In November 2014, the Environmental Investigation Agency released its report
Vanishing Point, revealing how a combination of criminality and corruption in Tanzania had caused the country to lose
more elephants to poaching than any other African nation.
Figures
in the report made for sobering reading. According to the Government’s
own figures, the elephant population in the Selous ecosystem had crashed
from 38,975 in
2009 to just 13,084 by late 2013. The population in the Ruaha-Rungwa
ecosystem declined from 31,625 to 20,090 during the same period, making
it home to more elephants than any other region of Tanzania.
It now
appears that status was short-lived. Leaked figures reveal that the
Ruaha-Rungwa area population had fallen to just 8,200 elephants by late
2014 – a catastrophic
decline of 60 per cent in a single year, caused by industrial-scale
poaching.
Yet
the news that Tanzania’s elephant population has plummeted yet again is
sadly predictable, as is the fact that the figures have been available
for months but suppressed;
despite receiving the data in January, the Government of Tanzania has
failed to publish it on the grounds that it needs to validate it or
conduct a recount.
It
appears the main justification for this is the discrepancy between the
actual population figures and the number of carcasses. Burying such bad
news has happened before.
In 2009, when a similar report highlighted an alarming decline in
elephant numbers in the Selous, the response was the same – Tanzania’s
Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism chose to cover-up the figures
which, to great embarrassment, were subsequently
leaked at a major international meeting.
Five
years on and the Government has yet again failed to acknowledge the true
scale of the problem in any recent public statements, instead choosing
only to highlight
cherry-picked positive examples of relative stability, such as the
Selous where figures have risen marginally.
Worryingly,
such practices could soon become the norm across the country. Last
month, Tanzania’s parliament passed an oppressive Statistics Bill, which
in effect makes
it a criminal offence to publish any data not endorsed by the National
Bureau of Statistics. If signed into law by the country’s president,
those falling foul of the new bill could by jailed for a minimum of one
year.
Whether
Tanzania’s judiciary has the capacity to implement such penalties is
highly unlikely. EIA’s detailed analysis of court proceedings connected
to major ivory seizures
linked to Tanzania since 2009 found that out of 13 cases involving 26.5
tonnes of ivory, just one person has been convicted.
The
international donor community, rightly concerned by the shocking decline
in Tanzania’s elephant population caused by rampant poaching, is lining
up to fund a range
of anti-poaching and elephant conservation projects in the country. In
return, it should demand basic openness and transparency from the
Tanzanian Government.
For
its part, the Government should be honest about the scale of the
poaching problem it faces and step up efforts to prosecute the main
culprits.
