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Langton Masunda Opinion
AN intellectual debate with Cont Mhlanga is always interesting.

I am engaging in this debate out of sheer respect for an intellectual brother not as a relative. Bra Cont recently touched on two fundamental issues in our sister paper Sunday News, one I totally agree with but he missed a few facts on the other.

I will dwell on both for the benefit of the reader and because of the nationalistic value of such a debate as he rightfully pointed out.

Gwayi Conservancy farmers are by and large the most marginalised of our resettled farmers. We did not receive farm inputs, graders, tractors and all other necessities that could establish us as a force to reckon with as tobacco farmers and producers of other crops.

We were affected by sanctions. The former land owners picketed and created bans for hunting in the Gwayi Conservancy as different legislation passed in the USA banning hunts in the Gwayi Conservancy would show.

Negative publicity meant no clients in a capitally beneficial venture where water and anti-poaching activities are of paramount importance.

In the absence of the capital poachers are not the farmers but the communities surrounding the valley that at first poached for pot then graduated to commercial poaching.

The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZimParks) was and still is a victim of the same capital shortcoming. You don’t pay the rangers and don’t equip the poacher and the symptoms are there for us to see, cyanide poisoning of elephants that we saw in 2013 and the so-called Cecil the lion killing.

We must establish a properly run organisation the country over and invite you to our next stakeholders meeting for you to get inside information and contribute as I know you would for the development of our area.

There is no lion in Lupane or Hwange called Cecil. I must correct you; we do not know him or his brother Jericho. That is, as you rightfully put it, a name given by your researcher at the Oxford University for their indulgence excluding the rightful owners of the intellectual property.

The question is who should engage government on our rights and privileges to our resource other than Lupane State University, National University of Science and Technology and other institutions. They are supposed to be custodians for our future generations and your nduku should be hitting them with impunity.

And the two people eaten by the Cecil pride in Dete last year without compensation, he is emotional but not far from facts.

But it’s how the media works. When a dog bites a man, it is natural but when a man bites a dog, it is news as in the case of Cecil. The Gwayi Conservancy farmers are your people and custodians of that resource on your behalf.

One can be engaged by you an important partner because it is not about animals but by and large our culture which I must say you have worked so hard to be a custodian of.

We Africans are conservationists by birth. Our totems, our fire place tales about the clever animals and the bad. Those were not useless stories, they were part of our lessons on life mirrored in nature.

The issue of double standards, as in hidden agenda, you are aware that we have an over-population of elephants. The Americans put an ivory ban in the United States.

Today our kinsmen are not deriving any benefits from these elephants yet they destroy our fields. What becomes their revenge? Now they target other species, the lion epitomised by Cecil who no Zimbabwean knew about until the time of his death. Did you ever ask Comrade; if he were so loved and visible, every safari guide would have shown this creme de la creme among the elephants and buffaloes to tourists.

The information being peddled is not about Zimbabweans but gullible foreigners with no idea about a lion but have a romantic notion peddled by researchers like McDonald of The Lion King.

Comrade, at 13 years the lion is no longer dominant as breeding takes place from between seven and nine years.

Also, the law of the jungle is “kill all cubs to produce your own and diversify genes.” Why are we preserving Cecil’s cubs, if any, when he killed other cubs when he became the dominant male? This comes back to the issue of nostalgia and perpetuating the Rhodes Foundation relevance in research and money to feed the machinery that sucks the blood of our people that you mention.

In Dete, parents lost their children to Cecil’s kind and it was not news. How can such tragedies be relegated to the grapevine. Is it not the same territory that Cecil and family roamed?

Three years ago, a lion was chased by hyenas after a kill and to satisfy his hunger jumped into the guard room to try and eat the guard who in turn shot him dead. Guess who cried? The lion researcher, I suppose for a research opportunity lost on Cecil’s brother eating a black man.

Despite authorities rebuking this mindset, we find that this is deeply ingrained and is of a hidden agenda.

I, a Gwayi Conservancy farmer, a custodian of this resource hear of the killing on CNN – my lion, my resource, my water and my animals are being spied on at Oxford University.

Zimbabweans need a paradigm shift in terms of how we look at ourselves and our resources, that we become active participants in safeguarding our interests.

For long we have been spectators and let foreigners become gatekeepers of our wildlife. The annual game count at Hwange National Park is done by a group called Friends of Hwange National Park and is by invitation hence the ratio of 1:9 in favour of white people in terms of volunteers in these counts. Whose interests are safeguarded here when the participants do not reflect national demographics?

To counter the ivory ban, we need to find new innovative ways to create revenue, which is by selling live animals. When we do, foreigners make noise about “cruelty towards animals” yet capital is needed to create a proper eco-balance of species.

When there are fires in the conservancy and park areas, it’s our people who toil in the October sun to put out these fires not the Friends of Hwange National Parks or the Rodriguez of Cyber Space.

It is a fact that when we moved into the Gwayi Conservancy, the previous landlords had a minimum four lions per farm on quota multiply by 32 farms, annually.

As black farmers, we had a moratorium for seven years, a voluntary one, not to hunt lions.

When we lifted it, the combined farms only had three lions per year for conservation purposes that is fire guards, game water supply and anti-poaching campaigns.

The whole point Comrade is that previous farmers were killing 128 lions per year, which was unsustainable and yet CNN and lion research never made noise.

The bigger picture is the wish by Oxford University to monopolise the lion research and the intellectual capital that come with it.

There is a need for a meeting of all interested groups and persons spearheaded by ZimParks and our institutions of higher learning to address this anomaly in the interest of our province and nation. There must be ways for our institutions to play a leading role in this research.

You mentioned the fact that our children are not given information about their resources and all organisations. It is only the Painted Dog Project which takes children for week-long camps to teach them about wildlife. The rest are using our resources to mobilise funds and are not accountable to our government hence the luxurious four by fours we see in Bulawayo and Harare and not on the ground.

The price of our wildlife is greatly distorted in favour of the middleman. We sell as rural district councils a lion for $12,000 and the middleman sells it in the case of Cecil, for $55,000! Cecil’s killing was a blessing in disguise as we now know the proper value of our animals. Hopefully, my fellow Comrades won’t get bogged down in the legality of the hunt but in the rich vein of information obtained in the aftermath of the killing of Cecil.

Dear Comrade, I thought you were going to lobby for the opening of a Chipangali in Lupane and seek to take custody of Cecil’s cubs if they are there. Why should our children travel to Bulawayo to see lions that are their birthright? We can continue the discussion koCont over our traditional beer.