The African safari haven where humans and elephants are locked in a desperate battle for survival over WATER
THE young bull elephant pushes his trunk into a village water pipe to quench his thirst. As I watch nearby, he drinks deep from the precious supply being pumped to the 1,500 people living in Phuduhudu village, 200 miles into the bushland of Botswana.
Every so often, the beast stops funnelling the water into his mouth and spurts gallons over his head to cool himself as the temperature reaches 90 degrees in the midday sun.
Each drop he takes means less for humans, who are equally desperate for water.
In Phuduhudu the same day, Bafenyi Ngwengare, 18, stands at a tap in the central square, her newborn baby girl tied to her back. ‘It is not water for the elephant, but for us,’ she says defiantly. ‘We need it to live. Elephants are stealing it out of the pipes before it arrives here.’
The area’s police sergeant, who is visiting the village, says she is right. ‘The elephants break the pipes. When they are mended by the government, the elephants watch. The minute they leave, they stamp on them again. They are crazy for water.’
There is a deadly battle between elephants and humans over water in this part of the world. A vicious drought across southern Africa has triggered a mass migration of the beasts into Botswana from neighbouring nations as they search for water.
Each adult animal needs 40 gallons of water a day — enough to fill three quarters of a standard bath — to survive. A fully-grown male can swallow this amount in less than five minutes.
Botswana relies on large numbers of elephants to fuel its booming tourist industry, but there are now too many. In response to the mounting crisis, the government controversially announced this week it will export 8,000 elephants to next-door Angola.
It will be the biggest land movement of wild animals ever attempted.
Meanwhile, they blithely walk across roads through the bush, ignoring cars and tourists’ safari vehicles which dodge round them.
They lumber at night into the gardens of suburban houses to drink from swimming pools.
People told me of elephants peering in through their kitchen windows at breakfast time.
Before a succession of recent droughts in southern Africa, the worst of them last year, Botswana had 130,000 elephants, more than any other African nation and a third of the entire population on this vast continent.
The number has now grown to 153,000 thanks to their wandering across its borders.
‘As the populations of elephants and humans grow — both of them needing water — it is a disastrous recipe for conflict,’ explains Dr Erik Verreynne, a Botswanabased
veterinary adviser. He takes us in a helicopter to show us the herds, some 50-strong, massing in Botswana close to farms and villages. A large bull elephant in the middle of a watering-hole for cattle and goats barely looks up as we pass overhead.
The joke here in Botswana is that elephants don’t recognise national borders and don’t need a passport to emigrate. But few are laughing any more.
Dr Verreynne explains: ‘The problem is they now go into farmland right next to villagers’ homes. They drink at water holes for domestic animals and trample on them.
‘The farmers used to clap their hands and the elephants were frightened and went away. Now they have got used to living among humans so they don’t care.’
At the country’s world-famous Okavango Delta, the unique and lush wilderness where Prince Harry courted Meghan Markle during a luxury safari trip, the elephant population is extraordinarily high.
In some parts of the delta, their density now matches that of the 19th century when millions of the animals roamed freely across Africa. And, worryingly for humans living here, the elephants often outnumber them. The creatures make long journeys to congregate at the delta, many from Namibia, one of the driest countries in southern Africa, which has been hard hit by drought. Others have trekked 400 miles from Hwange National Park in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where there was no rain between February and November last year and 160 elephants died in extremely high temperatures.
Distressing pictures of elephants dying of thirst in the park emerged earlier this month. In one, a vulture is standing on the head of a young bull’s corpse as it lies on the dry ground.
Thirsty and desperate elephants have even tried to drink mud, and one image shows wardens digging a young bull out from the sludge to save its life.
During one headcount in Hwange Park last September, 1,800 elephants were seen trying to drink from a single water hole.
‘It was horrible to see orphaned
calves waiting aimlessly for death. It was awful to drive around seeing dead elephants,’ said a conservationist, who talked anonymously about the crisis after helping conduct the headcount.
Yet, despite these terrible scenes, the sheer numbers continue to cause desperate problems for the local population.
In the overwhelmed Okavango Delta, the Community Trust — the equivalent of a local council — concedes that elephants are a valuable source of income through tourism, but points out they are also a ‘menacing threat’ to farmers and families.
A fear of elephants dictates how people run their lives. They stay at home after sunset to hide from the creatures roaming the area looking for food and water. Some villagers I met have given up sowing crops altogether because they are destroyed by elephants before they have a chance to grow.
Forty-eight-year-old mother Rethokanang Mogedu, from a village on the edge of the delta, told me: ‘We are the ones living with elephants, day after day.
‘We have to remind our children to be afraid of them because they are used to seeing so many around. These wild animals cross the road in front of them when they go to school.’
She is right to be worried. Elephants have regularly killed humans who get in their way.
In the ten years up to 2019, they caused 67 deaths and 26 injuries across the country. And there have been more tragedies since.
One alarming video posted by a Botswana newspaper on social media shows the deep anger in Gomare, a delta village, when a man was trampled to death by a marauding beast which wandered into the central square one morning recently.
The film follows a villager arriving on the scene with an AK-47 assault rifle or Kalashnikov.
He fires several times into the elephant which writhes on the ground before dying. The villagers cheer in delight at its demise.
But it is not just villagers and farmers who have declared war on the elephants.
The huge increase in the size of the herd in Botswana has drawn in poachers eager to make their own killing. During November and December, 64 tusks from 32 dead elephants were seized on the border between Botswana and Namibia, which is a transit point for gangs heading out to African ports with illegal ivory destined for Asia.
Another 25 carcasses of adult bull elephants, believed to have been slaughtered by poachers, were found in the north of the country’s Linyanti Game reserve late last year.
An alarming report in Africa Geographic magazine reveals that these elephants had suffered an excruciating death. ‘Skulls had been chopped at and tusks removed,’ it says.
Mary Rice, director of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency, has said that in Namibia armed gangs have been ‘successfully tackled’ after coming ‘through the Botswana landscape, laden with firearms, expedition equipment and a massive haul of large tusks’.
Anti-poaching experts we spoke to told us the gangs have developed devastatingly cruel new methods to escape detection.
‘They shoot an elephant and then leave it to wander as it dies slowly of its wounds,’ said one. ‘The poachers follow it — perhaps even for five days — before it falls. It means they are not able to be traced from the sound of their original gunshot.’
Poachers have other cruel tricks to evade capture. They kill an elephant then bury it with its tusks intact — then leave it there hidden before coming back days, even weeks, later to carve off the ivory.
They routinely shoot vultures which gather overhead when they fell an elephant. ‘It means the anti-poaching teams are not attracted to the place of a killing,’ he added.
This month Botswana sent members of its country’s defence force into the bush to catch and shoot the poachers.
The ultra-secretive teams are currently being run undercover so they have a chance of winning against the criminals.
Western-based conservationists have said poaching is out of control and elephants are being slaughtered unnecessarily. ‘The gangs seem to be able to pick and choose among the largest elephants in the area, taking their time to travel around, follow herds, camp out and select what they want,’ Dr Pieter Kat, a British-based wildlife conservationist who previously lived in the country, said recently.
‘The gangs have established a collaborative network, facilitating poaching gunners, transporters, suppliers of food and other necessities to the “resident” teams.’
According to the African Wildlife Foundation, up to 35,000 elephants across the continent are killed each year to feed the illegal ivory market. It said in a recent report that Botswana’s airports and numerous border crossings have been identified as a ‘major hub’ for wildlife traffickers to export their ‘bloody contraband’.
These views are a slap in the face for Botswana. It is intent on safeguarding its image as a wildlife paradise where thousands of delighted safari-goers, many of them British, holiday each year.
Before Covid hit in 2020, 13 per cent of the nation’s income came from the tourism industry. Only mining of minerals brought a bigger return to its coffers.
But it’s also trying to ensure its own people can survive and prosper unhindered by rapacious elephants that eat their food, drink their water and threaten their existence.
The 8,000 elephants to be evicted will be donated to neighbouring Angola to cut numbers.
Under the plan, they will be herded more than 500 miles to an area where food and water and forage are in plentiful supply so that they will not return to Botswana.
Conservationists have warned that the creatures could be killed by landmines which still litter Angola following the 27-year civil war which ended in 2002.
Joseph Mbaiwa, professor of tourism at the Okavango Research Institute, insisted that ‘all those landmines in Angola must be cleared before they go. This will be a move to depopulate Botswana of elephants and help grow the wildlife tourism in Angola.’
Botswana is also debating whether to capture and sell wild elephants abroad to reduce the population, using the money raised to finance wildlife conservation.
At a summit of southern African nations later this year, it is to push for their sale ‘to appropriate and acceptable destinations’. The going rate is €40,000 per animal on the open market.
This would not be the first time it has happened. Three years ago, Namibia sold 57 live elephants for a total of €470,000 to control numbers, saying the desert landscape could not sustain them.
Forty-two went to international destinations that have never been disclosed.
Any such sale by Botswana will have to be approved by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a powerful European-based body setting rules on wildlife worldwide, which is unlikely to give it the green light.
The West’s interference in African wildlife affairs has been criticised in the past by the country’s outspoken President Mokgweetsi Masisi.
‘They [the West] talk about elephants as though there are no people in Botswana,’ he has said.
Shot animals can take up to five days to die
‘Elephants are both a blessing and curse to us’
‘We will give England 200 elephants and let them roam all over as you want them to do here.’
He has also declared: ‘We cannot continue to be spectators while others debate and take decisions about our elephants. Conflict between elephants and people here in Botswana is on the rise.’ The president is certainly right. In Maun, the Okavango Delta’s dusty main town, which is a magnet for wildlife tourists, the deputy district commissioner Boammaaruri Otlhogile says the elephant invasion is harming the lives of ordinary Africans.
‘They trample and kill even children, not only their mothers or fathers. They march into smallholdings and steal the crops and water. In the end, the people take matters into their own hands and shoot the animal dead because they are desperate.
‘We love the elephant in Botswana. No one wants to slaughter them because we rely on tourism. But the numbers are overwhelming us.’
He told me sadly: ‘To Botswana, the elephant has become both a blessing and a curse.’