Since the state imposed a media coverage blackout on former president Ian Khama, the international media is filling the vacuum and providing the former president with a platform to push his agenda. Given an opportunity on any day to address and engage with the international media, the former president never misses an opportunity to pat himself on the back, and, at the same time, fire salvos at his successor and now nemesis, President Dr. Mokgweetsi Masisi.
In 2019, after Mokgweetsi Masisi was inaugurated as the president, he announced that Botswana would reverse his predecessor’s policy and start issuing trophy hunting licenses. He also explained that Botswana had exceeded the carrying capacity of elephants, and that trophy hunting would significantly reduce the human wildlife conflict by creating viable and balanced populations.
At the time, President Masisi said this exercise would be done in an “extremely limited, tightly controlled fashion,” adding that “after extensive consultations with local communities, scientists, and leaders of neighbouring African states, we decided on a course of action that embodies three guiding principles—the need to conserve Botswana’s natural resources, the need to facilitate human-wildlife co-existence, and the need to promote scientific management of the country’s elephants and other wildlife species”.
The 2022 trophy hunting season in Botswana opened with the killing of two big elephant bulls. However some conservations did not take kindly to this act.
Former president Khama who is very vocal on his Facebook page about conservation and wildlife issued a statement in the aftermath of the hunt noting that: “This was one of the largest, if not the largest, tusker in the country. An elephant that tour operators constantly tried to show tourists as an iconic attraction. Now it is dead. How does it being dead benefit our declining tourism due to poor policies? Our tourism is wildlife based. No wildlife means no tourism, no tourists no jobs, and no revenue stream”.
While on a conservation related visit in the United Kingdom (U.K) recently, Khama openly criticised his successor’s wildlife policies. In his address to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Banning Trophy Hunting which advocates for a comprehensive properly enforced UK ban on all trophy hunting imports, Khama went into detail explaining the ways in which trophy hunters exceed quotas, bribe rangers and kill the biggest and strongest animals. He also told the All-Party Parliamentary Group that this was what motivated him to ban the practice while he was still in office.
According to the all-party parliamentary group on trophy-hunting, a report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Banning Trophy Hunting released on June 29, 2022 entitled Trophy Hunting & Britain: The Case for a Ban, quotes former president Khama saying there were several problems within the hunting industry.
The 278-page report which is the most wide-ranging inquiry into trophy hunting states that: “On many occasions when quotas were given for the number of animals that could be hunted, they frequently exceeded those quotas. We resorted to making sure that hunters were accompanied by officials of the wildlife department. Those officials of the wildlife department then told us they were occasionally offered bribes to look the other way. If, for example, they shot a buffalo and then saw a more magnificent buffalo on his way back to the lodge, he would dump the one he had shot and go and shoot that other one,” he says.
Khama who is a signatory to the report also said that trophy hunting had an effect on the genetic balance of wildlife as the trophy hunters would only shoot the male species of for example lions or elephants. “There were times when we found that there were prides that had no males in them whatsoever. That was undermining the opportunity for those prides to grow because all the male lions had been shot out,” he says.
Former president Khama also suggests that the Botswana government should ban trophy hunting as it does not benefit communities. While he was in office, Khama said “photographic tourism was far more beneficial than hunting for many reasons”.
Another point of contention is that the Masisi government is of the view that trophy hunting is beneficial to local communities while research done by other conservationists indicates that it is of little benefit to communities. According to Khama, trophy hunting is of little benefit to the local communities. He believes that photo tourism is what the government should have at least pursued. “There was a definite improvement in the economy and in local communities in Botswana as a result of photo tourism as opposed to trophy hunting. It was not only the local communities but the general economy of the country that benefitted,” he says.
