Thursday AfricaDigest (11/4/10): Serengeti Road Plan Offers Prospects and Fears

[AfricaDigest Manager]

Serengeti Road Plan Offers Prospects and Fears

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
New York Times

SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK, Tanzania — Every spring, out here on this
endless sheet of yellow grass, two million wildebeest, zebras,
gazelles and other grazers march north in search of greener pastures,
with lions and hyenas stalking them and vultures circling above.

It is called the Great Migration, and it is widely considered one of
the most spectacular assemblies of animal life on the planet.

But how much longer it will stay that way is another matter.
Tanzania’s president, Jakaya Kikwete, plans to build a national
highway straight through the Serengeti park, bisecting the migration
route and possibly sending a thick stream of overloaded trucks and
speeding buses through the traveling herds.

Scientists and conservation groups paint a grim picture of what could
happen next: rare animals like rhinos getting knocked down as
roadkill; fences going up; invasive seeds sticking to car tires and
being spread throughout the park; the migration getting blocked and
the entire ecosystem becoming irreversibly damaged.

“The Serengeti ecosystem is one of the wonders of the planet,” said
Anne Pusey, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University. “It
must be preserved.”

But it is election time in Tanzania, one of the poorest countries in
the world, and Mr. Kikwete is embroiled in what political analysts say
is the feistiest presidential race this country has seen. Few things
symbolize progress better than a road; this road in particular, which
will connect marginalized areas of northern Tanzania, has been one of
Mr. Kikwete’s campaign promises.

“The decision’s been made,” said Salvator Rweyemamu, the president’s
spokesman. “If this government comes back into power — and we will —
the road will be built.”

He said Tanzania had done more to protect wildlife than most
countries, and he added, with clear frustration at outsiders, that
“you guys always talk about animals, but we need to think about
people.”

Hundreds of thousands of people here depend on tourism for a living.
And the Serengeti is like a giant A.T.M. for Tanzania, attracting more
than 100,000 visitors each year, producing millions of dollars in park
fees and helping drive Tanzania’s billion-dollar safari business, an
economic pillar. “If anything bad happens to the Serengeti,” said
Charles Ngereza, a Tanzanian tour operator, “we’re finished.”

Most Tanzanians scrape by on the equivalent of a few dollars a day, so
economic development is a pressing issue in the election, scheduled
for Sunday. But corruption is a growing — and related — concern.

Mr. Kikwete’s ruling party has been widely accused of siphoning
millions of dollars out of the treasury by awarding contracts to ghost
companies. Perhaps no one in the campaign has better channeled voters’
frustrations over being poor while the ruling class is getting rich
than Willibrod Slaa, a former Roman Catholic priest and legislator who
has crusaded against corruption for years and is now running for
president, along with five other challengers.

Tanzania’s government is not accustomed to upstarts. The governing
party, the Party of the Revolution, was formed in the 1970s as a
continuation of the Socialist-leaning political party that brought
Tanganyika independence in 1961, and it has dominated Tanzanian
politics ever since.

But the government now seems to be worried. It recently threatened to
close independent newspapers, and Mr. Kikwete refused to debate Mr.
Slaa on television, sending his campaign manager instead. The
government is also delaying opening universities until after the
election, which means many students will not be able to vote and will
be scattered across the country, not concentrated on campuses, should
there be any trouble.

Mr. Kikwete’s green guards, the governing party’s youth wing, have
attacked journalists and opposition supporters. Tanzania’s police, who
rarely confront civil disobedience, have tear-gassed rowdy opposition
rallies. This is one of the few African countries that has escaped
civil war and ethnic violence, but some Tanzanians now wonder if their
tradition of harmony will be tarnished.

“There’s no way this government can win this election in a clean
shot,” said Azaveli Lwaitama, a political analyst at the University of
Dar es Salaam, who predicted vote-rigging and possibly turmoil. “The
masses are discontented. They’re seething for change.”

That may be true in the towns, but in rural areas, where most
Tanzanians live, the president still has plenty of support. In Engare
Sero, a village of 6,000 people, mostly Maasai herders, just about
everyone interviewed said they would vote for him.

Engare Sero lies along the proposed 300-mile highway route, already
marked by red paint on rocks. The only roads out here right now are
spine-crunching gravel tracks. People here not only want the highway,
said chief Loshipa Sadira, “but we’ve been praying for it for years.”

He rattled off the reasons: cheaper goods; getting to the hospital
faster; being better connected to towns; and having a higher chance of
someday getting electricity and cellphone service.

It is hard to argue with him. Mr. Loshipa and his family eke out a
living herding cows in what is essentially a desert. There are fertile
grasslands nearby. But they are mostly reserved for the animals. This
policy goes back to colonial times, when Maasai were summarily evicted
from their lands for the sake of conservation. It has left many Maasai
destitute, with young men now converging in the towns to hustle
tanzanite, a semiprecious local stone, or to seek poor-paying jobs as
night guards.

None of the leading conservation groups pressing Mr. Kikwete to
reconsider say they are trying to block the national highway
altogether; they just oppose it running through the Serengeti, which
is a Unesco World Heritage site. Grass-roots groups are mobilizing
around the world, circulating petitions and setting up Web sites, like
savetheserengeti.org.

Mr. Kikwete recently promised that the roughly 30-mile stretch through
the park would not be tarmac but packed dirt, like the mainly tourist
roads already in the park. But conservation groups say any major road
would allow poachers to quickly get in, shoot the animals from the
highway and get out.

Scientists say the ecological damage is very hard to predict but
potentially enormous. During the annual migration, the wildebeest
produce more than 800,000 pounds of dung — per day — which nourishes
the grasslands. If the highway fragments that migration and makes the
wildebeest turn back, “the whole ecosystem could crash,” said Bernard
Kissui, a research scientist for the African Wildlife Foundation.

He spoke of a “cascading effect” on the lions, leopards, birds,
plants, all interconnected in an ecological web that has been
relatively undisturbed for eons.

The World Bank looked into financing such a highway around 20 years
ago and rejected it, partly for environmental reasons. Western
scientists have recently come up with an alternative route south of
the park, which they say will link up more towns and spare the
wildlife.

But the Tanzanian government is not biting. Tanzanian officials say
that the original route through the park is better, that construction
will start soon and that if no donors will pay the approximately half
billion dollars for the road, they will build it themselves.

“We are Tanzanians,” Mr. Rweyemamu said. “We know where the people
are. The research has been done.”

-------------

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world. -RD
Laing, psychiatrist and author (1927-1989)

---------------

This posting is provided without permission of the copyright owner for
purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship, and research under the
"Fair Use" provisions of U.S.Government copyright laws and it may not
be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner. The
sender does not vouch for the accuracy of the content of the message,
which is the sole responsibility of the copyright