Zambiawatch

The state of conservation in Zambia – something affecting mainly rural people,  is parlous: rampant poaching to supply the bushmeat trade and the ivory market; the illegal alienation to developers of state land having the highest protective status; the demise of a National Park and the impoverishment of a cattle owning people as a result of a hydro power barrage and 30 years of managerial apathy; the pollution of a major river; the gathering clouds of future river impoundments – probably by China, in one of the best watered countries in Africa;  the irresponsible invasion of our rural areas by donated mosquito nets, now sown together and used to pillage the fishery on which the bushfolk depend; the sport hunting of elephant when all concerned had recommended it should not be allowed; the poorly managed safari hunting industry, milked without much thought for conservation – and now undergoing nationalization by stealth; the failure to recognize the traditional rights of the hunter-gatherers and shifting agriculturists who are in the throes of their Neolithic Revolution; the failure to support conservancies which, under suitable Trust models, point the way to a liberation of the people from a failed and corrupt western capitalist model clamped upon the increasingly irrelevant (to the bushfolk) urban areas.  But what is the way forward ?  Zambians must, out of the long night of their community and survival traditions – their culture, discover their future, one more Karl Marx than Adam Smith. This does not lie  in looking to the West and China for support in embracing industrialization, in escaping the Malthusian Trap by a futile attempt to make all Zambians in the image of the waPajero – that small group of westernized Zambians who are in a mutualistic parasitic relationship with the donors and direct foreign investors. It lies in an appreciation of rural Zambia, of their distinct culture, where people, despite all the propaganda to the contrary, do live happy lives – though they have few schools, medicine and other facilities, and where the land does provide for them. But open access regimes inevitably destroys the ecology on which a community depends: so ownership of the natural resources is the key, the decentralization of a highly centralized western model to a system where traditional areas have greater autonomy. Such talk is considered seditious in Zambia, though it is what the Constitution and various Acts of Parliament supports – not least the numerous International Conventions to which Zambia is signatory.