Conserve wildlife to improve livelihood
The President of the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), Mr Kaddu Sebunya, has called on African leaders to conserve wildlife as a means of improving the livelihood and survival of Africans.
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He said even though many African leaders were targeting agriculture and other sectors as a means of improving their economies and ensuring the development of their people, that could not be effective if wildlife conservation was neglected.
“We are investing in agriculture with the intention of ensuring food security and exporting and focusing on rural development, forgetting that 80 per cent of our agriculture is rain-fed from the forests and wildlands. How can we get adequate rains if we do not conserve wildlife?,” he asked.
In an interview at the recently held two-day African Senior Media Dialogue in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mr Sebunya said there must be an African module for development, and that Africans could not develop using modules used by New York and China, for instance.
The president said, “What defines us as Africans is our wildlife, resources, climate and environment and if we lose it because we are chasing development and technology, that will affect us negatively.”
He, however, suggested that Africans could employ technology in its bid to conserve wildlife.
Describing wildlife as a brand for Africa, Mr Sebunya said there were numerous benefits Africans could derive from wildlife, giving as an example how tourists were now paying as much as US $ 1,500 in Uganda just to watch gorillas in their natural habitat when they used to pay only US $ 50 in the 1990s.
“We could use our African elephants and conserved wildlife to make money too,” he suggested.
Mr Sebunya added that the good thing about wildlife was that “it is fine just by being left alone and we must see how we can pursue development while leaving it alone”.
Touching on why conservation efforts seem to have failed on the continent, The AWF president said conservationists made conservation look too much like the preserve of the elite and scientists and by so doing isolated the needed efforts of policy makers, decision makers and governments in ensuring conservation.
The foundation, he said, was, therefore, taking the message on conservation to boardrooms, policy makers and the legislature to see how they could influence policies that would see to the conservation of wildlife.
That, he said, would help them know that wildlife conservation was a matter of sustaining livelihoods and about survival.
Mr Sebunya also called on African journalists to disseminate information about the benefits of wildlife conservation in order to increase the interest of Africans in the subject.
On Ghana’s situation in particular, Mr Sebunya said the country had lost most of its wildlife, and that there was the need to work towards conserving the little left.
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