Sol Kerzner’s new venture into the Southern African game lodge industry has become embroiled in a bitter battle about whether Botswana needs to cull its elephants.
One&Only, the company set up by the ”sun king” and his son, Butch Kerzner, to develop ”six-star” ecotourism resorts, is in negotiations involving a new lodge in the Chobe National Park in northern Botswana.
The proposed lodge will be built in an area where huge herds of free-ranging elephants congregate to drink from the Chobe river. The herds are a great tourist drawcard, but scientists argue that the elephants are hammering vegetation and reducing biodiversity in the area.
The debates are expected to heat up in the next two months after the Department of Wildlife and National Parks releases its draft elephant management policy on June 7. The final policy is due to be submitted to the Botswana government at the end of July.
Insiders are worried that One& Only’s entry into Botswana’s tourism market is being used by pro-culling lobbyists to put pressure on the government to reduce its elephant population. The company is known to be concerned that Chobe has turned into a ”single-species” reserve and that the elephants might eventually start dying of starvation.
”The apartheid-era conservation management style with the gun has a strong lobby in Botswana. But culling thousands of elephants in Chobe will be unbelievably devastating — it will turn the place into an elephant desert. We now know that elephants run like hell after there has been a cull,” says a member of the anti-culling group. Like most of the people at the coalface of this acrimonious battle, he preferred not to be named.
Estimates of how many elephants there are in northern Botswana vary between 50 000 and 110 000. Scientists argue that, to keep the population stable, between 6 000 and 10 000 need to be removed each year.
”If the animal rightists win this fight, they will be responsible for the loss of incredible biodiversity in Chobe. There will inevitably be a die-off of elephants. Those who have been responsible for preventing or avoiding management will not hold themselves accountable for the consequences,” says an ecologist.
One&Only has consulted conservation scientists about Chobe, but refuses to be drawn directly into the debate. ”Whether the elephants live or die won’t be a call we make,” says the company’s development director, Graeme Stephens.
The Kerzners have been dragged into the Chobe debacle because they are negotiating with Debswana, the diamond conglomerate jointly owned by De Beers and the Botswana government. Chobe is one of a ”bouquet of sites” Debswana is contemplating developing in a quest to break into the ecotourism industry.
Stephens says One&Only is keen to partner Debswana’s ecotourism ventures, though Chobe is not the plum the Kerzners were hoping for. ”We are aiming at the six-star market, but Chobe does not offer that any more. Its trees have been destroyed and the tourist volumes are high.”
Debswana is getting into tourism because it is the ”next engine of growth after diamonds”, says corporate communications manager Jacob Sesinyi. The company was given permission to develop a site in Chobe in May last year and is proud of the fact that it will only start designing and developing the site after a thorough environmental impact assessment has been completed.
The proposal to set up a development in the national park has been controversial from the start. Critics argue that the site was badly chosen, and that further development along the Chobe river front will exacerbate tourism pressures and disturb game the tourists come to see. The original idea was to set up a five-star 96-room hotel with tennis courts and a jetty.
The controversy over the development fuels the elephant-culling debate. Dereck Joubert, a renowned wildlife filmmaker who has been working in northern Botswana for 25 years, says one of the reasons elephants increasingly congregate along the Chobe river is because growing tourist numbers have disturbed their drinking patterns and they no longer feel secure about moving off inland to feed.
Joubert’s latest documentary records how lions in the Chobe area are preying on elephants, including healthy adults. ”Heavy-handed” management of wildlife such as culling could interfere with people being able to observe such surprising behaviour among animals, he says.
”Any decisions on whether to cull elephants or not need to be made on a conservation basis and should not be influenced by business decisions,” he says.
Alternatives suggested by Joubert and like-minded conservationists include opening up transfrontier parks and encouraging the elephants to use migratory corridors, linking a growing number of game reserves being opened in neighbouring countries.
These options could take a while to realise, so physically translocating some elephants to other reserves might be an interim solution. In the meantime, flights to Maun, capital of northern Botswana, are filled daily with adversaries in the culling debate.