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Training The
Poachers
By Lee Middleton
"Mr. Phiri, they've come to arrest
you - run!"
Wellington Phiri looked up from the
clay pit where he was working temporarily, casting bricks. Coming
down the small path through the high grass were three men he used to
hunt with. Behind them another man carrying a notebook was followed
by a muzungu. Phiri's body stiffened and his heart sank. He hadn't
gone into the bush to hunt since being released from prison over a
year ago, but perhaps that didn't matter. The sun beat down and
Phiri's fellow labourers watched to see what he would do. The
56-year-old man awaited his fate.
Phiri's old friend Isaac led the
group. He greeted Phiri warmly, the calm of his demeanour bearing no
signs of betrayal. The others - all once-notorious poachers from the
chiefdom - also smiled and shook Phiri's hand. They introduced the
outsider, a Mr. William Banda. "He is here to help," Isaac said.
Phiri held his tall thin frame perfectly still, his dark eyes fixed
on a point slightly to the left of Banda's face while the other
spoke.
 "I'm
here to inform you of a training. We want to teach you new skills so
that you don't have to go back to the bush to hunt," said Banda.
"When they came to tell us of the
training, we were all worried. Our wives said, 'No, no, no! My
husband is now going to prison. This company maybe has a trick!"
recalled John with a big smile that exposes a largely toothless
mouth. Back in 2003, John was part of the second intake of Luangwa
Valley hunters to go through the "Poacher Transformation Training."
Developed in 2001 by the Wildlife
Conservation Society (WCS), the training is one part of a
conservation program that is trying to protect wildlife in Zambia by
attacking the root causes of wildlife and habitat destruction: food
insecurity and poverty.
The program, Community Markets for
Conservation (COMACO), operates in Game Management Areas (GMAs)
throughout the Luangwa Valley, focusing its activities on addressing
the reasons for local poaching. Having observed that poaching levels
seemed to increase during food shortage periods, COMACO staff
interviewed local communities about the primary reasons for poaching
throughout the year: to have something to trade for maize and other
food, to provide relish for the household, and to earn some money
for soap, salt, clothes, and school fees.
COMACO reasoned that if local people
were more food secure, and had better success with crops and a
market where they could sell those crops at fair prices, poaching
should decrease. Among the many components of the COMACO program was
a 7-week course that trained known-poachers in conservation farming
methods, bee-keeping, gardening, poultry-raising, pottery, and
carpentry. The cost for the training: voluntary surrender of snares
and guns, and a promise to stop poaching.
"It seemed risky, as very few of us
had been transformed at that time," remembered John. "But we heard
that if you surrendered your gun and snares, you'd be given a bag of
maize and be taken to a course. So I thought: I've got an illegal
gun, and when I'll be caught, I'll go to jail for some years. Better
I just open myself and give these things to WCS."
Under the shade of a dusty mango
tree, Phiri offered the visitors seats on two maize-grinding mortars
laid on their sides and a small bench. The three small yellow dogs
that he used to take hunting scampered around the perimeter of
shade, suspicious growls vibrating in their throats. Their master
shooed them away.
"It's true, I was a hunter, and I
was caught," Phiri said carefully. "I used snares for small animals
- antelopes, bushbucks. I would get maybe two per month."
Asked how he was caught, the thin
man laughed ruefully and lowered his graying temples between large
hands.
"I had killed an animal and my
neighbor reported on me. ZAWA [the Zambian Wildlife Authority] came,
and I was taken to jail for 7 months."
In fact the man who informed on
Phiri was a transformed poacher himself - a harsh but telling
testimony to the success of the program, which takes a sort of
"hearts and minds" approach, and to date has transformed over 300
poachers, only 9 of whom are known to have gone back to hunting.
"Of course COMACO doesn't guarantee
that people won't go back to poaching - they can if they feel like
it. But it becomes a question of risk. ZAWA is complementing
COMACO's efforts by policing those areas. So given the choice of
doing business with COMACO which can guarantee their existence, or
poaching and eventually getting caught and going to jail, people
will feel it's not worth it to expose themselves to the higher
risk," pointed out Edwin Matokwani, Eastern Province Regional
Manager at ZAWA, one of COMACO's key partners.
The poacher transformation program
seeks not just to teach men new skills, but in fact to make them
understand the economic and ecological reasons why wildlife
conservation is beneficial, and ideally to bring them over to the
belief that wildlife has a greater value to them alive than dead. In
2005, nearly 4 million USD came into Zambia from the sale of legal
hunting permits issued by ZAWA. A share of this money went to
communities to be invested by their elected community resource
boards (CRBs) in infrastructure like schools, clinics, boreholes,
and hammer mills.
Of course, such communal benefits
fail to address the more immediate needs of individuals and their
families. Thus it is the combination of education and awareness
raising in tandem with the provision of income-generating skills and
market-creation that is key to the success of the COMACO program.
"Carpentry is difficult - it takes
time and it's more work than poaching," John explained frankly. "But
it's good, because we have stopped killing animals. I want these
animals to be plentiful, so that the name of my Zambia will remain
on the map. So no matter how hard it is to make this table, I don't
mind." The ex-hunter laughed heartily, slapping his knee at his own
hardship.
Isaac, who was part of the first
group to go through the 2001 training, has since become an
accomplished carpenter and created a workshop with his fellow
transformed poachers. These men who used to poach the bush together
recently won a valuable tender to construct the chairs and desks for
a secondary school.
"In the past a young boy of
fourteen, if he killed a buffalo people gave a lot of respect to
that one. But life was not easier then. Those things - you must sell
them at a cheap price because you can always be caught," Isaac said.
"With a table, I can sell it to any person who wants it. Now I work
with people in the open. Now we are very, very clean. Before, our
parents told us, 'Hey, bring that knife,' and in that way we were
trained until we were of the age to hunt. Now I tell my children,
'Bring that saw.' My sons will learn these good skills. My sons will
be carpenters, and life will be better for them."
Phiri shook hands with Mr. Banda,
who told him he would be contacted when the next poacher
transformation training had been scheduled.
The thin man, whose manner had
become easy and relaxed over the course of the conversation, watched
the visitors depart. As he headed back to the clay pit, he recalled
Isaac's first words at the mud pit: "My friend, do not be afraid!
The only thing we have come to arrest is your mind!" He hoped it
would be so.
For more information about the
Poacher Transformation Program or COMACO, go to: www.itswild.org
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October
2006