We inherited many things from our colonisers, many things we should have long extirpated from these climes starting in 1980.
We dress British, we speak British, and we poach British. In many instances all these better than the British themselves.
As reported elsewhere in this publication, the 1840s saw a handful of European and American poachers killing thousands of our elephants and other wildlife.
As a people, we already had communities of hunters. These people knew that they had to balance their hunting activities with the ecosystem.
We may have not called it the ecosystem, but we knew that everything in nature required balance.
All that changed with the arrival of poachers like Henry Hartley, William Cotton Oswell, William Charles Baldiwn and William Finnaughty.
People like Finnaughty killed at least 500 elephants in five short years, competing mightily with Frederick Selous to plunder our wildlife.
These men did not just come to loot our fauna. They changed the economy.
Those forebears of ours who lived by hunting, and who understood the need to maintain a balance in nature, suddenly found themselves pushed to the margins.
They joined their traditionally pastoralist and cultivating fellow Africans on stony, unyielding ground.
They had to either battle the barren soil to make a living, or scour for menial and demeaning employment in factories and mines.
Many of them, because of the changed economy and laws, suddenly found they had been converted from being hunters to poachers.
Their poaching, however, was not of the Finnaughty or Selous type. They simply wanted something to put in the pot back at the family hearth. So sometimes, it is the law and the economy that makes criminals out of people who simply want to feed their children.
But not always.
Usually, the criminals are of the Finnaughty and Selous sort. Greedy, atavistic men with guns who would do anything to further feather their already plush nests. Consider the senior Government officials whom we report are involved in the international syndicates that are poisoning elephants in Hwange and plundering natural resources elsewhere.
We are talking here of top police officers and rangers with the National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority. They are working with foreigners to loot Zimbabwe.
And they walk free. They drink expensive whiskey. They dine on the finest foods. They sleep in the softest beds under the most massive roofs. They send their children to the best schools. They holiday in St Moritz. They bank in the Cayman Islands.
But when a poor man in Doma, as again we report elsewhere in this edition of The Sunday Mail, hunts small game for the family pot, he is a criminal.
Meanwhile, the bigwigs live off the fat of the land, their continued freedom a monument of defiance against all we say about fighting graft; their crass flamboyance a middle finger to both the laws of nature and of man.
And they cannot do it alone, these cops and parks officials.
No.
Surely our ports authorities should know what comes in and out of the country. Surely our broader security services must be aware of what senior public officials are up to.
And surely the people of this country expect justice to be done to end this impunity.
We understand that sweeping investigations are underway to get to the local root of this transnational problem. It is our sincere hope that the findings of these sweeping investigations are themselves not swept under the carpet.
Some arrests have been made. That is a great start. We await the prosecutions and, more importantly, the kind of message the State will send out to those in its ranks who think they can live above the law in perpetuity.
If the poachers love hunting so much, let them enjoy being the prey this once. There are indications that the proceeds of these illegal activities, being supranational as they are, find their way to all manner of international rogue outfits associated with regional instability in other parts of the continent and indeed the world.
This should be cause for concern for a Zimbabwe that has always strived to be an upright member of the international community, providing a strong moral voice in an age of geopolitical moral ambiguity.
COMMENT: The State must find its prey
The Sunday Mail
We inherited many things from our colonisers, many things we should have long extirpated from these climes starting in 1980.
We dress British, we speak British, and we poach British. In many instances all these better than the British themselves.
As reported elsewhere in this publication, the 1840s saw a handful of European and American poachers killing thousands of our elephants and other wildlife.
As a people, we already had communities of hunters. These people knew that they had to balance their hunting activities with the ecosystem.
We may have not called it the ecosystem, but we knew that everything in nature required balance.
All that changed with the arrival of poachers like Henry Hartley, William Cotton Oswell, William Charles Baldiwn and William Finnaughty.
People like Finnaughty killed at least 500 elephants in five short years, competing mightily with Frederick Selous to plunder our wildlife.
These men did not just come to loot our fauna. They changed the economy.
Those forebears of ours who lived by hunting, and who understood the need to maintain a balance in nature, suddenly found themselves pushed to the margins.
They joined their traditionally pastoralist and cultivating fellow Africans on stony, unyielding ground.
They had to either battle the barren soil to make a living, or scour for menial and demeaning employment in factories and mines.
Many of them, because of the changed economy and laws, suddenly found they had been converted from being hunters to poachers.
Their poaching, however, was not of the Finnaughty or Selous type. They simply wanted something to put in the pot back at the family hearth. So sometimes, it is the law and the economy that makes criminals out of people who simply want to feed their children.
But not always.
Usually, the criminals are of the Finnaughty and Selous sort. Greedy, atavistic men with guns who would do anything to further feather their already plush nests. Consider the senior Government officials whom we report are involved in the international syndicates that are poisoning elephants in Hwange and plundering natural resources elsewhere.
We are talking here of top police officers and rangers with the National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority. They are working with foreigners to loot Zimbabwe.
And they walk free. They drink expensive whiskey. They dine on the finest foods. They sleep in the softest beds under the most massive roofs. They send their children to the best schools. They holiday in St Moritz. They bank in the Cayman Islands.
But when a poor man in Doma, as again we report elsewhere in this edition of The Sunday Mail, hunts small game for the family pot, he is a criminal.
Meanwhile, the bigwigs live off the fat of the land, their continued freedom a monument of defiance against all we say about fighting graft; their crass flamboyance a middle finger to both the laws of nature and of man.
And they cannot do it alone, these cops and parks officials.
No.
Surely our ports authorities should know what comes in and out of the country. Surely our broader security services must be aware of what senior public officials are up to.
And surely the people of this country expect justice to be done to end this impunity.
We understand that sweeping investigations are underway to get to the local root of this transnational problem. It is our sincere hope that the findings of these sweeping investigations are themselves not swept under the carpet.
Some arrests have been made. That is a great start. We await the prosecutions and, more importantly, the kind of message the State will send out to those in its ranks who think they can live above the law in perpetuity.
If the poachers love hunting so much, let them enjoy being the prey this once. There are indications that the proceeds of these illegal activities, being supranational as they are, find their way to all manner of international rogue outfits associated with regional instability in other parts of the continent and indeed the world.
This should be cause for concern for a Zimbabwe that has always strived to be an upright member of the international community, providing a strong moral voice in an age of geopolitical moral ambiguity.
CARTOON
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