E. Africa Tries to Balance Human, Wildlife Needs

Elephants, buffalo and other wild animals drink water on one side of a swamp. On the other, Masai warriors watch hundreds of cattle graze on the parched land of this wildlife sanctuary.

Balancing the needs of both is becoming more complex, and environmentalists fear the wildlife are gradually losing out.

Kenyan officials recently bent conservation regulations to allow cattle into the Amboseli National Park -- the only permanent source of water in the region -- to help the Masai save their precious livestock during a punishing drought.

Conservation workers warn that a government plan to hand over management of the park to the local county council will endanger Amboseli’s delicate swamps and streams. They say the move probably will result in Masai being allowed to gather firewood and use water in the sanctuary and to regularly graze cattle.

Competition for pasture and water could drive wildlife out of the sanctuary and intensify conflicts in a region already scarred by clashes over scarce resources, said Connie Maina, spokeswoman for the Kenya Wildlife Service.

The prolonged drought has begun to kill animals in wildlife sanctuaries and has started to press elephants to leave national parks and game reserves to search for food and water near villages -- triggering conflicts with residents.

Dwindling wildlife would discourage tourists from visiting Amboseli. That would hurt the local community, which uses part of the tourism earnings to fund education, health services and well digging, Deputy Senior Warden Thomas Mailu said.

Conservation groups have filed suit seeking to stop Amboseli’s transfer to the Olkejuado County Council. The sanctuary was run by local officials from 1961 until 1974, when environmental degradation caused by mismanagement and political wrangling prompted the central government to take over the park.

Local and international conservation groups say the county politicians lack the ability, experience and qualified personnel to conserve wildlife and its habitat, maintain roads and provide security for tourists and animals in a border region troubled by banditry.

A government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, said it would go ahead with the transfer plan.

“The government is empowering the local community so that they can benefit directly from the resources in their area,” Mutua said.

Amboseli is a huge salt lake that fills with water during the rainy season and dries up in arid months except for swamps and streams, which provide water for wild animals, migratory birds, people and cattle. The water comes from rain and melting snow that seep from Mt. Kilimanjaro -- Africa’s tallest mountain, which dominates the skyline from neighboring Tanzania.

Amboseli’s new status “is going to be absolutely suicidal as far as the management of wildlife is concerned because the removal of stringent conservation controls could lead to the drying up of water sources,” said Mailu, the deputy senior warden.

The Masai say they are pleased that they will be able to set priorities on access to water and pastures for cattle and wildlife once control of the park changes. They plan to press the county council to open more parts of Amboseli to livestock.

“We could negotiate with them because they are our people. If it is cows, they have cows like these, so they are people that we could talk to and they could listen to us,” nomadic herder Saiyanka Mollel said after washing a herd of 400 cows that later grazed in Amboseli.

“Cows are our life,” Mollel said as in the distance two elephant calves pressed heads together, using their trunks to fight.

Only six of Kenya’s 59 national parks and reserves make a profit, and they finance conservation in others. Taking Amboseli, the second-highest revenue earner, from the Kenya Wildlife Service would hurt the less popular sanctuaries, said Maina, the agency’s spokeswoman.

But tourist guide Saitoti Saibolob said the new arrangement would be more fair to local people, who often lose cattle to predators, because they would get a bigger portion of revenue from the land they share with wildlife.

Other East African nations also are struggling to balance resources between wildlife and people. Ethiopian authorities have relocated members of ethnic groups from the Nech Sar National Park and handed over its management to a private conservation organization.

The Netherlands-based African Parks Foundation is also expected to take over Ethiopia’s Omo National Park, home to the Mursi, tall nomads who are famous for huge clay plates inserted into the women’s lips.

The government’s plans to evict them “would severely disrupt their present economy, a semi-nomadic mix of cattle herding, riverbank cultivation following the Omo flood and bushland cultivation following the main rains,” Survival, a London-based group that helps tribal people, said on its website.

The Ethiopian government says it needs to develop the tourism industry, which is Africa’s largest source of foreign exchange after oil.

“For the last 40 years, we have totally neglected our conservation areas and wildlife,” said Tadesse Hailu, head of the Ethiopian Wildlife and Conservation Department.

In Tanzania, conservation workers are concerned that officials are studying an application by a businessman based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to build a hotel on the route of the annual migration of more than 1.5 million wildebeest, zebras and other grazing animals -- one of the world’s most spectacular wildlife sights. The planned hotel in the Serengeti National Park would violate stringent conservation rules that ban the construction of permanent structures inside national parks.