretched from poor villages in the wildlife areas to fancy shops in Beijing and ivory-carving factories in Vietnam, involving not only the poachers and the henchmen who controlled them but corrupt individuals in government, the judiciary, the police and, he insisted, even NGOs and conservation departments. His biggest problem was that almost no group or institution was clean. At the village end, poachers flashed their money and lured in other young men; at the Far Eastern end, demand was insatiable. As fast as the rangers armed themselves, the poachers went one better, toting Kalashnikovs against single-shot rifles. Penalties for their crimes were laughably light; ivory left the Selous in an unending stream. Even if he lopped a head off this octopus, he would find several legs still hard at work.

To fight this, he proposed an idea he had first heard from a detective in South Africa: when investigating a crime, create a network of informants. His were local people, incentivised with uniforms, cash and GPS devices to patrol in a buffer zone round their villages, recording the movements of elephants and also of their would-be killers, intercepting them and their rifles before they even reached the park. He wanted scouts to mingle, too, with the poachers living in their villages, finding out so much about them that, when arrested, they would instantly spill the beans on their paymasters. After all, the ivory they were paid five euros a kilo for was going for 2,000 euros in China.

This intelligence-led policing was so successful that in five years more than 2,000 poachers were arrested; the rate of poaching, he reckoned, was reduced by more than half, and the elephant population began to stabilise. Yet rangers, as he saw them, were like goalkeepers in a football team: the last line of defence. He also had to persuade farmers not to attack the elephants who trampled their crops, but to keep them away with barriers of chilli plants or beehives. He taught schoolchildren to value nature, and to put themselves in the paws, feet and hooves of the wild creatures that lived alongside them. (In fact, he wanted everyone in the world to try that exercise.) And he fortified Tanzania’s own serious-crime investigation agency with money for sniffer dogs and handlers and strong backing for timid prosecutors. As a result he helped get several kingpins arrested and tried, including Yang Fenglan, “The Queen of Ivory”, and Boniface Methew Malyango, known as Shetani, “The Devil has no Mercy”.

No place for a tie
He made little of his role, though. When Leonardo DiCaprio asked him to appear in his documentary “The Ivory Game” in 2016, he told him to film his village rangers instead. They did it all; he was just the one who went round, joking despite his anger, to ginger people up. He was fighting a war and, as in a war, he wanted his NGO to be nimble and unpredictable—no place for a collar and tie, which he barely knew the use of. The more ponderous and narrowly focused a conservation outfit was, the more easily poachers could corrupt it.

The gunman who forced his taxi door and shot him on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam probably killed him for his work. He knew it could happen; he had death threats all the time. With typical bravado he ignored them, and just went out again to watch with a cherubic smile a herd of elephant making their way across the Tanzanian savannah, safer than they were.

This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "The ivory game"

Bad news!