The last four years of President Kenyatta’s life saw many Cabinet ministers and allies turn to exploiting the nation’s resources in a pattern that would be repeated under future regimes. In the second weekend of our serialisation of CHARLES HORNSBY’s book, we look at the looting in these turbulent years.
By CHARLES HORNSBY
Ten years into independence, Kenya was now a place of increasing corruption and inequality. Civil servants enthusiastically exploited the opportunity that the Ndegwa Report (1971) had given them to engage in business. The ‘action’ was now in resource extraction: poaching, charcoal and mining.
With the support of senior Government figures, Kenya’s abundant wildlife was slaughtered for the export of ivory and skins to the Middle and Far East. In mid-1973, at least 500 elephants were killed legally each month.
However, receipts in destinations such as Hong Kong suggested that at least 345 tonnes of ivory had been exported from Kenya in 1973, indicated the death of at least 15,000 elephants in a year, three times the official number.
There were wide discrepancies between estimates of the number of elephants left, from 150,000 to only 40,000. Ten thousand rhinos were killed during 1973–9, 80 per cent of the remaining population. Sport hunting was still legal, but in 1973, Chief Game Warden John Mutinda finally withdrew all elephant-hunting licences. Western nations’ concern over poaching was rising, with television reports and articles devoted to Kenya’s problem and its causes in State corruption.
There were high-profile arrests, including a Somali picked up with the tusks of 525 elephants in his baggage en route to Hong Kong.
Ivory exports
Eventually, Tourism Minister Juxon LM Shako banned ivory export by anyone except the Government in August 1974.
However, exports continued.
One problem was that the Kenyatta family itself was implicated in poaching and ivory exports. Margaret Kenyatta, Kenyatta’s daughter, was chairman of the United African Company, one of at least ten companies exporting ivory despite the ban. Ivory could earn Sh300 (US$36) per kilogramme, making one elephant worth thousands of dollars.
Other valuable items included zebra pelts (5,000 of these animals were shot illegally within 320 miles of Nairobi in six months during 1975) and colobus monkey skins.
