It is only fitting the World Lion Day, championed by an independent campaign organisation and observed every 10th of August, found the much awaited lions already settled in Akagera National Park. The seven lions – two males and five females – arrived amid much fanfare last month. And, after a period of aclimatisation, they are now free to roam the park and earn their keep as they pull in the tourists. From an estimated 300 before 1994, the predator was last seen in Rwanda in 2000. It took only six years to decimate them – mainly by poachers and, not to a small measure, by returnees claiming land and safeguarding their cattle after the Genocide against the Tutsi. However, just for perspective, let us first take a moment to remember Cecil, the Zimbabwean lion that recently met its demise at the hands of an American dentist. During the nighttime hunt, sometime towards the end of June, Zimbabwean men tied a dead animal to their car to draw the lion out of its sanctuary in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. It found the American hunter eagerly waiting, and promptly shot it with an arrow for sport. But the lion did not die immediately. Wounded and on the run, it was tracked and killed with a rifle on July 1, nearly forty hours later. When the news of the lion’s painful end finally emerged, it caused an outrage across the world spawning millions of posts of angry criticisms on Facebook and Twitter. While the outrage may have been justified, the global interest Cecil drew would soon morph into a moral issue: Why should people care so much about the death of a lion when so many human beings are suffering and dying? “More than 220,000 #Syria-ns died & millions displaced but the world would rather mourn a lion,” one Twitter post read. And, a Harare resident, baffled by the whole “fuss”, was quoted lamenting, “We have water shortages, no electricity and no jobs – yet people are making noise about a lion?” What is the morality of all this, human need or animal rights? The answer is not easy, and I will invite you to Google about Cecil to unravel the raging debate for and against big game hunting. But the moral of the Zimbabwean lion is: as long as there will be money to self-indulge, the lions and other wildlife will remain easy sport, even as safeguarding them will remain a development imperative. Impoverished Africans driven by economic hopelessness and hunger have often fallen prey to financial inducements to poach or contrive traps as was the case in Cecil’s killing. And it didn’t start now. Some estimates suggest that the number of lions in Africa has dropped from 400,000 in 1955 to between 20,000 and 30,000 today. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the lion as vulnerable in its red list of species facing survival threats. But the lions continue to captivate a significant portion of visitors to the continent, underscoring their economic value and the development imperative. According to the UN World Tourism Organisation, tourism contributes 80 per cent of international travel sales to the continent, a large percentage of the $34.2 billion African tourism industry. These are earnings in national coffers around the continent that can – and often do – uplift the lives of the people, including through community-based conservancies. Tourism revenues in Rwanda in 2014 amounted to $303 million with Gorilla permits accounting for the largest portion, according to the Rwanda Development Board. The new lions in the Akagera, which are equipped with satellite collars to reduce the risk of them straying into inhabited areas, are expected to boost the country’s tourism earnings. They are also expected to grow in number. They were specially picked on the basis of their future reproductive potential and social attributes of their species, including a mix of ages and genetic makeup. And, in the 112,000-hectare park which also boasts elephants, buffaloes, zebras, giraffes and various antelope species, there will be enough space. The lions’ only competition will be the leopards in the park. But no doubt the lions will stump their authority again in Akagera at the top of the food chain.
