Would-be hunters have paid  deposits 0f R275 000 to bid for seven licenses allowing the hunting of ten elephants apiece.

Conservationists say elephants have become a political football for President Mokgweetsi Masisi who is determined to kick over the traces of his wildlife-loving predecessor Ian Khama.

They say there  has not been an increase in Botswana’s elephant population of 170 000 and hunting will increase the demand for ivory and the risk of poaching the animals heading for extinction

The government insists that if there are too many  elephants, it  poses a threat to humans and their crops

The post Botswana auctions licences to hunt elephants appeared first on Jean-Jacques Cornish.

Amnesty International calls on the government in Botswana not to carry out its threat to forcibly remove them.

The members of the secessionist United Democratic Party, now banned in Namibia, say the reasons for their fleeing to Botswana 20 years go still exist.

Some of their comrades are still imprisoned in Namibia and the Windhoek government has refused their call for dialogue.

Their leader Felix Kalula does not believe the assurance from Namibian President Heine Geingob that they will be safe back home.

His Botswana counterpart Mokgweetsi Mashishi insists his government will enforce a court order for the refugees to be repatriated next month.

The post More than 800 Namibian refugees in Botswana say it’s still not safe to go home appeared first on Jean-Jacques Cornish.

Sometimes, though the country’s animal wealth strikes with red-toothed and massive strength that can only serve to remind humans  of their vulnerability.

In the past week there have been at least two fatalities attributed to the Big Five – once the goal of big game hunters now reduced to the aspiration of game viewers.

And the King of Beasts has reminded South Africans why Lions dominate that quintet.

The incidents all centered on the Kruger National Park, a 19,485 square kilometer  game reserve the size of Israel stretching up South Africa’s north east along its borders with Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

It began with a 33-month-old toddler being mauled to death by a leopard at a workers compound in the south of the park.

Courtney Ntimane followed his father who went into his hut, leaving his son outside playing with his mother’s telephone.

The leopard climbed a tree and dropped into the compound where it grabbed Courtney and tried to jump back over the fence.

The horrified screams of the family caused it to drop the boy and flee.

Courtney’s father Isiah rushed him to hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Rangers tracked and shot two leopards near the camp. They were an adult female with an empty gut and sub-adult female that had recently eaten an impala.

This raises the likelihood that the opportunistic attacker is still at large.

Leopards are rarely known to  attack adult humans but they will take their chances with children.

Last weekend a pride of 14 lions escaped from Kruger and took up at the Foskor Mine in Phalaborwa which is halfway up  the reserve on his western border.

The South African Parks Board at first denied that the lions had come from Kruger.

However, environmental specialists said there was no doubt about the origin of the big cats.

Local residents were not comforted by assurances that they were in no danger if they stayed inside until the lions returned to their normal habitat.

Eric Kgatla, a 45-year-old nightwatchman at the  Foskor Mine, was not able to find security behind a bolted door.

With the lions on the premises, he and his colleagues redoubled their vigilance.

On high alert, they were patrolling the area in the dark when he stumbled across a bull elephant that had come through the fence from Kruger.

Kgatla was trampled to death by the pachyderm.

Elephants have  been in the news in South Africa’s north-western neighbour of  Botswana where President Mokgweetsi Masisi has reinstated the right to hunt tuskers.

This has  incensed Mokgweetsi Masisi’s conservationist predecessor Ian Khama who banned the hunting and culling of elephants five years ago.

He maintains trophy hunters stimulate the  market for ivory that drives crime syndicates to poach more than 30,000 elephants a year for their tusks

Mokgweetsi argues that the national herd has grown above 130 000, which is a third of the elephants left on the African continent.

He says elephants have done millions of euros of crop damage and more importantly have killed at least 50 Botswana these past years.

There is weekly social media footage of ill-tempered elephants damaging the vehicles of game viewers in several national parks that have come too close, particularly to young bulls or males in must.

The elephant ranks fifth on the list of deadly African creatures.

That  roll is easily dominated by the anopheles mosquito that carries  death by malaria  to more than  more than 400 000 Africans a year.

The puff adder is second, killing 32 000 humans.

The giant hippopotamus kills the third-highest  number of  people in Africa followed by the lion, crocodile and buffalo.

Leopards  barely make the top ten.

The post Red toothed wildlife makes humans contemplate their vulnerability appeared first on Jean-Jacques Cornish.

The latest manifestation is an official apology to Washington from Gaborone for Khama calling US President Donald Trump arrogant and racist.

Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi admits the transition from the rule of notoriously plain-spoken Ian Khama has not gone smoothly.

Now his foreign affairs department’s repudiated Khama for saying Donald Trump is unbelievably immature and the worst president the US has ever had.

Khama counters that the Botswana government is entitled to abandon its principles, but he will continue to speak out against the violation of democratic principles and human rights violations.

The post Botswana’s stability reputation undermined by public leadership feud appeared first on Jean-Jacques Cornish.